“A world without memory is a world of the present,” Alan Lightman wrote in Einstein’s Dreams. “The past exists only in books, in documents. In order to know himself, each person carries his own Book of Life, which is filled with the history of his life…Without his Book of Life, a person is a snapshot, a two-dimensional image, a ghost.”
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While doing some research on human evolution, I stumbled across the web site for a wonderful meeting that was held in March at San Diego to celebrate the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome. You can watch the lectures here. By comparing the chimp genome to the human genome, scientists are discovering exactly how we evolved into the peculiar species that we are. If you find yourself in an argument with someone who claims that evolution has nothing to do with cutting edge science, plunk them down in front of these talks. Without evolution, genomics is gibberish.
Is Intelligent Design the same thing as creationism? The people who back Intelligent Design have spilled an awful lot of ink saying they’re different. Even self-proclaimed creationists have tried to claim a difference. Somehow, both of these camps think that any confusion between the two is evidence of the lazy arrogance of evolutionists. In fact, the evidence points towards Intellgent Design being just a bit of clever repackaging to get creationist nonsense into the classroom. (See this useful article.)
If you took a census of life on Earth, you’d probably find that the majority of life forms looked like this. It’s a virus known as a bacteriophage, which lives exclusively in bacteria. There are about 10 million phages in every milliliter of coastal sea water. All told, scientists put the total number of bacteriophages at a million trillion trillion (10 to the 30th power). Bacteriophages not only make up the majority of life forms, but they are believed to have existed just about since life itself began. Since then, they have been evolving along with their hosts, and even making much of their hosts’ evolution possible by shuttling genes from one host to another. Thanks in large part to bacteriophages, more and more bacteria are acquiring the genes they need to defeat antibiotics. Bacteriophages also kill off a huge portion of ocean bacteria that consume greenhouse gases. If you suddenly rid the world of all bacteriophages, the global climate would lurch out of whack.
Continue reading “Deadly, Tiny, and Ready For Its Close-up, Mr. DeMille”
Spiteful bacteria. Two words you probably haven’t heard together. Then again, you probably haven’t heard of altruistic bacteria either, but both sorts of microbes are out there–and in many cases in you.