"If you put a poison in the air in hospital nurseries that kills 50% of babies, after enough centuries you'll have a human population that's resistant to the poison. But if you go in there with a flamethrower you'll just have a lot of dead babies because, well, it's a flamethrower."
Alcohol-based solutions that are anti-bacterial dissolve the lipid membrane around the bacteria. They can't really develop a "resistance" to this.
Yes, but that's not what triclosan does. It inhibits bacterial metabolism by binding to certain enzymes, which bacteria can evolve resistance to (by evolving different enzymes or other changes to metabolic pathways).
"If you drop a truck from 50 feet on a group of people, and two managed to survive, it doesn't mean they became more resistant to a truck falling on their heads."
Depends on why they survived I guess. If they lived because they happened to have particularly thick skulls and managed to pass it on to their children, you could indeed argue that overuse of truck dropping can lead to resistance in the human population.
And even in the real case of bacterial resistance it isn't that they (the individual bacteria)actually become more resistant; they were already resistant and now they have the opportunity to pass on their genes to a much larger fraction of the population, changing the gene ratios significantly. By definition that is evolution.
People are grieving and gently pointing out that perhaps other analogies might be better. There's no ranting nor pitchforks. Just a polite gentle reminder that the loss of a child is an incredibly traumatic thing.
That's a reasonable point. The analogy isn't so amazing that it is crucial to understanding. It cod easily be tweaked.
I would have used it unmodified, but now i will try to change it to avoid dead children.
the air is stringently filtered, the floors are cleansed with certified cleaning agents, and surfaces are wiped with alcohol and hydrogen peroxide, then heated to temperatures high enough to kill almost any living thing.
Basically bacteria will evolve to survive in virtually whatever hellish environment you want to come up with.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bacteria-di...
Yes it will. "Antibiotic" is just a name for a particular kind of antibacterial compound that's put in a pill and given to sick people so it can work inside their bloodstream. The general point about bacteria evolving resistance applies to any antibacterial chemical, not just the ones in pills.
[Edit: It's possible that by "soap that is merely antibacterial without using antibiotics" you mean just ordinary soap, with no chemicals added; but that's not what the article is talking about, it's specifically talking about triclosan, an antibacterial chemical.]