alt Hacker News> put the lungs into a constant state of readiness, allowing fast responses to almost any invading germ
Succeeding at this would prove that our bodies have the capacity to do that but evolution "tuned" the system differently. A corollary would be that this vaccination is probably a net negative for public health, even if nobody'd really know why.
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No. Evolution is not "tuning" it's just statistics at a huge scale. The high likelihood of back pain, the lack of important sensors, broken synthesis pathways, this is not a carefully tuned system, this is just blind luck plus statistics. Which means we can do better because we're purposeful.
Don't bat immune systems work like this? Except they end up in equilibrium instead of eliminating the viruses, which is why it's so dangerous to come into contact with them.
I think almost everyone would avoid this if it meant you became deadly to your dog or cat.
Maybe not! Let's find out.
We're not really calorie constrained anymore and most humans live in much denser environments than they used to. You would expect rate of exposure, the rate of mutation / change and the rate at which new pathogens appear to be higher than in the past.
Consequently, you wouldn't necessarily expect ancestral "defaults" to be optimal for modern environments.