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RE: Bugs in the News: Real-time imagery of bacteria grabbing DNA the same way Indiana Jones grabs Nazis
You just saw a bacteria reach about with a pilus and snag some potentially useful environmental DNA. How freaking cool is that?!
Amazingly cool!
Biochemistry is often like physics, in that you're imagining things happening instead of watching them. That video brings life into what was before just an intellectual understanding. It almost looks alien. It's like we cracked the atom and we're watching inside.
This is probably a very bad strategy for an individual bug, but it works out well for them as a population.
The Richard Dawkins in me wonders how that's possible 🤔
Well put.
It helps to think of the population as the organism, not the individual bug. If only 10% of the cells figure out how to avoid antibiotics, but they do it faster than cells from another organism, they're going to win. This is particularly nice for organisms that are (more or less) clonal.
Yes, if they're clonal, then the game-theoretical equations allow for group selection :)