RE: Letters From Darwin - An Evolutionary Coin Flip
Truly, you possess a gift for finding apt analogies.
I totally agree, what we see today are simply nature's random experiments that worked out. The 99.99...% that didn't, died out.
This phenomenon is readily observable respecting bacterial adaptation and, because they reproduce so quickly and numerously, the effect becomes apparent.
Start off with a billion bacteria in a petri dish. Throw in an antibiotic. It will kill off 999,999,999 of them. But one survives because of a random mutation that allowed it to be impervious to the antibiotic. Because the single bacteria has no competition from it's dead brethren, it's got tons of food and starts replicating like crazy. Soon, you've got 1 billion bacteria that are now all antibiotic resistant.
The reality is even more intriguing when you get into "Horizontal Mutation," an area of science that we're only recently starting to appreciate. Most bacteria live in multi-species colonies called biofilms. The biofilms are a secreted gelatinous material that protect it's inhabitants from host immune systems and antibiotics.
Nevertheless, plenty still get killed and when their bodies breakdown, it releases fragments of DNA. These fragments of DNA can be absorbed by the living bacteria, and the absorbed DNA starts producing proteins too. These DNA fragments are called Plasmids. So, if there is one antibiotic resistant species of bacteria in a biofilm colony, it can pass on its resistance to completely unrelated species of bacteria in that same biofilm colony.
The spirochete that causes Lyme Disease has 18-22 different Plasmids depending upon the strain.
The result is evolution on steroids, a rate of adaptation that could never occur if one relied on vertical mutation alone. Such recent realization has scientists quaking in their boots.
My daughter and I have spent 6 years experimenting on how to dissolve these biofilms in vivo. It's not easy.
Respecting randomness: Experiments have been done where humans create a "fake randomized list" of heads and tails. A second list is created by a computer. Judges can spot the fake within a minute or two.
How? Humans won't periodically put in a string of a 100 heads. It doesn't seem random. 2-3 heads in a row, sure ... but not a hundred. The judges simply scan both lists to find the one without "improbably long strings of heads" ... and that's the fake.
Wow!! Thank you for this!
Horizontal mutation sounds truly frightening; it really makes you wonder how anything other than bacteria can survive on this planet. That is why I loved the (spoiler alert) War of The Worlds ending, I felt that it was probably a fairly accurate representation of what would happen, though in reality they probably would have died before they did all the cool destruction stuff.
OK, well there's a line that I can't just let slide by :-) Are you both just home scientists? Work in a pro lab? Forgive me if I've missed that in a previous post, or maybe it's just my memory is being an arsehole again!
Yes and I remember vaguely somebody saying; I think it was google or facebook, for some reason had to make their random number generator less random, because humans have a fixed pattern of randomness in their heads.
Man, I'm interested in what you and your daughter are doing!
Cg