Why can bacteria adapt to antibiotics, but not adapt to environmental things like heat or acids/soaps (Salmonella as an example)?

Question

Edit: I’ve had a lot of fun reading all of your analogies

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Answer 1

The same reason you can’t adapt to getting shot through the heart. The adaptation required to support that would be formed by eons of natural selection and evolution.

In that way, bacteria cannot adapt to an autoclave, because the steam literally tears them apart. It de-natures the proteins required for the specimen to live. This would be like melting you over a spit. You just can’t adapt to that within a lifetime or a generation, or a few generations, or many generations, it would take A LOT of generations to adapt to that environment. It isn’t impossible, there are microbiomes around thermal vents, but that is super specialized.

The thing with antibiotics is it targets biological functions of the bacteria; it can’t just tear it apart because you would also tear apart human cells. The few bacteria left over may have some genetic anomaly that makes it resistant to antibiotics. Bacteria go through generations really fast compared to mammals, so after ~94 years of using antibiotics we have some bacterial strains that are very resistant.