Hey guys, Jonathan12345 here at Chapterhouse again with some good-old fashioned biomed.
If you’ve paid any attention to medicine in the recent years, you may have have heard of ‘superbugs’. These bacteria are resistant to many common antibiotics. If you’ve ever dug a bit deeper, you might’ve even heard that bacteria have evolved themselves to be resistant to antibiotics.
This is complete bullshit. Let me explain why.
It’s true that many strains of bacteria have resistance to common antibiotics now. However, they didn’t consciously choose to evolve resistance–that’s not how evolution works. As an example, could you suddenly evolve the ability to fly? I thought so.
The truth behind what happens is that bacteria reproduce so quickly, they accumulate many random mutations fast, some of which are bound to cause resistance to antibiotics. When these antibiotics are used, the bacteria that can’t survive die, while the ones with resistance survive and grow more common. This process, natural selection, we touched on in my previous article about evolution.
The idea, now discredited, that beings could choose to evolve, was first proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Now, while we know that his ideas are garbage today, we can’t completed discredit him as he lived before Darwin, and still managed to propose a (albeit flawed) theory of evolution.
What Lamarck believed was that animals had an innate desire to become perfect. They would try very hard to get the traits they desired (how they did this was never touched upon), and pass these improved traits to their offspring. Needless to say, this idea is stupid. If you lose an arm to a flying knife, does that mean your children will also be missing an arm? No.
The advent of genetics sealed the fate of Lamarckism. There is simply no way to modify your own genes without relying on tools, so there was no pathway left where Lamarckism would still be feasible.
Despite the evidence to the contrary, Lamarckism has survived amid the populace because of its straightforwardness. Just remember that you can never consciously “choose to evolve.”
That’s all for Chapterhouse today, and as always I’ll see you in the next one.
One thing you have missed here though, is some microbes have the ability to take DNA from another species of microbe and use it themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
This still isn’t Lamarkian evolution, and they would’ve evolved this ability with Darwinian means, but evolution is stupidly complex and intricate. There is still fear of a “superbug” (though the media does fearmonger about it far more than they should, of course) as one antibiotic resistant bacteria could transfer their genes to another, deadlier one.
This isn’t supposed to be a “gotcha” or anything, just a bit of extra information, as there is just so much to cover.
I’m aware of that, I just didn’t really feel the need to include it here. Besides, the gene transfer isn’t conscious.
Fair enough. Though on the other hand, maybe gene transfer is conscious?! Sure, they might just be single cells with no central nervous system or brain, but what if that is just what they want us to think? They’re planning something…
Quick, pull your tinfoil hat down tighter. They could be reading our brain waves at this moment!
Oh, thanks for the tip! They almost got me there. :P