Actually, Ivermectin is the drug given as a mixture of 2 different substances of the avermectin family.

yeah, it's the drug is spelled Ivermectin, among many other botch ups!

My apologies for skipping explanation steps and also of the term ‘lay person’, although the commenter seemed to indicate that he was a software engineer and that he was all ears for a further explanation. When I said three letter code, I was referring to the triplet code in which RNA is made into protein. I appreciate you calling out my misstatement. Never the less, what I find more interesting is that we like to talk about how mutation is random. Interestingly, the probability of one particular base becoming mutated is somewhat random but what it mutates into is not. We actually know pretty darn well the probability that one specific nucleotide came from another. That was what I meant by chemistry of mutation. That’s why this approach is considered very valid. This has been done before in many other papers actually. I find it to be pretty darn cool.

I would like to address the idea of working backwards in biology. I can see how ridiculous this methodology would seem to the lay person. However, it is a bit similar than say the linux kernel. Biology is a three letter code of chemical components. These three letters have known translations and the chemistry of mutations is very well understood. In addition, at some point, multiple species arise from a common ancestor. These lineages of speciation are fairly well understood. Basically, you work backwards so that you get to a common ancestor via the most probable mutation path. I would be like if you took the kernel example, except that we know pretty well the probability of programmers to use certain formatting/variables and there were many many more kernels that arose from a common kernel. That way predicting the order of past events could be estimated fairly well. In addition, with biology, the translations are known so it would be like compiling and running the code with each backwards guess to make sure that there wouldn’t be an endless loop or crash. Hopefully that somewhat makes sense.

Artists who sample should always give the original artist credit... This is a childish attempt to explain, or rather justify, a wrong AFTER the fact.

You also are attending college in one of the worst states for education, no offense...

Most people scoff at degrees from an online university... because anyone can cheat their way through any test of knowledge. I teach at a major university and the idea of labs on a computer is horrific! I myself took a molecular genetics lab on a computer. While the simulation was wonderful, it was ultimately useless... you can not teach lab techniques on a computer, period.

AHAHAHAHA, the guy clearly can not formulate an argument which lacks biased and sexist undertones. Really though, this article has to be a tad off about the 'invention' of quorum sensing... We've all known for a while that there is an amplification and synchronization event among bacteria, it was just a matter of how.