Fascinating! I'm a complete novice at biology and genetics, but have wondered a lot about the microbiome's role in evolution. It has long seemed obvious to me that bacteria can iterate (and so adapt to changes in the environment) many, many orders of magnitude faster than mammals, and affect their hosts / us is so many different ways, that some microbial adaptation would virtually always precede a certain class of adaptations in ourselves. And that, in itself, would be such a change in the environment that the kind of adaptations we would have to undergo, and the pathways there, would change as well.
But in my experience, even smart people with tangentially relevant background don't seem to be able to have good conversations about questions like that. (On the contrary, it appears the term "random mutation" shuts down curiosity and ends conversations almost as efficiently as "intelligent design", but of course no one will admit that.)
Is it reasonable to think that some kind of mechanism like that could have played a role in, for example, the rapid evolution of lactase persistence (or similar adaptations)?
Talked to a VC who was excited about a proposed Shit Bank. There is money behind some of these ideas. I wonder how much it matters that you eat similarly to the donor. Surely quite a bit!
Fascinating! I'm a complete novice at biology and genetics, but have wondered a lot about the microbiome's role in evolution. It has long seemed obvious to me that bacteria can iterate (and so adapt to changes in the environment) many, many orders of magnitude faster than mammals, and affect their hosts / us is so many different ways, that some microbial adaptation would virtually always precede a certain class of adaptations in ourselves. And that, in itself, would be such a change in the environment that the kind of adaptations we would have to undergo, and the pathways there, would change as well.
But in my experience, even smart people with tangentially relevant background don't seem to be able to have good conversations about questions like that. (On the contrary, it appears the term "random mutation" shuts down curiosity and ends conversations almost as efficiently as "intelligent design", but of course no one will admit that.)
Is it reasonable to think that some kind of mechanism like that could have played a role in, for example, the rapid evolution of lactase persistence (or similar adaptations)?
Talked to a VC who was excited about a proposed Shit Bank. There is money behind some of these ideas. I wonder how much it matters that you eat similarly to the donor. Surely quite a bit!