Why is cooking still an effective way of eliminating human pathogens or fermentation or salting? These methods do not eliminate all traces of the bacteria so what is keeping a random mutation from happening that allows, say, e. Coli in beef to become resistant to heat up to 60c or Listeria to resist salt concentrations to the same levels as bacteria which are not infectious and potential beneficial to us that can tolerate?
What is it about antibiotics that makes them so susceptible to creating these random mutations that antibiotics become near obsolete in decades?
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Basically, you can’t gain immunity to the laws of nature. There are certain things that life needs in order to function, and no amount of adaptation can fix that.
You can be resistent to whatever antibacterial fungus hunts you down. You can’t be resistent to having the water within you boiled into vapor.
You can be resistent to immune responses by turning them off when you enter a body. You can’t be immune to osmosis while still being able to take in nutrients.
To put it in a more human context, no matter how many martial arts you train in and master, no matter how much you know, a bullet to the heart is gonna kill you because you can’t live if your blood doesn’t get pumped around your body
That said, that’s not the be all end all. Some creatures have actually evolved to deal with these environments. They’re what we call “extremophiles”.
The problem is, they tend to be specifically adapted to live in a specific extreme environment. Have you ever seen a blob fish? The reason they look like that is because they’re specifically made to live at the bottom of the sea. Once at surface pressure, they basically expand until their body is too warped to function; That is, they die in “normal” environments
There are also beings like Tardigrades, which effectively shut down all bodily functions in extreme environments until things get habitable again. But they’re one species, and a very odd one
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