You haven't convinced anyone here that there wasn't.
No, perhaps given enough time, either we develop HIV resistance (some of us already have it!) or HIV itself will become less damaging to the host (though, seeing as HIV acts over a very long time frame and spreads quite well, I'm not sure how much pressure there is for it to grow "milder"). Parasite-host coevolution is a beautiful arms race.
Yes, so what?
Eh, we're not talking volcanic
eruptions. Magma and hot ash and stuff like that
is rather too hot even for hyperthermophiles. Things like the Yellowstone hot springs and the Solfatara, more like the enviromnents these things like to live in, have certainly been around for more than 50 years. Anyway, even 50 years is a heck of a lot of time for a fast-reproducing organism like a bacterium. Let's be generous and assume one generation per day for our hypothetical protobacteria - that's 50 × 365 = 18250 generations in fifty years (not counting leap years
). If we assume a generation time of an hour - and why not, modern bacteria can do even better than that -, the numbers go up to more than 400 000 generations. Stick, how many, four zeros at the end to get the numbers for 500k years. I don't think you really thought about their implications.
It doesn't even take 50 years to adapt to a
totally new food source - nylonases evolved in less time than that, and nylon isn't really similar to anything you can eat in nature. Reversing a metabolic pathway would probably be much simpler. Methanogens and anaerobic methanotrophs are something I've found out about just recently. I gather the most accepted view is that they use the same enzymatic apparatus in reversed directions, although the details of anaerobic methane oxidation do seem to be somewhat mysterious.
Also, why can't two opposing metabolic pathways develop simultaneously? The earth spews out all sorts of stuff, not just one step in each nutrient cycle, doesn't it?
And it need not. Balance would come about when later cells started to work on what was left by cell 1. And don't say there wasn't enough time. There most likely
was.
Except not all volcanism involves spectacular bursts of lava. And we know hot acid is the ideal place to live for a number of organisms.
Dormancy?
Any reason for your feelings against TO apart from not agreeing with its conclusions? Anyway, TomK was kind enough to send me a nice little pdf so I can email the stuff if you really want it.
As for humanity being a single entity, yes it is, in the sense that it doesn't interbreed with anything else (that I know of
). However, in terms of genetics and disease resistance it's anything but (sickle-cell trait has been done to death but that's definitely not the only example). Polymorphism of all kinds is abundant in humans, and that makes it harder for any single parasite to adapt to all of us. And makes it
very hard for me to swallow the idea that parasites would ever totally wipe us out.
I don't
want you to do anything. In any case I think the gist of the
Chlorella vs
Ochromonas case was summarised pretty well. A predator was let loose among unicellular algae, who within a few dozen generations became stably multicellular (colonial). That's the example in a nutshell. References are (1) just in case you don't believe the one who summarises them, (2) you are so interested you want to read more.
Based on your summary, I find it hard to imagine that your link can bring up any good arguments in favour of the humans-are-doomed idea, but if you really want me to read and analyse it I'll be a good little scientist and do it.
