Rosa Rubicondior: Microbiology

Showing posts with label Microbiology. Show all posts

Tuesday, 5 August 2025

Creationism Refuted - The Subterranean Microbes That Make Creationists Sick

Karen Lloyd

Buried Alive: The Secret Life of Deep Earth Microbes

What if we could peer back through deep time and see what single-celled organisms looked like—not just thousands, but hundreds of millions of years ago—and compare them to their living descendants? It would be a revelation for science… and a nightmare for creationists.

That’s precisely what geobiologist Karen Lloyd and her team at the University of Southern California (USC) are uncovering. They study microorganisms that have made an incredible journey: born in the depths of the ocean, slowly buried under a relentless rain of sediment, and then carried by plate tectonics into the deep Earth, where subduction dragged them beneath continental crust. There, cut off from oxygen and sunlight, they survived for millions of years in a slow-motion existence, drawing nutrients from the surrounding rock. Their metabolic rates became so low they could no longer replicate, yet they endured by “breathing”—in the biochemical sense—through redox reactions, extracting energy from electrons provided by whatever electron donors the rocks could supply. Some have even evolved the ability to “breathe” carbon dioxide, something unknown among terrestrial life.

These organisms’ existence is a direct challenge to creationist dogma—not only because they have persisted for timescales far beyond the Bible’s allowance, but because they reveal how even apparently simple single-celled organisms can diverge and adapt over geological epochs. Environmental pressures have driven them into extraordinary evolutionary niches, each defined by what they have learned to “breathe.” Moreover, they exist in environments in which life as we know it couldn't survive, yet creationists insist that Earth was intelligently created, perfect for life, which begs the question, which life? The life that breathes using arsenic, lives for millions of years deep underground with almost no metabolic activity and survive in the heat and acidity of volcanic hot springs, or life the breathes oxygen and needs a regular supply of water and a narrow range of ambient temperatures in which to survive without special equipment?

Refuting Creationism - How Living Organism's Survived - 700 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Pustular microbial mat section such as could have existend in small melt-water ponds.

When Earth iced over, early life may have sheltered in meltwater ponds | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Only by systematically ignoring geological and archaeological evidence can creationists continue to delude themselves into believing that Earth is just a few thousand years old and was perfectly created by an anthropophilic god especially for humans – its supposed “special creation.”

The evidence, however, paints a radically different picture from that childish superstition. Not only was Earth clearly not perfectly created for humans, it wasn’t perfectly created for any life form. And it is far older than creationists assert. In truth, around 600 million years ago, Earth was such a hostile place for life that it was entirely covered in ice. The polar ice sheets had extended until they met at the equator. These “Snowball Earth” conditions led to a mass extinction so severe that it remains something of a mystery how any life survived – especially complex eukaryotic cells.

Now, a multinational team of researchers led by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has found evidence that early life could have survived in small pools of surface meltwater. They reached this conclusion after studying similar meltwater pools on the McMurdo Ice Shelf in Antarctica. What they found not only showed that single-celled eukaryotes can survive in such conditions, but also revealed that the population of prokaryotes varies according to local environmental conditions

These meltwater pools act as microcosms of diverse environments and demonstrate how local factors shape the distribution of different species – exactly as predicted by the Theory of Evolution. Had the conditions been perfect as creationists insist, there could be no variation in the populations in these pools. Variation only arises because the species need to adapt to different conditions - something that would never be needed in perfectly designed conditions.

The team has just published their findings, open access, in the journal Nature Communications.

Refuting Creationsm - Evolution By Loss of Genes, Horizontal Gene Transfer And Gene Duplication

Nitzschia sing1 lives on the alginate in the cell walls of decaying brown algae.

A borrowed bacterial gene allowed some marine diatoms to live on a seaweed diet | PRESS-NEWS.org

A fundamental axiom of creationism is the claim that any loss of genetic information is invariably detrimental—so much so that any mutation resulting in such a loss would be fatal and could therefore play no role in evolution. A second axiom asserts that new genetic information cannot arise naturally and must instead be supplied by a supernatural intelligent designer.

Both of these assertions are demonstrably false. Nevertheless, they continue to feature in creationist apologetics, relying on the audience's ignorance and incredulity to pass as justification for belief in an intelligent creator.

To add further difficulty for creationist claims, scientists have now identified a marine diatom, Nitzschia sing1, that has not only lost the genes and organelles required for photosynthesis — present in its photosynthetic relatives — but has also adapted successfully without them. It achieved this by acquiring new genetic information through horizontal gene transfer from a marine bacterium. The transferred gene subsequently underwent extensive duplication and diversification into three gene families, each with complementary functions. Together, these 91 versions of the acquired gene enable N. sing1 to metabolise alginate, a carbohydrate found in the cell walls of brown algae such as kelp.

Mallevolent Design - How Salmonella Sneaks Past Our Defences To Make Us Sick

Intestinal lumen

New study shows how salmonella tricks gut defenses to cause infection

There is a simple paradox at the heart of creationism that I have never even seen an attempt to resolve. It all comes from two beliefs: there is only one designer god capable of designing living organisms and that designer god designed us complete with our immune system with which we can attempt to resist attack by pathogens, and that pathogens are not the work of this design, but are the result of 'genetic entropy' and 'devolution' since Adam & Eve let 'sin' into the world. The fact that Michael J. Behe, who invented that excuse, has let slip that ID Creationism is Bible literalism in a lab coat seems to be lost on his followers who still dutifully insist that it is a scientific alternative to evolution and should be taught in school science class (presumably now with the tale of Adam & Eve taught as real history and 'sin' as a real force in science).

The paradox is, did the designer god give Adam & Eve an immune system, or did it design an upgrade when 'sin' allowed pathogens to exist? If the former, it was anticipating and planning for the so-called 'fall'; if the latter, it lacked foresight so is not omniscient.

But however creationists resolve this paradox they still have to explain why the 'intelligently designed' immune system doesn't work very well and why whatever is designing pathogens seems to be able to overcome it.

The nonsense about 'sin', 'the fall', etc., is trivially easy to refute because any improvement in a parasite's ability to parasitise its host can't possibly be regarded as a devolution from some assumed initial perfection because an improvement can't be worse that what it's an improvement on. The whole nonsense of 'devolution' is biological gobbledygook, intelligently designed to appeal to scientifically illiterate simpletons who want to fit the Bible superstition somewhere in the reasoning without bothering too much about the logic or the biology.

So, the paradox boils down to why an intelligent designer would be having an arms race with itself so the parasites it creates can continue to parasitise the victims it creates complete with their immune system it created to stop them. Creationists normally flee in terror at the mere mention of arms races, which is why you'll never see them discussed in the cult literature apart from where pathogens are waved aside as 'caused by sin', blah, blah, blah...
So, it would be refreshing indeed to see a genuine attempt by an intelligent design creationist try to give some rational explanation, and hopefully without giving away the fact that ID creationism is merely Christian fundamentalism in disguise, for the discovery by a new UC Davis Health study that shows how the Salmonella bacteria, a major cause of food poisoning, can invade the gut even when protective bacteria are present.

As an added embarrassment for creationists, Salmonella is closely related to Escherichia coli (E.coli) that they usually cite Michael J. Behe as 'proving' it must have been designed by their god because its flagellum is 'irreducibly complex'.

First a little AI background information about Salmonella, where it came from and what it does to us:

Common Ancestry - Ancient Choanoflagellates Genes Used To Make A Mouse

Choanoflagellates, singly and as a colony.

Scientists recreate mouse from gene older than animal life - Queen Mary University of London

If there is one thing designed to get creationists chanting 'Common Designer!' it's evidence of the same gene doing the same thing in lots of different organisms, no matter how distantly related they are.

But when that gene is needed because of a basic design blunder long ago in the evolution of multicellular organisms, that chant looks increasingly forlorn.

For example, scientists have just shown how SOX and POU genes isolated from a single-celled choanoflagellate can be used to convert a mouse cell to function as the stem cell to clone another mouse. The reason this works is because something needs to reset the epigenetic setting in specialised cells. In a multicellular organism like a mouse, this effectively means any cell produced after the first few cell divisions of the fertilised zygote.

But why would a single-celled organism like a choanoflagellate need to do that? The answer it that epigenetics originally evolved to make an organism more able to respond to environmental changes and stresses.

Refuting Creationism - How Eggs Evolved Hundred of Millions of Years Before Chickens

Chromosphaera perkinsii resembles the early stages of animal embryo development during its multicellular life stage

DudinLab

The egg or the chicken? An ancient unicellular says egg! - Medias - UNIGE

Scientists believe they may have cracked the chicken and egg 'problem' that creationists have been fooled into thinking is a killer problem for the Theory of Evolution. With their child-like understanding of evolution, creationists can't imagine how species emerge over time from earlier species by a process of evolution and think that their mythical magic creation without ancestors is actually what happens, or at least what evolutionary biologists think happens. So, they imagine explaining how the first chicken hatched from the first egg before there was a chicken to lay it, is an insurmountable problem.

In fact, of course there never was a first chicken just as there never was a first human, and eggs are simply a phase in the life cycle of, in this case, chickens, so hens' eggs are chickens just as much so as adult hens are. The ancestral species that the Southeast Asian jungle fowl evolved from had been laying eggs ever since they diverged from the egg-laying avian dinosaurs that had evolved from the egg-laying theropod dinosaurs, etc, etc, back to the egg-laying tunicates and chordates in the Cambrian and their egg-laying ancestors...

Malevolent Design - How Chlamydia Is 'Designed' to Cause Maximum Sufferring.

Schematic representation of how a C. pneumoniae cell infects a human cell. The bacterium injects the protein SemD (green) into the cell, which activates the cell protein N-WASP, which in turn initiates vesicle formation.

Credit: HHU/Fabienne Kocher.

Universität Düsseldorf: Original or copy: How Chlamydia manipulate the host cell

The problem of parasites for creationists is one that, despite the best efforts of apologists like Michael J Behe of the Deception Institute, just won't go away.

Sadly, Behe shot himself in the foot with his original claim to have proven 'intelligent [sic] design in living organisms with his choice of the bacterial flagellum in E. coli, where he persuaded his willing audience that these nasty little pathogens had been intelligently designed - and by unspoken assumption, designed by the locally-popular god.

Now creationists wave his 'proof' of design as evidence for their creator god because only their god is capable of creating living organisms.

But, with characteristic double-think, creationists also argue that their god is omnibenevolent, so something else must have created parasites like E. coli, and, courtesy again of Michael J. Behe, they cite 'Sin' causing 'genetic entropy' and the absurd idea of 'devolution' this supposedly causes, as the cause of parasites and pathogens (but not the bacterial flagellum, obviously!).

The problem with that notion is that they need to do their double-think trick one more time and believe that a trait with improves a pathogens ability to live and reproduce in its host makes it somehow less perfect that one without that trait. So, in the creationist's world, an improvement is a move away from perfection!

But, with a cult that appears to believe learning is a move away from the 'perfection' of pristine ignorance (from whence comes expertise in all aspects of science), that's probably not too difficult a feat of mental gymnastics for a creationist to perform.

Refuting Creationism - Even More Signs of The Divine Malevolence's Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?

Over 160,000 new virus species discovered by AI - The University of Sydney

This is the second paper today to show the apparent obsession creationism's putative designer has with creating viruses, if you believe that superstition.

The first paper dealt with the discovery that there are some 600 different viruses to be found on a used toothbrush and on the shower heads in US bathrooms; this one reports on a discovery that makes that finding pale into insignificance. It is the discovery, using the machine learning of AI, of 161,979 new viruses!

This is just tip of the iceberg as the authors say the method just scratches the surface of biodiversity and opens up a world of discovery with millions more to be discovered.

Structural model at atomic resolution of bacteriophage T4

By Dr. Victor Padilla-Sanchez, PhD https://www.drvictorpadillasanchez.com
Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Viruses are teeming on your toothbrush, showerhead - Northwestern Now

Creationism's putative creator is nothing if not obsessive.

One of its obsessions appears to be designing ever-more exquisite ways to kill its creation as almost nothing in nature exists that doesn't have something that lives on or in it, often killing it in the process or at least weakening it in some way.

Its most visible obsession seems to be with designing beetles of which there are some 500,000 species with more being discovered almost daily. It's highly likely that there may be as many as a million different beetles in the world, many of which catch and devour other arthropods.

But it's in the field of virology that we find another obsession with designing variations on a general theme. Not only are there literally hundreds of thousands of viruses but every species has multiple variants - look at the number of different variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that have emerged since the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic!

Refuting Creationism - Living Bacteria Sealed Inside 2 Billion-Year-Old Rock

2-billion-year-old rock home to living microbes | The University of Tokyo

The Bushveld Igneous Complex (BIC), South Africa.
This picture shows a very famous outcrop where nearly horizontal black and white layers are observed. The BIC made of layers of igneous rock in a basin shape, formed over a period of about 1 million years, after which it seems to have barely changed.

In today's incidental rebuttal of creationist dogma, archaeologists have discovered living colonies of microbes sealed within cracks in 2-billion-year-old rocks from South Africa.

The microbes became sealed in the cracks by tightly-packed layers of clay so effectively creating sealed chambers from which nothing could escape and, more importantly, nothing could enter. They have survived over geological time by firstly having an extremely low metabolic rate, with a generation time measured in thousands, even millions of years, compared to surface-dwelling microbes with generation times in hours or minutes, and by utilising sulphates as their energy source.

What they demonstrate, apart from the fallacy of Earth only being made by magic 10,000 years ago, is that in a highly stable environment, a plentiful source of energy and the ability to recycle their dead with almost no loss of energy, there is no environmental pressure to evolve, so the microbes have remained virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions, even billions of years.

Malevolent Design - A Newly-Discovered Gut Bacterium That Suppresses Immunity!

Drs. Thaddeus Stappenbeck, M.D., Ph.D., (left) and Qiuhe Lu, Ph.D., in the lab.

Cleveland Clinic Discovers Bacterium Causing Gut Immunodeficiency

The human gut, like that of other mammals, birds and vertebrates in particular and the gut of many insects and worms, in fact any organism with a moth and an anus, is an ideal environment for a whole host of other organisms, most of which will have co-evolved with humans and have been with us since our ancestors were small insectivores, skulking in the dark of the night to avoid dinosaurs and predatory proto-birds.

They for a complex and dynamic ecosystem of competing and cooperating bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoa which exists in a more or less stable balance of arms races, predation and symbiosis.

Refuting Creationism - An Improved Method For Analysing Ancient Microfossils To Discover How Life Evolved

Research News - Unveiling Ancient Life: New Method Sheds Light on Early Cellular and Metabolic Evolution | Tohoku University Global Site

One of the clutch of science publications which casually and unintentionally refute creationism to be published today, comes in the form of a paper by a team from the University of Tokyo, Tohoku University and Kochi University, Japan, which describes a new method for analysing ancient microfossils, and so discovering more about how key processes evolved in early cellular life.

The purpose of this is to discover not whether (that is never in doubt) but the precise details of how and when these key processes evolved.

Malevolent Designer News - Why Cholera is So Good at Killing Us

Vibrio cholerae

AI generated image (ChatGPT4o)

News - Experts discover the deadly genetics of cholera, which could be key to its prevention - University of Nottingham

Although good hygiene and safe drinking water have most brought cholera under control in developed societies, it is still a major kill, especially of children, in poor and technologically under-developed countries.

It was a cholera outbreak of 1849 in Soho, London, the John Snow famously showed was statistically linked to drinking water from a well in Broad Steet, eventually persuading the authorities to remove the pump handle from the well, so ending the epidemic, that Snow conformed the Germ Theory of disease and founded modern epidemiology.

The cause was later shown to be a leaking septic tank which was contaminating the water in the well, and more remotely to a baby which caught cholera elsewhere whose nappy (diaper) was washed into the sewer, introducing the Vibrio cholerae into the septic tank.

I was born and brought up in North Oxfordshire in a rural community where, a generation earlier, cholera had been the single most common cause of death of children. A perusal of the parish burial registers shows regular patterns of epidemics causing a sudden increase in child deaths.

Even in technologically advanced countries, natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, and man-made conflicts such as those currently in Gaza and Ukraine can destroy the infrastructure and quickly lead to conditions in which cholera can further devastate an already weakened population.

It would be an especially despicable malevolence that designed an organism to exploit people in those situation to ensure there was even more suffering, but those subscribing to the intelligent design hoax are unwittingly attributing exactly that to their putative designer god.

Malevolent Designer News - What Was The Divine Malevolence Doing With Plague Bacteria 5000 years ago?

In the study, scientists performed a genetic analysis on the bones of 133 human individuals from late Neolithic megalithic graves near Warburg in North Rhine-Westphalia. The team discovered the genome of the bacterium Yersinia pestis in the bone samples of two independent individuals. Additionally, previously published genomic data from a bone sample of a Neolithic dog found in Ajvide (Sweden) suggested a potential infection route.

Neolithic plague bacterium did not cause mass mortality

What was creationism's divine malevolence up to with one of its most successful pathogens with which if killed hundreds of millions and changes society - the Yersinia pestis bacterium which caused the waves of black death and plague that regularly spread across the world?

It seems to have been experimenting, possibly trying to either perfect its virulence or work out the best delivery system to ensure it got to and killed as many people as possible. Sometimes, entire villages were wiped out. Not far from where I currently live are a couple of former villages that disappeared during the black death - the village of Woodperry near Oxford is an example, surviving now only in the name 'Woodperry Road' and a farmhouse later built on the site.

But 5000 years ago, Y. pestis doesn't seem to have been anything like a virulent as it became in the 12th Century. According to a recent discovery, it was capable of killing the occasional neolithic farmer but not of becoming a major pandemic able to kill hundreds of thousands and depopulate vast areas.

So, what changed, and more to the point, which explanation would a creationist prefer; the one which blames their god or the one which attributes it to evolution, climate change and cultural changes in human society? One thing we can be sure of though is the Michael J. Behe's biologically nonsensical religious apologetic of 'genetic entropy', causing the bacterium to 'devolve' away from an assumed created perfection (as though that were remotely possible), can be ruled out, because whatever the changes were, it led to a massive increase in the number of Y. pestis organisms, so was indisputably beneficial to it - in other words, in classical terms, it evolved.

Refuting Creationism - Co-Evolution Of Humans And Their Gut Microbiome

Development of the infant gut microbiome

AI generated image
(complete with spelling idiosyncrasies)

Natural probiotic discovered in UK newborns’ microbiomes

In a very nice example of how humans and their gut microbiome have co-evolved, researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, University College London (UCL), and the University of Birmingham, have identified a bacterium that helps digest breast milk and protects the baby from harmful pathogens.

As an example of intelligent [sic] design, this comes as close to a Heath-Robinson solution to a problem of the designer's own making as it's possible to imagine.

No designer who designed a baby's digestive system so it is susceptible to the harmful pathogens that it also designed, and created the baby to feed on breast milk that is difficult to digest, then solved those problems by creating another bacterium to fight the pathogens and help digest the milk, and infecting the baby with it, doesn't deserve the adjective 'intelligent'. 'Bloody stupid' would be a more appropriate term.

It's almost exactly as though the designer of these systems is a mindless automaton, simply obeying the natural laws of chemistry and physics and working without a plan!

The researchers have completed the largest study of UK baby microbiomes to date, carrying out whole genome sequencing to analyse stool samples from 1,288 healthy infants, all under one month old from the UK Baby Biome Study^1.1.

Colorized image of a colony of Actinobacillus actinomycetemcomitans

Derren Ready/Wellcome Images
CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Shedding Light on How Oral Bacteria Can Aggravate Rheumatoid Arthritis｜Tokyo Medical and Dental University, National University Corporation

Not content with the suffering that gum disease and dental caries cause, creationism's divine malevolence used at least one of the pathogens behind those problems to increase suffering a little more by aggrevating rhuematoid arthritis.

That's the inevitable conclusion honest creationist, who rejects the notion of evolution in which pathogenic parasites evolve naturally without intent, malevolent, benign or indifferent, should be drawing from the evidence from a Tokyo Medical and Dental University team of researchers led by Tokuju Okano and Toshihiko Suzuki of the Department of Bacterial Pathogenesis recently published in the International Journal of Oral Science.

This is not the first instance of creationism's divine malevolence multi-tasking its pathogens: in 2017 a team of researchers from The Chinese University of Hong Kong found a link between five oral bacteria, Peptostreptococcus stomatis, Streptococcus anginosus, Parvimonas micra, Slackia exigua and Dialister pneumosintes and the incidence of stomach and eosphageal cancer.

The oral bacterium which has been found to be aggrevating rheumatoid arthritis is Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans.

Refuting Creationism - Selfish Genes Evolved Cooperative Alliances

Fish swimming past coral and marine sponge. The researchers are currently using the proposed framework to investigate microbes inside marine sponges.

Researchers create new framework to help understand how microbial communities emerge - Swansea University

One of the lines of attack against the science of evolutionary biology is the lie that Richard Dawkins was advocating selfishness with his seminal book, The Selfish Gene, so 'proving' that rejection of the Christian god as the explanation for biodiversity is because 'Evolutionists' just want to sin.

It is, of course, like other creationist attacks on science, utterly devoid of any factual basis and reflects badly both on those who seek to fool their target dupes with it and on their dupes who eagerly believe them in order to justify a pretense of moral superiority.

In fact, natural selection and differential success of different alleles within a selective environment is devoid of any moral contents because it is devoid of intelligent input and genes are passive in the process. In Dawkin’s analogy, the result is as though genes behave selfishly, not that they make moral decisions or have the ability to choose which environmental selectors act on them.

One of the predictable outcomes of this gene-centred approach is that in a competition, the result which suits all competitors is cooperation since in a cooperative alliance, all the genes are winners, just as with a human group, a cooperative group is invariably more successful than a group of competing individuals in perpetual conflict.

Malevolent Design - How A Human Mouth Bacterium Is 'Designed' For Super-Fast Proliferation

Open Wide: Human Mouth Bacteria Reproduce through Rare Form of Cell Division | Marine Biological Laboratory

Cellular elongation at the tips of the filamentous bacteria Corynebacterium matruchotii.

Credit: Chimileski et al (2024).

Most cells, either single-celled organisms like bacteria or the eukaryote cells of multicellular organisms, reproduce by simple division into two daughter cells. Under favourable conditions, this means a cell can produce a population of descendants that grows exponentially 1 &rightarrow; 2 &rightarrow; 4 &rightarrow; 8 &rightarrow; 16 &rightarrow; 32&rightarrow;64 … etc. (population = 2ⁿ; where n= the number of generations)

But the trick a bacterium, Corynebacterium matruchotii, that is only found in the human mouth uses is to divide into multiple new cells at each generation. For example, assuming it splits into 10 daughter cell at each generation, its growth rate from a single founder cell will be 1 &rightarrow; 10 &rightarrow; 100 &rightarrow; 1000 &rightarrow; 10,000 &rightarrow; 100,000 &rightarrow; 1,000,000 … etc., (population = 10ⁿ). But scientists have found it can do better than that, producing up to 14 new cells at each generation.

In 6 generations in favourable conditions, Corynebacterium matruchotii can produce 1 million or more offspring, against an 'ordinary' bacteria's 64, so rapidly out-pacing any other bacteria. C. matruchotii is an essential component of the plaque that quickly develops on teeth. It appears to have no other known function.

In some ways, C. matruchotii behaves more like fungal hyphae, growing at the tip to produce a long thin filament. It is this filament that then simply splits up into small sections, each of which becomes a new cell.

The filamentous bacteria C. matruchotii splitting into multiple cells at once, a rare kind of cell division called multiple fission.

Credit: Scott Chimileski, MBL

In 2020 a team of researchers showed how plaque is a highly structured and organised colony of different microorganisms which almost seems to be designed to allow Streptococcus mutans to get on with its job of dissolving the tooth enamel and causing caries. Creationists dogma insists that anything with a complex, organised structure must be intelligently designed because, so they assert, complexity and order can’t arise from disorder without intelligent intervention.

This latest discovery shows how the beginnings of this organised colony are established very quickly.

Creationism Refuted - A Marine Relative of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Shares 80% Of Its Genome

A new species of bacterium, related to Mycobacterium tuberculosis has been found living in a sponge on the Great Barrier Reef.

TB under the sea: A marine sponge microbe provides insights into the evolution of tuberculosis | Doherty Website

Tell a creationists that humans and chimpanzees have 98% of their genomes in common, and they'll tell you this doesn't prove common origins or 'macro-evolution', but show them evidence that two bacteria have evolved from a common ancestor because they have 80% of their genome in common and they'll tell you this doesn't mean they've evolved because they are both still 'bacteria kind'.

So, why doesn't 98% commonality mean humans and chimpanzees are both still 'ape kind'?

But the evidence that the two bacteria, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and the newly-discovered M. spongiae is compelling, and gives a clue as to the origins of M. tuberculosis, one of the most deadly pathogenic bacteria, possibly from marine origins.

Malevolent Designer News - The Sneaky Way Chlamydia Is Designed To Get Round The 'Problem' of Antibiotics

Chlamydia doesn’t always cause symptoms, but when it does, these are some of the most common.

Everyday Health

Chlamydia Can Settle in the Intestine -

Chlamydia is a sexually-transmitted bacterial infection in which the bacteria are passed to a new victim during sexual intercourse. It caused few or no symptoms to begin with - usually nothing worse than mild itching - but if left untreated it can cause infertility and sometimes cancer. Fortunately, it can be treated successfully with antibiotics.

However, it is not unusual for people who have been successfully treated to develop a new infection with exactly the same strain as the previous infection, suggesting that the bacteria had somehow survived the antibiotic treatment although symptoms had disappeared, and traces of the bacteria had gone.

Researchers have now shown that chlamydia can take up residence in the gut where it can survive for some considerable time and develop increasing resistance to antibiotics with each course of treatment. The mechanism of this increasing resistance is a classic example of evolution as the antibiotic acts as an environmental selector which removes the non-resistant bacteria from the population gene pool, leaving the resistant form to become dominant in the gene pool.

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