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Comment by undata | Hacker News Reader

Evolution doesn't ask itself whether it needs to "bother".

The article's point is that it needs several mutations to become airborne and that those mutations have a cost; so unless the benefit of becoming airborne outweighs the cost, it won't happen.

Bear in mind that the traditional method of dealing with Ebola was simply to shut down travel in/out of affected settlements until the disease ran its course. This isn't working as well this time for a variety of reasons (I'll guess increased urbanization, better transportation, and problems with public information -- e.g. distrust of governments telling people to do sensible things).

What's probably far more likely is that a less lethal mutation will displace it. A disease that kills and kills quickly is maladaptive -- that's why the Ebola reservoir is believed to be bats which can catch it but not suffer ill effects.

Cost simply isn't how it works, the mutations are completely random. It has no direction other than chance as to if it becomes airborne. People can talk about it but a strain this virulent going airborne would be a disaster.

> Cost simply isn't how it works, the mutations are completely random. It has no direction other than chance as to if it becomes airborne.

A random walk on a gradient tends to go downhill, and becoming airborne is a long uphill trek.

Theoretically possible, but unlikely to the point I'm more concerned with other things.

Costs are exactly how it works, the "randomness" of mutations notwithstanding. Becoming airborne is not inherently an advantage for ebola - if the costs outweigh the benefits the virus with said mutation will not survive to replicate enough, thus the mutation will lose out long term.

Mutations are random, but to get a new "feature" you need many small mutations in the right direction. To accumulate the useful mutations you usually need that the intermediate mutations have some are useful alone. Most of the time these mutations have a side cost, so if the intermediate steps are not useful they are "discarded" because the non mutated members of the population outnumber the mutated population.

I think that most of us understand more about ostrich than about virus. Let's make a think experiment. How difficult is that ostrich become airborne? How many mutation they need? Is it possible? Is it dangerous?

I hope there is an ornithologist nearby, but I'll try:

* Stronger chest muscles

* More white meat in the chest muscles

* Longer wings

* Better feathers

* Lighter bones

* Shorter and lighter legs, to reduce weight

* Less brain? (less weight)

* Do you need some special brain areas to fly?

Ostrich is a case of neoteny ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny ), so many features can be possible changed at one. But it's a old case, so the genes for the features needed to fly are probably partially overwritten with garbage since a long time.

This is irrelevant. To be transmitted via an airborne vector does not require Ebola to mutate into a flying virus.

Not explicitly, but this is the nature of evolution; advantages against costs translate to greater success and replication.

You might say, for example, it would be advantageous if humans had feet that allowed them to climb trees faster or hold things with them. But that of course becomes a disadvantage for upright movement, etc. In this very article they discuss this concept in terms of costs for the Ebola virus to become airborne.

It doesn't ask itself that, but an airborne mutation wouldn't have a meaningful advantage, since the current virus is highly effective in spreading already.

exactly what the article was talking about.

Life, uh, finds a way.

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