This can be explained by the changes in ARDS with time, as the lung evolves from a wet, heavy, atelectatic lung to a brittle fibrotic lung [ 12].
The Human lungs evolved to utilise CO2 and if we did not create our own CO2 now we all would be ill if not dead.
Overall then, did limbs and lungs evolve as an adaptation to living on land, as was once believed?
To assess whether viruses in lung evolve differentially from those in blood, we used the nucleotide alignments to calculate two statistics: (1) divergence, which is the genetic distance between nucleotide sequences from blood and lung to the inferred MRCA (Figure 4); and (2) the mean pairwise nucleotide diversity of viruses in blood and lung samples (Figure S2).
11 15 The key issue unmasked by our analyses is that many patients with severe lung disease evolved with usual care to less severe forms of lung injury within 24 h while others evolved to more severe forms of ARDS, as clearly demonstrated by the lack of concordance between the Berlin criteria and data at 24 h under SVS.
The lung has evolved effective barriers to prevent the uptake of any inhaled foreign particles [ 46].
Arguably, the lung has evolved in distinct segments to trap infection and prevent spread through local consolidation and obstruction of airways.
Consequently, the lung has evolved significant defense mechanisms against cellular damage from reactive oxygen species, which most notably include the family of superoxide dismutases (SOD), the peroxidase catalase, and reduced glutathione [ 263].
Lung dysfunction by itself may not influence the postoperative course of a patient; only when lung dysfunction evolves into a lung complication it becomes clinically relevant.
One argument for why lung loss evolves is that lungs are no longer needed by animals living in cool, highly oxygenated water so they become eliminated by natural selection to conserve energy (Noble, 1925; Noble, 1931).
It may be that the lungs have evolved a similar self-defense mechanism against airborne pathogens.
