> Bacteria, like any living organism, want to survive.
> bacteria will always change in order to survive.
Excellent article. Everyone should read it from top to bottom twice. Forward it to your entire network. This is a serious matter.
However. I really cringe when I see scientists get loose with language like this. I know he knows perfectly well how evolution works. This is an attempt to make it simpler to swallow for those who might not be up to speed and, perhaps, come to the discussion lacking a minimal scientific background to be able to rationalize it. I get it. Among that population the misrepresentation of the driving mechanisms behind evolution can actually do more harm than good.
Taken far enough you end up with? "Oh, so you mean to say that a monkey WANTED to survive and CHANGE in order to become a human". Which makes you sound like an insane lunatic, of course.
The mechanism is dead simple: Out of a pool of organisms exposed to an environment some die and some survive. This "environment" can be anything, from an antibiotic at the bacterial level to a flood in a canyon. Of those who survived some did so due to blind chance. Others because they might possess a characteristic that helped them survive the environment. Survivors mate and reproduce. Some mutations occur. The cycle repeats with the new population. If the environmental "attack" (antibiotics, the flood, whatever) remains the same, over time populations will develop that will have better and better resistance to their particular challenges. This is the brutally simple result of the demise of those who simply could not handle whatever was dished out. Over time either the entire population is killed off and game over or those who were resistant, for whatever reason, will --without intent, goals or knowledge-- help evolve populations equipped with increased resistance to what is trying to kill them.
In evolution there is no "wanting" to do anything. There isn't even the idea of wanting to survive. There is no struggle for survival. There is no conscious desire to change or to become something else. It is brutal and simple. Some die. Some don't. Those who survive repeat the cycle. Eventually either all die or you end-up with one or more new species/variants that got past the killing spree and emerge resistant to whatever ailed them. And it goes on. Challenge after challenge.
Part of me wishes people would have a better handle on this very simple scientific fact so we could move on to more important topics. We went to see Richard Dawkins at Caltech this weekend. He mentioned that in the US some 40% of the population think the earth is 6,000 years old and reject evolution. What they reject might very well be what ends-up killing them.
This issue of bacteria evolving past our ability to concoct antibiotics is a very serious one. I've always believed we are all going to be killed-off by something microscopic that nobody is going to see coming. The potential is there for hundreds of millions of people to die over a short period of time. Airplanes will contribute to that greatly, helping take bacteria all over the world before we even realize what's happening.
That's why I don't understand why we don't get behind this --as a planet, not just a nation-- with great force. I see virtually no use for our military and that of other nations. Can't we lobby for the elimination of the horrible waste that is the maintenance of massive military forces and, instead, devote those funds to more worthy causes? Imagine if we, as a nation, devoted half our current military budget to honest medical research. I am not one for huge government programs, but there would be ways to do such a thing without having government bureaucracies devolve the thing into a cash burning furnace.
The point isn't the details but rather the idea that something like this should be priority one. We are looking at the possibility that within the next 25 to 50 years there could be a massive antibiotic resistant bacteria outbreak that takes out a huge chunk of the human race. We need to be ahead of that event, not behind it. And it is far wiser to throw billions of dollars into medical research of almost any kind rather than into making the latest wiz-bank how-to-kill-more-people-per-round machine.
Utopia. I know. Sad.
EDIT:
I neglected to add how I would explain evolution to a general audience without resorting to "want" and "desire" type analogies. In other words, don't be critical without offering a solution. Well, I think it's simple, I sort of did:
When faced with challenges organisms either excel or die. Those who excel go on to reproduce. In reproduction there is mutation. Small changes to each and every new organism. Reproduction does not produce clones. Reproduction results in a population of new and distinct individuals with some of the traits of their parents and some new ones. Their offsprings, if faced with the same challenges will, just the same, survive or die. If none survive the population goes extinct. Otherwise, over time, the only organisms who will continue to survive are those who continue to carry the traits that made their ancestors survive. This repeats over time and across challenges.
That's not the elevator pitch, of course. So here is that one, applied to bacteria in particular:
When attacked by antibiotics some bacteria survive. These reproduce and produce new bacteria that might carry-on some of the traits that allowed the parents to survive. Random mutations might also make some members of the new population even more resistant to the same antibiotics. The process repeats over many generations. Over time new populations emerge with immunity to the antibiotics that killed so many of their ancestors.
The more we expose bacterial populations to wide ranges of antibiotic challenges the greater the effect can be. Over time populations will evolve that will be resistant to anything we have on the shelves to throw at them.