Roland G. Roberts, Bugs Split to Attack and Gamble to Survive…
“ Increasingly, however, we're appreciating that there are many intrinsic advantages to diversity, and nature can readily exploit this by using stochastic mechanisms to program populations of organisms to vary despite genetic and environmental uniformity. ”
Roland G. Roberts, Bugs Split to Attack and Gamble to Survive…
“ Crucially, when the heterogeneous traits involved are drug tolerance and virulence, then unfortunate clinical consequences may arise from the peculiar confluence of two facts—that expression of virulence proteins is expensive enough to slow cellular growth and that slow cellular growth helps bacteria to weather the presence of antibiotics. ”
Roland G. Roberts, Bugs Split to Attack and Gamble to Survive…
“ The monkey with the pole is lagging behind as usual and watches his nine brothers drown in the distance. When the flood abates, he walks on, finds a mate, and eventually passes the pole on to one of his ten identical children.Bacterial populations grow rapidly and asexually, generating millions of genetically identical progeny. Traditionally, it has been assumed that if these bugs are placed in a uniform environment, then they'll behave identically—nature and nurture are invariant, so there is neither motivation nor mechanism for diversity. ”
