yes, and among the things i find especially interesting about your comment is the talks i’ve had with experienced medical professional “friends” who point out that each of us has a completely independent and unique set of accompanying flora and fauna, gut and otherwise. that to kill one set off will likely kill off the host as no one else’s seems to be transferable. go figure how those individual sets can account for speciation. but it must be true.
and of course, your examples bring to mind what we all *know* about the relationship between mousquitos and sickle cell anemia. how a very *stable* relationship exists between the sickling of red blood cells and the survivability of human beings suffering malaria. one expects that relationship to generatate a new species at any moment now.
Partially true. The possible combinations of intestinal flora are great. However families who live together tend to “normalize” their flora a lot.
Yet killing off a part will not kill a person, usually, unless they get a bloom of a drug resistant bacteria, of which there are at least a dozen types killing many people in the US right now.
Naturally, people have about four different floral combinations in their life. Their first one is mostly from their mother, via both contamination and breast milk. It develops over about a two week period after birth, while the baby is still using a subset of its mothers immune system, until its own system comes on line.
The second one is when they start eating solid food. They need a different combination of flora for digestion. The third is when they move to a normal diet, of what is typically eaten in that region. Around the world there are several predominant adult diet floral patterns.
The fourth floral pattern can either be induced through sickness, radiation, antibiotics, toxic chemicals, or old age. So it, and other patterns can happen several times in adulthood. It can also be voluntarily modified, though that can take several months.
And yes, doctors have known for a long time that people with damaged flora can get a floral replacement, sometimes called a “fecal transplant” from someone with good flora. While traditionally this was done, literally, by adding feces to a chocolate ice cream shake, it is now done directly with a colonoscope.
To avoid the possibility of a drug resistant bacterial bloom, some doctors are recommending that live culture yoghurt or Kefir drink are consumed in between doses of antibiotic, to repair the healthy floral balance after killing the pathological bacteria.
Actually, a new species only happens when its offspring can no longer reproduce with the old species. This was observed to happen a few decades ago in the US.
There were three breeds of wild bird, one western, one central US, and one eastern. The western and eastern birds could reproduce with the central breed, but western and eastern breeds could not reproduce with each other. And the central US breed was dying out. So technically, once it was extinct, the western and eastern breeds would become two different species.
The only known real mutation of humans to happen in recorded history was in one family in Europe, whose parents had five or six boys, who became known as “the hedgehog men”, because they had very rough skin from their knees to their navel, like hedgehog skin. For the time, about 400 years ago, they were seen as smarter, stronger and faster than were typical people.
Unfortunately for them they could not easily mate. Had they tried they could have caused significant harm to the woman. So they died out. Such is natural selection.