This idea can generally work, but one should be careful of 'just-so' stories in evolutionary biology.
It appears this deletion happens in other animals and may be attributable to pathogen pressure. It's arisen multiple times, which makes it hard to claim that it has a specific role in primates (beyond its presumed antimicrobial benefit, which any animal should enjoy).
Evading pathogen pressure is just another benefit behind the scenes. The point is that I would be careful to attribute any of these things to such weird mechanisms when there are so many much more realistic explanations that we just haven't fully uncovered yet.
> Evading pathogen pressure is just another benefit behind the scenes.
I'm imagining that this relates to a specific pathogen that may no longer exist (like the presumed mechanism of the most common cystic fibrosis mutations and cholera).
I'm not sure how this would relate to humans running, however.
It appears this deletion happens in other animals and may be attributable to pathogen pressure. It's arisen multiple times, which makes it hard to claim that it has a specific role in primates (beyond its presumed antimicrobial benefit, which any animal should enjoy).
https://inflammregen.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s412...