Different in degree or kind: Egnor's take (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, October 14, 2016, 05:12 (2750 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You make it sound as if the millions of problems bacteria have solved are a simple choice between right and left. You know as well as I do that they have mastered virtually every environment, solving nearly every survival problem thrown at them.

David: Yes they have evolved into every extreme environment. As God created life, He may well have set them up to all types of survival

Look at this article about gene swapping to survive:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2108972-cheese-making-led-to-gene-swapping-orgy-of...

"A study of 165 of the diverse bacterial species present in cheeses has found that 130 of them – 80 per cent – have shared genes with other species. Altogether nearly 5000 genes have been swapped. The study does not reveal when this happened, but the process probably began when people started making cheeses, and continues to this day.
And if anything, this is probably an underestimate, Kevin Bonham of the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues think. Cheese not only contains many other species of bacteria, but also many fungi. There could be gene-swapping going on between fungi and bacteria, and between fungi.

"It has become clear that gene-swapping is much more common than we thought, especially among bacteria. “So if you think about it, it’s not that surprising,” says cheese microbiologist Tom Beresford of the Teagasc Food Research Centre in Fermoy, Ireland. “But I had never thought about whether it occurs in the cheese environment.”

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"These specialised microbes have evolved to thrive in cheese by, for instance, picking up new genes. “There’s been evolution going on for millennia,” says Paul Kindstedt of the University of Vermont in Burlington, who studies cheese and has also written about its history.

"Although the functions of most of the 5000 swapped genes are unknown, many are involved in scavenging iron. That makes perfect sense: one way animals try to limit bacterial growth is by depriving them of iron. Milk, for example, contains an antibacterial substance called lactoferrin that mops up any free iron.

Comment: Put in a new cheese making environment the bacteria adapt. Did God provide this ability?