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.
I don’t really think Lamarckian evolution of genetics is a very prominent belief today. Rather, when we talk about organisms and physical phenomena, we like to ascribe them some form of agency because it makes explaining easier, not because they actually have agency.
For example, in the phenomenon of osmosis, water tends to flow towards areas of high solute concentration and away from areas of low solute concentration. When explaining to less scientific people, we usually say: “water flows towards the solute to find a balance”. Does the water actually, consciously choose to flow? NO. It’s just easier to say that then to explain, “it is more thermodynamically and entropically favorable for the water and solute to disperse evenly”.
Similarly, bacteria do not consciously choose to evolve antibiotic resistance. It’s just easier to say, “they evolved resistance after repeated antibiotic exposure” than it is to explain, “every time you took antibiotics, all the bacteria without a resistance mutation died until only resistant ones were left”.
Initially I was pretty annoyed about this too. It’s just a limitation of language and the human tendency to ascribe consciousness and agency to inanimate things.