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Scientists are working on "everything vaccines"

economist.com

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Re: Scientists are working on "everything vaccines"

#51

Post by glenstein »

qsera wrote: post #43
glenstein wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know enough specific things about immunology and about the illnesses we're trying to avoid to be something more than clueless and we're learning more all the time, including about the potential applications of "everything vaccines" that are being tested for potential programmatic use.

Don't we have a problem of ever increasing auto-immune diseases? If we know "enough" then I think we should be able to make it go away. Until that happens, I don't think humanity can claim to know "enough". Also, evolved systems are hard to reverse engineer. https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ If something simple like an electronic circuit with comparatively short evolution can end up with myst…

I would flip that framing around entirely. If we were clueless, we would not have had a centuries worth of progress of any kind whatsoever, let alone be brought to the point of testing general purpose vaccines, something that would have been unthinkable perhaps even a decade ago.

Electricity is a convenient example, because it's indisputable that we have leveraged it to do real work based on real understanding. I suspect any and every area of knowledge is subject to a kind complexity crash where the combinations of variables outstrip our ability to track them. But treating that like it negates the knowledge we do have is almost literally what it means to miss the forest for the trees.

Re: Scientists are working on "everything vaccines"

#52

Post by qsera »

glenstein wrote: post #51
qsera wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't we have a problem of ever increasing auto-immune diseases? If we know "enough" then I think we should be able to make it go away. Until that happens, I don't think humanity can claim to know "enough". Also, evolved systems are hard to reverse engineer. https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ If something simple like an electronic circuit with comparatively short evolution can end up with myst…

I would flip that framing around entirely. If we were clueless, we would not have had a centuries worth of progress of any kind whatsoever, let alone be brought to the point of testing general purpose vaccines, something that would have been unthinkable perhaps even a decade ago. Electricity is a convenient example, because it's indisputable that we have leveraged it to do real work based on real understanding. I sus…

It does not negate the knowledge that we do have. But we should also acknowledge that certain undertakings are impossible to do safely with the amount of knowledge that we do have.

Re: Scientists are working on "everything vaccines"

#53

Post by qsera »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #48
qsera wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We're not really calorie constrained anymore Why do you bring this up? It seems a weird hypothesis to bring up given that the parent comment did not suggest the possibility...

Not the OP, but evolution will often select for less energy expenditure as most animals are calorie constrained or at least during certain times of the year (c.f. animals that hibernate to survive low calorie availability). It seems plausible to me that the immune system might be calorie intensive to be on full alert all the time. However, I suspect that having the immune system be more active will likely lead to oth…

An always full alert immune system won't have any lee way to address any onset of an infection, and also considering that pathogens also evolve to by pass the increased alertness, this will probably be catastrophic for the species.

That is unless of course like bats, this was the result of evolution and natural selection. But bolting on like this vaccine do it, yea, going to be pretty bad.

Re: Scientists are working on "everything vaccines"

#55

Post by senordevnyc »

qsera wrote: post #34
lifeisgood99 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no wise guiding force behind evolution. It's all guesswork.

It might be guess work, but it has got a ruthless filter called natural selection and really long time to get here. So I don't see your point. It is really tuning for surviving within the constrains.

And the constraints are very different now…

Re: Scientists are working on "everything vaccines"

#57

Post by mitchbob »

zaknil wrote: post #6

> put the lungs into a constant state of readiness, allowing fast responses to almost any invading germ Succeeding at this would prove that our bodies have the capacity to do that but evolution "tuned" the system differently. A corollary would be that this vaccination is probably a net negative for public health, even if nobody'd really know why.

But "false positives" could be very likely, resulting in chronic inflammation or, worse, the cytokine storms that made COVID deadly. I'm guessing there needs to be some slack in the system.

Re: Scientists are working on "everything vaccines"

#58

Post by qsera »

senordevnyc wrote: post #55
qsera wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be guess work, but it has got a ruthless filter called natural selection and really long time to get here. So I don't see your point. It is really tuning for surviving within the constrains.

And the constraints are very different now…

Maybe, but that does not mean that it is possible to work around evolution to change ourselves to fit better with the new constraints.

Re: Scientists are working on "everything vaccines"

#59

Post by gignico »

mattmanser wrote: post #31
gignico wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution is not a process toward better quality of life and life expectancy of individuals. As long as enough individuals can reach the age to procreate in their environment evolution is done. Evolution didn’t train our bodies to reject the diseases we already have the vaccines for neither, so your reasoning would apply to smallpox as well. And what about viruses appeared after Homo sapiens evolved (such as HIV)?

I don't think it works like that, from my recollection of the uni courses I did 20 years ago. Even a small advantage like 1% will quickly propagate in a population, because it's about advantage over 1,000s of generations. That this disease defence CAN be turned on, means some people would have at some point had a genetic mutation to turn it on. As the GP pointed out, therefore it must be a net negative from an evolut…

The problem is implying that “if evolution did not do it there must be a reason”, because 1) it makes evolution look like an engineer evaluating trade offs, which is not and 2) it considers the current state of affairs the final “product”, which is not. For example, flowers did not exist in the Cretaceous, so somebody looking at what evolution did until then would say “if evolution did not invent flowers, then we’d better not do it”. But of course that’s absurd.

Also as I said evolution is not a process towards a goal. There are 8 billion people around the world which proves Homo sapiens is quite fit for its environment so the pressure to evolve further features is quite low.

Re: Scientists are working on "everything vaccines"

#60

Post by mattmanser »

gignico wrote: post #59
mattmanser wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it works like that, from my recollection of the uni courses I did 20 years ago. Even a small advantage like 1% will quickly propagate in a population, because it's about advantage over 1,000s of generations. That this disease defence CAN be turned on, means some people would have at some point had a genetic mutation to turn it on. As the GP pointed out, therefore it must be a net negative from an evolut…

The problem is implying that “if evolution did not do it there must be a reason”, because 1) it makes evolution look like an engineer evaluating trade offs, which is not and 2) it considers the current state of affairs the final “product”, which is not. For example, flowers did not exist in the Cretaceous, so somebody looking at what evolution did until then would say “if evolution did not invent flowers, then we’d b…

pressure to evolve further features is quite low

I'm really sorry, but you're really misunderstanding how evolution works.

Worth reading something like the Selfish Gene if you want to understand it a bit better.

There are always reproductive pressures and there are always genetic variations.

Modern civilization and medicine has simply changed what the pressures are.

As an example if a genetic variation occured tomorrow which gave resistance to spermicide, within 100 generations that variant would probably be quite successful and prevalent in the human population.

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