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Comment by erickhill | Hacker News Reader

Re: #3, so if you go all the way back to the original strain: Potentially animal > human > animal > omicron in humans.

Like, a continuous mixing and mashing feedback loop.

If nothing else, the variants occurring in real time right before our very eyes should make the idea of evolution a lot easier for some in various communities to finally grasp.

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>If nothing else, the variants occurring in real time right before our very eyes should make the idea of evolution a lot easier for some in various communities to finally grasp.

I don't think the issue of evolution has ever been a question of people grasping the science. The issue has and continues to be the resolution of its conflict with their faith. Some have found a way through that mental obstacle course, but most have not.

Scary number of people, not even of religious sort, think that it's perfectly fine to pick and choose which parts of scientific achievement they accept and which they don't. It's more on the scale of what they like or don't like. They might like their smartphones and other gadgets, not so much vaccines, fluoride, GMO, all that which isn't 'natural' or 'organic'.

So yes, it is a question of people grasping the science, not of this specifically, but as a whole. They are not on-board, they never fully confront any contradictions that they encounter or spew. Logic is not their friend, they are not inquisitive, getting to the bottom of something is not in their nature. You might think that in general people are reasonable, but margins are not that high and informed-ness is very surface-level.

There’s certainly some deeply unscientific thinking out there … but I don’t think your examples are good ones.

It’s reasonable to dislike GMOs (or some subset of them) because of who’s selling them and why, unrelated to the science. It’s reasonable to argue against fluoridated water even while accepting it’s good for dental health, because you disagree with mass medication. It’s reasonable to buy organic food if you know it to be free of certain chemicals which, knowing their scientific characteristics, you would rather avoid.

Problem is that people I'm talking about can't divorce not liking something from accepting something as a thing. They would look for 'evidence' that it doesn't exist, harmful or a product of a conspiracy. They don't use scientific method, they are not looking for facts, they are looking for confirmation of their preconceived notions using biased search engine queries or by hanging around in their bubbles. People like that don't have a habit of changing their opinions, that's who I'm talking about.

> People like that don't have a habit of changing their opinions, that's who I'm talking about.

I think this is a pithy description of human beings. :)

Of course, it's a habit we'd all do well to do out best to develop.

It is absolutely scientifically ok to reject GMO, since they decrease variety and after x years of abundance in a year a superbug can destroy it all.

In case of GMO it is a play with the unknown (health, stability), it is a risk against a somewhat cheaper food. In case of vaccine it is still a play with unknown, but there the risk is against another risk not just money. If the virus would be less deadly much less people would have taken it. And the other way around as well, would be more deadly people would queue up instantly.

It is not as black and white as you describe. stupid vs smart people as you say it.

And by the way, this is called common smartness. Everybody is susceptible for different thing everybody is resistant to different things so the whole word is hard to take on.

> The issue has and continues to be the resolution of its conflict with their faith. Some have found a way through that mental obstacle course, but most have not.

This baffles me. I believe most Christian religions(definitely Catholics and most Protestants) embraced the evolution decades ago. So who is debating it and why?

Not sure if they constitute "most protestants" but the majority of so called evangelical christians are quite hostile to the scientific reality of evolution.

Ah now I see. It looks like the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy is an US thing - it's unusual to find Protestants in Europe that would reject the evolution.

Evolution has always occurred before our eyes, e.g. antibiotic resistant bacteria. I doubt the evolution of Covid changes anyone’s opinion on evolution.

People disbelieve macro evolution. Micro evolution on the other hand is hard to disbelieve because the experiments about it can be performed in real time.

I worked with a clinical pharmacist who was an ardent young-earth creationist & anti-evolution proponent who during his day job spent his time adjusting medications and dosages for patients as part of our antimicrobial resistance stewardship team. Could never quite make that click for him.

OTOH as engineers who spend a large percentage of life pouring blood and sweat into creating things, it's not a giant leap of inference to ponder that there may be a Creator for the engineering marvel we live in.

I struggle with the speciation aspect of Evolution. Not hard to empirically verify in-species adaptations, but I'm still waiting to see coronavirus turn into influenza (etc)

Where do you think covid came from in the first place?

Covid won't change into the flu, that's like assuming a chicken might evolve into it's ancestors species or humans will evolve into apes. Evolution goes forward, not (or rarely) backwards.

It's a completely new species that, up until 2019, did not exist in the human population.

This sort of evolution happens frequently when people are in close contact with animals. Hence the reason European disease wiped out native populations but not the reverse. Also, a direct example of human evolution.

It's a completely new species

I think this is where we differ. That obnoxious spiky little ball we all now know as coronavirus(es) existed in both humans and bats long before making the "jump". Ignoring the possibility that humans are directly responsible for the new host capabilities, it's not like we watched influenza slowly morph into a coronavirus and cause a new form of havoc. All we saw was an existing "species" that had mutations inside the bounds of its genetic code that enabled it to survive elsewhere.

>I struggle with the speciation aspect of Evolution.

You might find that pondering the existence of "ring species" proves enlightening. It turns out that "species" isn't even a well defined concept when you look closely enough.

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

(Also, you needn't capitalize "evolution". It's not a god :))

Yep, Phylogenetic boundaries and the clades are entirely arbitrary constructs. Useful, but don't treat them as though they have absolute meaning as they're essentially a discretization of a continuous process with all the limitations henceforth.

If you were trying to make it click by citing the micro evolution you were working with it is not all that surprising it didn't work, because in fact trying to use micro evolution to prove that macro evolution is possible is not a very good approach.

In programming terms, evolution is like tweaking a program a few lines at a time, with the requirement that the program has to still run and be useful after each tweak. You can evolve a C program this way to get a faster, or smaller, or more memory efficient, or more featured C program, but you are not going to be able to evolve a C program into an APL or Haskel or LISP program that way.

That macro evolution is possible is quite amazing and astounding when you stop and really think about the constraints. It is not at all obvious that micro evolution implies the possibility of macro evolution.

It's really something that is best approached from the opposite direction. We see evidence of macro evolution, and then use micro evolution as part of the explanation of how this is happening.

Dude literally thought the world was 6,000 years old and that Adam lived to be 930 likely because "the oxygen content of the air was higher then" -- I wasn't too hung up on walking through the science of evolution with him. He also told me evolution wasn't possible because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, so.. yeah.

I dislike the use of the terms "macro evolution" vs. "micro evolution" because they're not really any different other than timescale. For some reason, though, people who are religious and deny evolution misrepresent "macro evolution" as "one animal changing into another" as opposed to just "micro evolution over a longer period of time".

> should make the idea of evolution a lot easier for some in various communities to finally grasp

Only if the members of those communities are receptive to re-evaluating their ideas and changing their minds.

A rare quality for members of any community.

> If nothing else, the variants occurring in real time right before our very eyes should make the idea of evolution a lot easier for some in various communities to finally grasp.

I've heard people say that hurricanes and natural disasters were God punishing us, I can easily see the same logic applied to COVID. No need to rely on science for answers when a vengeful god suffices.

Like a high order polynomial that can be fit to any historical data, but which has next to no predictive power.

Never underestimate a human's mental gymnastic ability. This is where evolution deniers draw a distinction between "micro" and "macro" evolution, arguing that "of course micro evolution happens, you can see it!" and "of course macro evolution doesn't happen, you can't see it!"

Which is pretty much how we end up w/new flu variants out of China ever year, correct?

That’s not how it works.

We basically guess what the US flu will be by what is “popular” in Asia or Southern Hemisphere, we figure in about 6 months or so it’ll be in the US. I have no idea how Europe or Rest Of World makes flu vaccine guesses.

Guess what though? They do the same. What is “popular” in the west MAY be popular in Asia in a few months.

The flu game is constantly a best guess of what others saw months ago.

The flu is seasonal, so the northern hemisphere looks at what flu is in the Southern Hemisphere during their flu season and vice versa.

We seem to have been increasingly getting bad at that guessing game... Thankfully coronavirus put the kaibosh on the flu at least in the short term, so if it was the flu pangenome making a meta-evolutionary play, we may have reset that clock.

False. The seasonal influenza vaccine creators haven't been increasingly getting bad at that guessing game. Vaccine effectiveness estimates have fluctuated up and down randomly with no clear trend.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates...

are we looking at the same data? It's hovering around 40% with at least two duds, when it used to be in the high fifties, even 60%. Plus, this is a table of strictly "seasonal" flus. There is no clear definition of what constitutes a "seasonal" flu; If I'm not mistaken, "non-seasonal" is just a catch-all for flus that weren't part of the vaccine package.

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