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Lesigner Girl Profile
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posticon But it's still bacteria!


Nov 21, 2009 edit: I misspoke in this post when I originally made it. Below, where I state that bacteria is a kingdom and there are only three, I actually meant "domain", which only furthers my point. </edit>


How many times have we heard this argument, in response to explanations of bacteria evolving? Yes, it's still bacteria. But bacteria is a kingdom, which is comprised of at least several million different species.

quote:

How Many Species of Bacteria Are There?

Currently, estimates of the total number of species of bacteria range from about 10 million to a billion, but these estimates are tentative, and may be off by many orders of magnitude. By comparison, there are probably between 10 and 30 million species of animals, the vast majority of them insects. The number of scientifically recognized species of animals is about 1,250,000. There are almost 300,000 recognized species of plants.


Life
Domain
Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

There are only three kingdoms in our current classifications: archaea, bacteria, and eucharya. By exclaiming, "But it's still bacteria!" it's no different than arguing, "But it's still eucharya!" when discussing the relationship between humans and mold, because humans and mold are both "still eucharya".

quote:

Phylogenetic tree showing the diversity of bacteria, compared to other organisms. Eukaryotes are colored red, archaea green and bacteria blue.


[See diagram here]


Anyone who looks at even 10 different species of bacteria can see how diverse they are from species to species. One species of bacteria can be so different from another species of bacteria, in fact, that the differences between humans and bonobos are so small in comparison.

Last edited by Lesigner Girl, 11/21/2009, 4:54 pm


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10/11/2009, 1:15 pm Link to this post Send e-mail to   Send PM to Blog
 
Morwen Oronor Profile
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Re: But it's still bacteria!


And the evolution of bacteria is so obvious that you have to be blind (or not want to see) to ignore it.
Here's why'
When penicillin was first discovered it was heralded as the biggest breakthrough in the fight against disease that the world had ever seen. And from the point of view of humans, who still, despite evidence to the contrary believe that they are the zenith of evolution, it was a fight that they were going to win because the fungus that had killed the bacteria was going to ensure that their children never again got life-threatening infections.
But what they didn't know and what we do know now is that bacteria are living things with the ability to change the way they work when faced with adversity, in exactly the same way humans do.
If something threatens your life, you find a way to protect your life against that thing. If someone is threatening you with a gun, you invent body armor so that you are impervious to the bullets that are shot with you from that gun.
This is what bacteria are doing now. Because we come at them with bigger and better antibiotics, they invent ways to defend themselves against the antibiotics to the point where we may be heading back to where we were before penicillin was invented, i.e. infections like the this one. MRSA.
Normally a staph infection would respond to some penicillin and be almost cured in 24 hours, but not anymore. If you get a simple skin infection and don't have it seen to fairly quickly, it could become a systemic infection and cause your death, why? Because the bacteria that cause staph infections have evolved mechanisms to fight the drugs we use against them.
10/11/2009, 11:13 pm Link to this post Send PM to Blog
 
Lesigner Girl Profile
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Re: But it's still bacteria!


I wouldn't say it works quite that way.

When a doctor gives you something for a bacterial infection, you're supposed to take it until the medicine is gone, to make sure all the bacteria are dead. Unfortunately, too many people stop taking the medicine as soon as their symptoms are gone, not realizing that it hasn't quite gotten all of the harmful bacteria yet. The survivors reproduce, and since many of them came into contact with the antibiotic but it wasn't enough to kill them, their offspring can be 'born' with an immunity to the antibiotic.

This is exactly how flu shots work, but with humans reaping the benefits. However, it isn't the human individual who evolves the immunity against the flu; it's the beneficial bacteria within the human that does this.

A flu shot is a small 'dose' of the virus we're trying to ward off. Beneficial bacteria within our bodies come into contact with this virus. Some bacteria die as a result, while others live because they were able to survive the virus. The survivors breed more bacteria, which inherit the same immunity to this virus as their parents had.

When someone gets sick as a result of taking a flu shot, it's because not enough of their bacteria was immune to that particular virus. When people are constantly sterilizing their environment, they are more prone to getting sick when exposed to germs, because the 'weak' bacteria have just as much chance of survival as the 'strong', and they take up valuable space that the 'strong' could otherwise be occupying.

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10/14/2009, 8:26 pm Link to this post Send e-mail to   Send PM to Blog
 
Morwen Oronor Profile
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Re: But it's still bacteria!


That was what I was trying to say except it didn't quite come out right.

You see this kind of immunity happening in the natural world.
We have a really huge problem with ants, the tiny kind that run around all summer gathering food that they take back to their nests to feed them through the winter, or something like that.
Our house appears to be built on top of one of their nests.
The only way to combat them is to poison their paths.. If you catch a line of them marching towards your window, you poison that area, and they move somewhere else.
Except we have to change the poison every year.
I don't like doing what people suggest, ie. putting down maize meal for them and then sitting back to watch them take the meal to their nest, they then eat it and literally explode, or so the myth goes.
I'd rather discourage them from coming into my house.
But every summer they come back in bigger and bigger numbers and then they die when then come into the house.
I don't know why they live outside the house but die when they come inside, so I like to keep them from coming into the house, hence the poison to discourage them coming to certain death, except that all the poisons I've tried over the years have stopped working.
I've run out of ideas now. Nothing works. And as I said i don't like the idea of killing them in their nests. I'm quite happy for them to live outside the house so it upsets me when I have to sweep them up like tea leaves, mountains of them every day.
Like a Holocaust.
Little living things learn new ways of coping, exactly the way big things like us do.

Last edited by Morwen Oronor, 10/15/2009, 12:11 am
10/15/2009, 12:09 am Link to this post Send PM to Blog
 
Lesigner Girl Profile
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Re: But it's still bacteria!


Maybe some of the ideas on this page will help.

When you consider how some babies are already being born with immunity to AIDS, it's not surprising that ants will develop immunity to poisons in just one or two generations.

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10/15/2009, 8:46 pm Link to this post Send e-mail to   Send PM to Blog
 
Morwen Oronor Profile
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Re: But it's still bacteria!


Thanks I have seen that website before and I've tried all of that.
The problem is not the live ants coming in but that they bring the bodies into the house when they collect their dead.
It's amazing, there are millions of dead bodies around the windows every morning.
Our town is built on top of a mound, these are a very serious problem everywhere. We have pest control people who come in and do their thing, which does stop them coming in, but it doesn't stop the funeral ceremonies.
I've put silicon on all the windows to seal them but they still come in, I think they're in the walls and when the pest guy tries to get rid of them, he succeeds in killing them and then the corpses land on my window sills.
It's not as bad as millions of live ones crawling everywhere but it's sill a nuisance.
10/15/2009, 11:26 pm Link to this post Send PM to Blog
 
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Re: But it's still bacteria!


But are you not making a specification to at least the genus level when you say bacteria Lesa? In doing that the kingdom of life argument would then become what is and isn't possible in the level set by the specification parameters of the initial statement.

For example: for decades people thought that evolution declared that man descended from a sponge but recent scientific evidence shows that at the phyla level this is just not possible (link).


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10/17/2009, 9:40 am Link to this post Send e-mail to   Send PM to Blog
 
Morwen Oronor Profile
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Re: But it's still bacteria!


That's interesting.
It would also be interesting to see other scientists' commentary on that.
10/17/2009, 10:29 am Link to this post Send PM to Blog
 
Lesigner Girl Profile
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Re: But it's still bacteria!


Rick, bacteria make up a whole kingdom, not just a genus. In the same way, we are in the same kingdom as dogs, rats, snakes, fish, birds.... Obviously, that doesn't fall into the argument of 'kinds'.

Last edited by Lesigner Girl, 11/4/2009, 6:41 pm


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Re: But it's still bacteria!


You had me wondering when you stated there were only 3 kingdoms but you then named the 3 Domains instead of the 6 Kingdoms. It is true that there was a old classification system that only had 3 Kingdoms but under that arrangement Bacteria falls in the kingdom of Protista as a Order or Family as I understand it.

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