- bacterial populations are being regulated by bacteriophages (viruses) or predators. They have spent millions of years evolving to hunt standard chiral life and wouldn't be physically able to digest or hunt mirror bacteria.
- the same is true of our immune system. Our pattern-recognition receptors only work for non-mirror molecules and wouldn't recognize a reversed molecular fingerprint. You may be able to engineer antibiotics and phages, but a vaccine would require a creative approach.
- the claim "yes but mirror bacteria would starve since they wouldn't find mirror food to eat in nature or in our bodies" doesn't hold up, because there are enough achiral (non-handed) nutrients in the soil, our blood and our gut that mirror bacteria could eat.
I recently measured something similar on whether a quote supports the claim it's cited for. I tested on 240 examples from ALCE (labeled by human annotators).
Jev 1.13 flagged 87.5% of the citations that the annotators marked as not supported. The best regular LLM judge I tried was GLM-5.3-flash with reasoning which flagged 83.9% (without reasoning it was 75.6%).
The same also works with open models though. Give Qwen3.5-397B the three possible answers, let it output a single token, and read off the probability of each answer. No reasoning, one token per check. That flagged 89.3%.
There were only 56 unsupported cases, so these numbers are within each other's error bars. But my conclusion was that the speed and the confidence score come from reading out a single token, not from Jev itself.
- bacterial populations are being regulated by bacteriophages (viruses) or predators. They have spent millions of years evolving to hunt standard chiral life and wouldn't be physically able to digest or hunt mirror bacteria.
- the same is true of our immune system. Our pattern-recognition receptors only work for non-mirror molecules and wouldn't recognize a reversed molecular fingerprint. You may be able to engineer antibiotics and phages, but a vaccine would require a creative approach.
- the claim "yes but mirror bacteria would starve since they wouldn't find mirror food to eat in nature or in our bodies" doesn't hold up, because there are enough achiral (non-handed) nutrients in the soil, our blood and our gut that mirror bacteria could eat.