Is Evolution a Dangerous Idea? If so, why?

Are you aware of why the CERN was built ? It was because we had no measurements, no real data below the size of an quark.

When I first stepped out on to the trading floor, I could smell and see the money. Throughout my time at Barings I had been inching closer and closer to it, and in Singapore I was suddenly there. I'd been working in various back offices for almost six years, pushing paper money around, sorting out other people's problems. Now, on the trading floor, I could work with instant money--it was hanging in the air right in front of me, invisible but highly charged, just waiting to be earthed. As I watched the traders all screaming at each other in their red jackets, I imagined an electrical thunderstorm. There was lightning in the air, and all I had to do was give the right signals and it would charge through me as if I were a copper conductor.

** Essentially, we evolved, our souls did not.
So whether the human body was specially created or developed, we are required to hold as a matter of Catholic faith that the human soul is specially created; it did not evolve, and it is not inherited from our parents, as our bodies are.

See, you do care. Otherwise, you would not have stated your purported height . . . which we can neither prove nor disprove . . .but, which, I for one, tends to disbelieve.

He left the group because the theatre and rehearsals were excuses to engage in adultery.

A nip into the confessional once a month would soon clear any slates clean and ready for the next month.

Not indignant . . .bored to tears by your persistence which makes you appear more petty and less well educated by the minute.

Listen, sluggo, I have brought wrath upon my head many times by stating what a risk to life, limb and hymen consenting to have dinner with a right wing man is--

Nori is an extremely common ingredient in Japanese cuisine, used to garnish dishes and wrap sushi. And when hungry diners wolfed down morsels of these algae, some of them also swallowed marine bacteria. Suddenly, this exotic species was thrust among our own gut residents. As the unlikely partners mingled, they traded genes, including those that allow them to break down the carbohydrates of their marine meals. The gut bacteria suddenly gained the ability to exploit an extra source of energy and those that retained their genetic loans prospered.

This incredible genetic voyage from sea to land was charted by Jan-Hendrik Hehemann from the University of Victoria. Hehemann was originally on the hunt for genes that could help bacteria to digest the unique carbohydrates of seaweed, such as porphyran. He had no idea where this quest would eventually lead. Mirjam Czjzek, one of the study leaders, said, “The link to the Japanese human gut bacteria was just a very lucky, opportunistic hit that we clearly had no idea about before starting our project. Like so often in science, chance is a good collaborative fellow!”

For now, it’s not clear how long these marine genes have been living inside the bowels of the Japanese. People might only gain the genes after eating lots and lots of sushi but Hehemann has some evidence that they could be passed down from parent to child. One of the people he studied was an unweaned baby girl, who had clearly never eaten a mouthful of sushi in her life. And yet, her gut bacteria had a porphyranase gene, just as her mother’s did. We already known that mums can pass on their microbiomes to their children, so if mummy’s gut bacteria can break down seaweed carbs, then baby’s bugs should also be able to.

Michel also says that for these genes to become permanent fixtures of the B.plebeius repertoire, the bacterium would have needed a strong evolutionary pressure to keep them. “Daily access to ingested seaweeds as a carbon source” would have provided such a pressure. My weekly nibbles on highly sterile pieces of sushi probably wouldn’t.

That’s one question down; there are many to go. How did the advent of agriculture or cooking affect this genetic bonanza? How is the Western style of hyper-hygienic, processed and mass-produced food doing so now? As different styles of cuisines spread all over the globe, will our bacterial passengers also become more genetically uniform?

The only way to get more answers is to accelerate our efforts to sequence different gut microbiomes. Let’s take a look at those of other human populations, including hunter-gatherers. Let’s peer into fossilised or mummified stool samples left behind by our ancestors. Let’s look inside the intestines of our closest relatives, the great apes. These investigations will tell us more about the intestinal genetic trade that has surely played a big role in our evolution.

Rob Knight, a microbiome researcher from the University of Colorado, agrees. “This result reinforces the need to conduct a broad and culturally diverse survey of who harbours what microbes. The key to understanding obesity or IBD might well be in genes or microbes acquired under circumstances very different to those we experience in Western society.”

The key to understanding obesity or IBD might well be in genes or microbes acquired under circumstances very different to those we experience in Western society.”