Comment by fc417fc802
16 hours ago
It is not a model. It is a description. I'm torn on whether it would be correct to refer to the approach as constituting a sort of analogy.
No idea why you think the effect is being put before the cause. I'm hungry so I head to the kitchen. An observer says "he wants to eat". Antibiotics are administered. Only the bacterial cells expressing a certain set of proteins survive. An observer says "the infection wants to be resistant".
> An observer says "the infection wants to be resistant"
I can confidently claim that literally nobody says this because a google search for this exact phrase has only one result, and its this thread.[0]
Really though, I have never met a biologist who thought this way. All of the ones I've met and worked with knew that development of antibiotic resistance is not in any way like a decision process, and they usually understood on an intuitive level that bacterial cultures don't have a goal of developing the capability. Its just something that evolves, which is a distinct category of process.
Talking about it the other anthropomorphic way, like you claim is normal and acceptable, just confuses things; it is the opposite of helpful analogy. Infections don't "want" anything, they are better understood using the details of their actual biomolecular mechanics, which are about as far different from how brains work as could be imagined.
[0]https://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+infection+wants+to+be...
> An observer says "the infection wants to be resistant".
That's complete bs. Infections don't want anything. You're stuck in a loop of your own making, the only way out is to backtrack, not to keep on digging.
These lines of thinking were discredited many years ago and since then the field has seen enormous progress, anthropomorphize all you want but reality does not care.