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As far as I know, people suffer from the cold since ever. Why didn't and don't we evolve to resist it?

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  • $\begingroup$ Not since ever, only since about 70 years is it considered normal to suffer from the cold a few or more times per year. This is because we spend so much of our times indoors in rooms with central heating and air conditioning where the signal from the newly emerging cold viruses is drowned out by the microbes that live in the artificial tropical indoor climate. The first exposure to the cold virus is then when someone sneezes in your face; the cold can spread as wildfire with all these people with poor immunity against it. $\endgroup$
    – Count Iblis
    Apr 19, 2016 at 16:44

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The main reason is that there really isn't any one "cold," but rather the word is used to describe many different infections that simply have the same symptoms. The reason for these same symptoms is that almost all of the symptoms that one experiences in a cold are actually the immune response to said infection. For instance, a fever is used to make the body less hospitable for the infection causing agent and throwing up is used to ensure that harmful substances are removed from the digestive system before they can cause too much harm.

The reason that the body can't simply evolve resistance to all of these possible infections is both because the infections evolve too and because there are simply too many of them that all need a separate method to be defeated. Therefore, curing the common cold is effectivley curing the majority of known ailments.

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