(April 9, 2016 at 10:09 pm)TheRocketSurgeon Wrote: The evolution of bacteria under the fierce Natural Selection pressures imposed by our antibiotics has become a major issue in hospitals, as resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus (among others) have become effectively immune to anything we can throw at them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicilli...cus_aureus
As you noted, viruses evolve quite rapidly, due to the relative simplicity of their genomes, but we understand their evolutionary pathways pretty well--that's what the numbers in the H1N1 (etc.) Influenza virus refer to. In fact, because the Flu virus evolves as it moves from its origin in birds to pigs to humans, we look at the genome of the virus that appears each year in order to get ahead of manufacturing a vaccine that will impact the human version when it emerges. Sometimes we get it partially wrong, as occurred a couple of years ago, and the companies must scramble to make enough of the "right" version. It's why you must get a new flu shot every year; the old one usually won't work on next year's version, because it will have evolved.
It's also one of the major reasons people still die of HIV, despite highly-effective antiviral medicines; the virus population "learns" (by the deaths of those that have the wrong genome to resist the medication, leaving only the resistant ones to breed) to resist the cocktail being taken by the patient.
So, isn't this good evidence of evolution? Doesn't it take the theory and put it into law? Or is that never possible? Rather, why is evolution still just a theory when we can see it now with super duper microscopes and such?
"I'm thick." - Me
