Would there be an expected evolutionary benefit for Ad-36 to increase obesity?
I wouldn’t worry too much about this. A lot of pathogen effects have nothing to do with evolution directly, just with the human body being very complicated and it being very hard to do one thing without doing twenty other things at the same time.
For example, some scientists think a Coxsackie virus indirectly causes diabetes. The virus infects, the immune system does its usual job of mobilizing to fight the virus, but something about the virus “looks” enough like beta cells in the pancreas that the immune system gets confused and destroys them too. This doesn’t provide any benefit to the virus afaik, it’s just something that happens when you have a finite number of ways biological molecules can be configured.
Likewise, chlamydia can make people infertile, not because there’s some evolutionary benefit to chlamydia in making people infertile, but just because fertility’s a complicated process and in the process of invading the uterus chlamydia ruins all those fine-tuned organs.
I don’t know anything about this particular virus, but if it does increase obesity I would expect it to be more like the Coxsackie virus and less like some weird evolutionary adaptation (although those aren’t unheard of—see eg toxoplasma)
I wouldn’t worry too much about this. A lot of pathogen effects have nothing to do with evolution directly, just with the human body being very complicated and it being very hard to do one thing without doing twenty other things at the same time.
For example, some scientists think a Coxsackie virus indirectly causes diabetes. The virus infects, the immune system does its usual job of mobilizing to fight the virus, but something about the virus “looks” enough like beta cells in the pancreas that the immune system gets confused and destroys them too. This doesn’t provide any benefit to the virus afaik, it’s just something that happens when you have a finite number of ways biological molecules can be configured.
Likewise, chlamydia can make people infertile, not because there’s some evolutionary benefit to chlamydia in making people infertile, but just because fertility’s a complicated process and in the process of invading the uterus chlamydia ruins all those fine-tuned organs.
I don’t know anything about this particular virus, but if it does increase obesity I would expect it to be more like the Coxsackie virus and less like some weird evolutionary adaptation (although those aren’t unheard of—see eg toxoplasma)