The flu virus evolves to survive onslaughts against its survival. And since flu poses a danger to our well being, we engineer new vaccines annually to attack the "mutations." If we can do this--annually--what can nature alone accomplish using its counter-/adaptive-techniques?
B. Got a dog? What kind is it?
Dogs are the products of breeding. So, purebreds are not really purebred. Bring two together and the offspring look/act like a combination of the parents. Why not thee, er thou, you, whatever?
C. Do you take after your mom or dad? Well, then are you "just like" him or her in each and every way?
Thought so. If you count the generations even from the biblists six or ten thousand years, you should get pretty significant variations from the original pair of humans, not apes (separate evolutionary history).
D. Segue. Eve was created from Adam's rib?
Quite a leap from the original specimen, comparable to monkeys-to-humans. Why it's same-sex procreation! Or maybe self-sex. Unbelievable.
. . . And these without going into any of the concrete sciences of physical and biological constants and changes in us and other living things.
PS This published yesterday and an interesting extension to part of this discussion. Scientists Move Closer to a Lasting Flu Vaccine By Carl Zimmer.
Vaccines work by enhancing the protection the immune system already provides. In the battle against the flu, two sets of immune cells do most of the work.
One set, called B cells, makes antibodies that can latch onto free-floating viruses. Burdened by these antibodies, the viruses cannot enter cells.
Once flu viruses get into cells, the body resorts to a second line of defense. Infected cells gather some of the virus proteins and stick them on their surface. Immune cells known as T cells crawl past, and if their receptors latch onto the virus proteins, they recognize that the cell is infected; the T cells then release molecules that rip open the cells and kill them.
This defense mechanism works fairly well, allowing many people to fight off the virus without ever feeling sick. But it also has a built-in flaw: The immune system has to encounter a particular kind of flu virus to develop an effective response against it.
It takes time for B cells to develop tightfitting antibodies. T cells also need time to adjust their biochemistry to make receptors that can lock quickly onto a particular flu protein. While the immune system educates itself, an unfamiliar flu virus can explode into full-blown disease.
Today’s flu vaccines protect people from the virus by letting them make antibodies in advance. The vaccine contains fragments from the tip of a protein on the surface of the virus, called hemagglutinin. B cells that encounter the vaccine fragments learn how to make antibodies against them. When vaccinated people become infected, the B cells can quickly unleash their antibodies against the viruses.
Unfortunately, a traditional flu vaccine can protect against only flu viruses with a matching hemagglutinin protein. If a virus evolves a different shape, the antibodies cannot latch on, and it escapes destruction.
Influenza’s relentless evolution forces scientists to reconfigure the vaccine every year. A few months before flu season, they have to guess which strains will be dominant. Vaccine producers then combine protein fragments from those strains to create a new vaccine.
Scientists have long wondered whether they could escape this evolutionary cycle with a vaccine that could work against any type of influenza. This so-called universal flu vaccine would have to attack a part of the virus that changes little from year to year.
