The Genesis of Germs

"It’s not my favourite book, it’s just a book I found interesting. It was published in 2007, almost 350 years after Hooke. It’s 148 years since the first edition of The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Here you have a person studying the organisms that most obviously represent a history of evolution, and yet, amazingly, the idea of microbes appeals to him as a creationist. I find this very, very amusing because it’s shocking – and the author apparently is unaware of the irony. We currently have 14 candidates in the Republican Party running for president of the United States. Not one of them will be able to stand up in front of a television audience in the United States and say, “I believe in evolution” and win the nomination. We still have books published that appeal to a creationist worldview, that are supposedly written by scientists. That’s just mind-boggling to me. It’s amazing that this book is bought and sold – and it sells very well. “Microbes shaped our planet in ways we don’t even think about.” Once a religious worldview is embedded to displace scientific thought, it’s very difficult, even in children, to present data that changes that worldview. The idea that we should be discussing evolution as a ‘theory’ is fundamentally flawed. The word ‘theory’ is used in the vernacular, at least in the US, as something that is not well known. So we say there is a ‘Law’ of gravity — we don’t say there is a ‘theory’ of gravity. But if you ask a physicist what causes gravity – what is the actual force due to? — they really don’t know. It’s an empirical phenomenon. “Once a religious worldview is embedded to displace scientific thought, it’s very difficult, even in children, to present data that changes that worldview” If you say ‘Well, we don’t say there’s a ‘Law’ of evolution, do we really know that organisms have evolved from each other? The answer is ‘Yes’. There are changes and variations in organisms and one of the mechanisms for evolutionary processes is variation followed by selection — that’s the Darwinian mechanism — that process is demonstrable. It’s very, very easily shown with microbes. In fact, one of the very best ways we can prove evolution works as a process is because we can select for natural mutations in E.coli generations that have gone on for years. My colleague Rich Lenski has done exactly that at Michigan State University. He has 30 years of continuous cultures of Escherichia coli, and they’ve evolved . It is not possible to reconcile the demonstrable evidence with a religious worldview of creationism. It’s possible. I sometimes have to push back against the creationists in the State of New Jersey when we teach high school biology teachers about how to teach evolution. Amazing isn’t it? This state is very educated — but the religious world-view can still impact the education of our children in public schools."