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Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

I remember seeing a comment on reddit about this a few years back. It went something like:

"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.

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Alcohol-based solutions that are anti-bacterial dissolve the lipid membrane around the bacteria.

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).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triclosan

You're probably right. My comment wasn't actually directed towards Triclosan, but since Triclosan is the subject of the article here, it makes my comment kind of out of place.

I read a good one too, I think it was here on HN:

"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."

I reckon if you'd repeat that experiment a gazillion times, which is what evolution is about, that you would end up with some pretty good truck dodgers.

Not sure if these corrections are needed, maybe it was just sloppy wording, but here they are nonetheless:

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.

NASA / ESA found a bacteria that lives in 'clean rooms' in space craft and space stations, feeding off the scattered remains of the less resistant bacteria.[0]

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...

Empirical evidence of this theory: bacteria still haven't developed a resistance to soap, which we have been using to kill them for at least a hundred years now.

That is about the most awful casual analogy I've ever heard. I doubt hurt was intended, but do be aware that many people have lost children and would find this hurtful.

If I had to refrain from saying any joke which someone in the world might find hurtful, I wouldn't have very many jokes to say. Besides, in this case, he was talking about releasing pathogens upon, or lighting up with a flamethrower, half of the babies in a hospital. I can't imagine there are too many people who've had something like that happen to their child.

I'm sorry for whomever you have in mind, but I absolutely reject the mentality that non-bullying humour must be curbed in case someone might have their feelings hurt - especially the kind of hurt where people take offense where none was intended.

People are not taking offense.

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.

You can't explain evolution without making reference to people who get killed before they get to breed, and trying to sugar-coat it too much just inhibits understanding.

I've lost a child (in a hospital, too), and I don't find this hurtful at all. This crazy overreaction since someone, somewhere, somehow, might be offended is just silly.

s/children/tulips/ would be the same argument

As someone who has lost tulips, I find that offensive.

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