Survival of the Fittest or the Luckiest?
Evolutionists assume that bacteria spread because they evolve resistance to antibiotics and become more fit to survive. That’s apparently not true, says a story in EurekAlert about a study from Imperial College, London: the spread of bacteria appears to be due to chance alone.
Here are two quotes from the article by team members explaining the finding:
Dr Christophe Fraser, from Imperial College London, a Royal Society University Research Fellow and one of the authors, says: “Microbiologists have assumed for some time that some disease strains spread more successfully than others. In fact we found that the variation in the communities we studied could be explained by chance. This was surprising, especially considering all the potential advantages one pathogen can have over another, such as antibiotic resistance and differences in host immunity.”
Dr Bill Hanage, from Imperial College London, and also one of the authors, says: “When we look at a sample and see that some strains are much more common than others, it’s tempting to think that there must be something special about them. In fact, they could just be the lucky ones, and that’s what it looks like here. Most of the variation in the spread of these pathogens can be explained by chance alone.” (Emphasis added in all quotes.)
The team studied three pathogenic bacteria and followed the social patterns of the humans they infected. There was no clear association between success at spreading and fitness for spreading .
A related commentary by Dan Ferber in Science1 had another surprise about bacteria: they are not immortal. Reproducing strains in a culture apparently show their age. What does this mean? For one thing, the results “make it unlikely that natural selection produced an immortal organism.” For another, “It’s one of those exciting results that makes you take a fresh look at what you think you know.” One observer is not sure the populations that stopped growing were aging; maybe they were taking a break for repairs. But another said the new findings “put the onus of proof on anyone who claims that cells can be immortal.”
1Dan Ferber, “Immortality Dies as Bacteria Show Their Age,” Science, Vol 307, Issue 5710, 656 , 4 February 2005, [DOI: 10.1126/science.307.5710.656a].
Would survival of the luckiest generate all the richness and complexity of the living world? This seems to be a very non-Darwinian way of looking at biology. It also seems to undermine one of the key evidences of evolution in the Darwin Party’s debate arsenal: the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
The second story reminds us that if biologists are still surprised by things happening right under their noses that have been studied for over a century, how can we trust their confidence about millions of years ago?