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Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

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Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

#371

Post by gnaritas »

kamaal wrote: post #357
gnaritas wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, desire is a useful way for the general public to understand what is happening. No it isn't, it's misleading. > It's like saying "Water wants to flow to the lowest point of a room" Equally unnecessarily misleading. Water doesn't want anything, and before you claim people understand that let me tell you, they don't. It's a common belief that water has memory, there's an entire industry based on the concept a…

This is basically debating semantics. Bacteria don't 'want' anything in a purely technical sense. But they will eventually develop/are developing resistance to antibiotics anyway. You seem to be stuck in debating about the right sentences to describe that. That should be least of our worries.

Semantics matter, communication is not possible without agreement on the meaning of words. And the OP made the argument, not me, I'm simply agreeing with his point that's it's wrong to personify evolution, it's why so many people don't understand it.

Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

#372

Post by gnaritas »

baddox wrote: post #366
gnaritas wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an inability to understand you're seeing, it's a rejection of it because it misleads people. Pendants attack such language precisely because it's misleading without cause. There's no reason to personify random processes and doing so actively misleads people.

Where's your evidence that people are mislead? I don't have any data either, but I suspect exactly zero people came away thinking that bacteria have conscious desires, just like zero people believe that wind actually bites or people actually get butterflies in their stomach.

Yea, like zero people believe water has memory or zero people believe the earth is 6000 years old. Open your eyes, people believe shit they hear that's absurd constantly and in my anecdotal experience maybe 1 in 8 people I've met understood evolution. But maybe you don't live in a red state.

Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

#373

Post by gnaritas »

baddox wrote: post #367
gnaritas wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's your opinion, not mine; however it's exactly talk like this that has led to most laymen not understanding evolution. They don't get that it's being dumbed down for them and that's not their fault, it's the fault of people who casually anthropomorphize things because they wrongly think it helps to clarify; it does not. Understanding comes from truth, not casual simplifying lies.

You place a large hindrance on discussion if you require every discussion that mentions natural selection to give an entire introductory lesson on evolution. It's a ridiculous notion, especially when there is unlikely to be any misconceptions taken from this article. The purpose of the article was to explain why bacteria become resistant to antibiotics and how our use of antibiotics has led to this, and it does a fin…

I require no such thing, it is possible to have the same discussion without the unnecessary personification of bacterial wants. It adds nothing to the conversation to say bacteria wants rather than the fit survive.

Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

#374

Post by einhverfr »

Shinkei wrote: post #369
waps wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much wrong with this post: > There is a testable prediction here of course: either bacteria outrun human antibiotic development or they do not. I'm confident that more bacterial lineages will be wiped out before human medicine is seriously compromised by natural selection of bacteria that are resistant to most antibiotics used in human medicine. Do a dumb test. Walk into your nearest hospital, I don't even want to…

>Unfortunately, if you study how evolution actually works you'll realize what it means for resistant bacteria. Once a fully resistant bacterial strain evolves, a process that takes between decades and centuries, all other species of bacteria will quickly copy the resistance, in a matter of months to years. Which is exactly what we've seen happening. This is the important point that people forget. Bacteria are experie…

I am not actually sure that it takes as long as people think. The fact is it isn't just individual genes, but selection for combinations of them. If you look at random mutations, I think that is likely dwarfed by random permutations. This is why the resistance bell curve shifts over time. You aren't just selecting for a single gene, but for a function, which could be carried out any number of different ways, and which any number of different gene combinations could do it.

Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

#375

Post by einhverfr »

gnaritas wrote: post #371
kamaal wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically debating semantics. Bacteria don't 'want' anything in a purely technical sense. But they will eventually develop/are developing resistance to antibiotics anyway. You seem to be stuck in debating about the right sentences to describe that. That should be least of our worries.

Semantics matter, communication is not possible without agreement on the meaning of words. And the OP made the argument, not me, I'm simply agreeing with his point that's it's wrong to personify evolution, it's why so many people don't understand it.

It's far worse than that. Not on;y is it not possible to have semantic communication without a general agreement on the meaning of words, but at the same time perfect agreement is impossible. This is generally understood (and has been understood for a hundred years) to be one of the causes of linguistic drift.

Humans aren't computers.

Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

#376

Post by einhverfr »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #195
narrator wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Desire" implies that the bacteria is acting purposefully and planning ahead. This isn't what's happening unless you attribute the bacteria's activity to some sort of intelligence. On the contrary, we eliminated smallpox which was one of the most devastating diseases in history so this fatalism is basically disproved. More depressingly, we've also made extinct thousands of species who have not evolved to resist us.

Also, individuals don't evolve, populations do. So there is no "wanting" whether you've got a brain that can or not.

Ummmm bacteria do. See horizontal gene transfer.

Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

#377

Post by einhverfr »

resu_nimda wrote: post #197
mistercow wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm slightly bugged by "desire" type language because it does actually cause problems in how laymen think about evolution. It's not uncommon to hear them make the mistake of thinking evolution will "think ahead". But the bigger problem I have with it is the "anything we do ... bacteria will eventually discover". Some problems are just very difficult to evolve around, and it's hard to predict what they'll be even if y…

Evolution is actually a really crappy optimization algorithm. The reason it has worked so well is not that it is so effective, but because it's the only game in town. It took evolution billions of years to make machines that can run 60 miles per hour. You come off as being dismissive of the power and beauty of evolution, although I don't think that's your intent. Evolution assembled the most complex system known to e…

> Evolution assembled the most complex system known to exist, starting from a handful of molecules, without any "thought" or "reasoning."

There may have been a lot more complexity early on than that statement assumes. Static systems, after all, pretty much by definition can't evolve (and this is why a reductionistic assessment of evolution as biochemistry doesn't work).

The beauty behind evolution is the same beauty behind Feynman integrals in quantum physics. You take the integral over all possible paths and something is likely to work. Many paths will end or cancel eachother out.

It's like open source software.

Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

#378

Post by ronaldx »

refurb wrote: post #342
ronaldx wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an unconvincing argument to me - if antibiotic resistant bacteria survive, why would finishing the course of antibiotics make a difference? Does it clinically happen that stopping a course of antibiotics early causes an antibiotic resistant form of the infection? (I couldn't find evidence either way, but I did find a few articles saying typically prescribed course lengths could be safely reduced in the effort…

This gives a much better summary of the theory... http://blog.oup.com/2011/11/antibiotics/

Yes, I get the theory, but I think it's probably false. No clinical evidence is offered.

Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

#379

Post by pimentel »

aianus wrote: post #260
selmnoo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is touched in the FRONTLINE documentary. See 33:40-40:00 here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hunting-the-nightmar... Basically Pfizer, one of the last companies working on antibiotics for gram-negative bacteria, pulled out due to pressure from shareholders, because there's little money to be made here. You spend billions of dollars on creating an antibiotic, and upon its release the recommended instruc…

They could patent it and charge $5000 a course to people who are suffering from resistant bacteria. It's the American way.

If that's what's necessary for the company to develop such an antibiotic, why not? State-of-the-art cancer drugs can cost that ore more. I'd rather pay $5k and live, to not being able to do anything.

Re: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

#380

Post by brazzy »

Fomite wrote: post #294
uptownJimmy wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of this is nonsense. This, for instance: "If you get infected with a deadly viral disease, like rabies, it's curtains. There's nothing any hospital can do for you except sedate you until you're dead."

Umm...rabies pretty much is curtains. If we miss the postexposure prophylaxis window, the fatality rate for rabies is indistinguishable from 100%

Actually, there are experimental treatments that involve an induced coma and seem to produce survival rates of over 10%:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_protocol

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