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.
Consequently, you wouldn't necessarily expect ancestral "defaults" to be optimal for modern environments.
Why do you bring this up? It seems a weird hypothesis to bring up given that the parent comment did not suggest the possibility...
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 other complications such as autoimmune disorders or even something as common as hayfever.
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.
I like the term ancestral defaults and indeed, we've come a long way since then and our biological and environmental reality is substantially different.
There is this book series Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada which imagines a future where technology has advanced enough to allow one to tweak their genome as easily as we use apps on our phone today. It was a fascinating read.
As true as it might be, that does not mean that it is possible to work around evolution to change ourselves to fit better with the new reality.
"Purposeful" does not help if we are mostly clueless.
So I don't see your point. It is really tuning for surviving within the constrains.
Let x be the set of all physical behaviors in nature. At any point in time, we (human beings) are aware of a subset of x, let us call it y.
When a human entity design a system, they can only use the behaviors in y. But an evolved system could potentially use all of x. Since y is always proper subset of x, this means that we will never be able to know everything required to safely modify an evolved system.
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 mysterious, un-intutive and complex inter-dependent behavior, imagine how non-understandable an immune system that evolved over millions of years can be..
So I still think we are mostly clueless, and it is nearly impossible to safely engineer changes into something that was not engineered in the first place...
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.
Pathogen defenses can roughly be thought of having a metabolic cost at the very least. Meaning if there’s no selection pressure (such as death) otherwise, then it often ends up being more optimal to not have a defense active until it’s needed.
Problem is we have a global distribution system that is forcing organisms that have previously evolved into an equilibrium with the disease complex in their area, to encounter multiple novel threats in rapid succession. Like how aggressive species of downy and powdery mildews are now everywhere in the US. Giving plants a boost by inducing defenses early on helps them resist the onset of infection and helps treatment succeed.
I think almost everyone would avoid this if it meant you became deadly to your dog or cat.
https://news.usask.ca/articles/research/2020/bat-super-immun...
Which means bats are the Mr Burns of the animal kingdom.
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 evolutionary stand point.
I also suspect it would be calorific consumption, as someone else said, so it might be ok.
However, there are plausible other explanations. For example there are medical conditions that result from a too aggressive immune system and it could instead be reducing the chance of that occuring.
If in the future we could trade a few hundred extra calories per day for a great immune system (without auto-immune side effects) we would have found a nice cheat code!
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.
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.
Those who reject this even after reading the following 100% deserve to suffer, but worse yet, they make others suffer, often due to their conflict of interest as shills for pharma. The general commitment to truth is well below zero for those who stand to gain from its suppression.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-10-vitamin-d-deficiency-...
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-vitamin-d-supplements...
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-02-magnesium-vitamin-d-i...
It's worth being aware of that as the recommended limits for vitamin D are laughably too small, so it's common for people to take much larger amounts. I believe that 4k IU is considered a safe adult dosage.
Able to reproduce, but succumbs to ailments quickly after? Eh, good enough.