> The novel aspect of these bacteria is that they apparently do the job 10x more efficiently than natural organisms.
This makes me wonder why this solution was not found by evolution directly.
This makes me wonder why this solution was not found by evolution directly.
Which is also the answer to everybody else wondering about what happens if this gets into the biosphere. Well, have you ever been walking in a relatively natural forest area and come across the sad sight of a natural clearing being totally dominated by wild broccoli plants? No, you never have, because broccoli is completely incapable of outcompeting any natural plant. Broccoli's genes put way too much energy into producing that big beautiful edible bit that all of its competition puts into offense and defense. Similarly, the answer to the question of what happens to bacteria that pours its energy into producing alcohol while its competition is pouring its energy into producing offspring is that if you blink, you'll miss the death of the alcohol-producing bacteria. They're not going to take over the ecosystem. In energy terms you probably stand a better chance of seeing broccoli sweep the meadows of the world than having this bacteria survive in the wild.
(And when I say broccoli, I mean something like what you'd buy in the store. Not merely a rapid reversion to its historical ancestor, which could actually happen, but actual proper broccoli.)
http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-news/5-invasive-species-you-should...
You don't seem to understand natural selection. The idea of evolution producing something that an organism "needs" is akin to saying that God decided that the organism "needed" it and changed its genes.
The theory of natural selection is a completely passive process. For every generation of an organism, the genes are naturally randomized, producing various expressions of genes, and once there is selecting event, those that are not selected for will go extinct. That's what natural selection means. The idea that a giraffe "needed" a long neck is preposterous because it implies that the animal willed itself to have a longer neck. Instead, the giraffe's ancestors had a variable length neck, but given its particular circumstances, those with longer necks survived, and passed those genes on.
So there very well might be naturally occurring bacteria that produce 10x efficiently, but they haven't been selected for, yet.
I'm pretty sure he understands it fine, and is just using shorthand that makes it easier to describe.
There exists no approximation of a fitness function in nature that selects for this output because it's not efficient for survival, until we come along and create custom environments and select for survival based on energy output.
(I've decided which is the most annoying: Meta-pedants like me.)
I suppose I could #include<evolution_isnt_anthropomorphic> up front and then carry on.
In nature we see a lot of "good enough" because there are other costs and higher-priority bottlenecks.
> Evolutionary changes occur by random mutation and, in sexual reproduction, by random genetic mixing
The genetic changes of evolution are due to random mutation, but the ones that don't survive are not "evolution". Evolution is the subset of random mutations that increase reproduction/survival rates. If, at some point, a chimp was born with two heads, we wouldn't say that "chimps evolved to have two heads" because that two-headed chimp didn't pass on its genes. We'd say "a chimp randomly had two heads one time" and wouldn't bring it up in a discussion of evolution at all.
> governed by survival, but it's not directed by survival
To be directed by something does not always imply intentionality. Of course the most common usage of "direct" indicates something intentional, but that wasn't how I meant it. I meant "direct" in the sense that a particular landscape will direct the course of a river.