If bacteria can evolve resistance to antibiotics, surely that means unguided evolution can do…pretty much anything. That’s a challenge we often get — believe it or not. A variation is that evolution is critical to understanding the development of bacterial antibiotic resistance. Thus, doubting Darwinian theory is a threat to the public health. Even raising the topic of intelligent design imperils life and limb. ID proponents basically want everyone to get sick and die.
I exaggerate, but only a little. As The Guardian newspaper put it:
It is critical that the voting public have a clear understanding of evolution. Adaptation by natural selection, the primary mechanism of evolution, underpins a raft of current social concerns such as antibiotic resistance, the impact of climate change and the relationship between genes and environment. So why, despite formal scientific education, does intelligent design remain so intuitively plausible and evolution so intuitively opaque? And what can we do about it?
In other words, what we are dealing with here is another icon of evolution, in biologist Jonathan Wells’s phrase. Well, what about these argument?
We’ll have a chance to discuss the subject in detail today when Discovery Institute premieres the latest in our delightful “Long Story Short” series of animations. Join us here at 6 pm Pacific time for “ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE & BACTERIAL EVOLUTION — WHAT’S THE REAL STORY?” The video event, which requires no registration, will include a live chat with the creator of the series, “Long Story,” and Discovery Institute science staff.