Jessica Umanzor

English 21003

11/13/18

Professor Sidibe

RadioLab: Infective Heredity

A classic example of Darwin’s theory of evolution that has been taught in many classrooms is the peppered moth from England. Originally, the peppered moths were white and lived on the surrounding white trunked trees, which protected them against predation. However, the tree trunks color changes because of industrialization. The black pollution that was produced from factories blanketed the trees and they turned black. The moths were not able to camouflage anymore so through evolution, the moths turned black as a result of incremental mutation. The difference is that it has recently come to light that that is not how it had occurred, and in fact infective heredity took play.

Apparently it did not take generations for the moths to turn black, within its genome a 2000 stretch of DNA code, suddenly jumped into somewhere, and they turned from white to black in a day. For the purpose of survival the moths genes were able to activate this mutation instantly which then changes the whole though process on how the theory of evolution actually works. This is all a result of the infective heredity, which claims that once life began with a small primitive collection of cells, like a commune. These cells are exchanging chemicals that then change genes in a short period of time instead of years of evolution. This is done through their cell membranes, which at this primitive state must have been more porous than what it currently is. Cell membranes will leak some genes and another cell can absorb it, eventually it happens with all the cells in the system. These are non sophisticated organisms, so organelles are not containing this genetic info within their individual cell, therefore this gene swapping is not intentional. So within the first billion years of life infective heredity is how information was moved about and then evolution came into the picture.

Eventually, 3 billion years ago, a bacterium refused to share and maybe kept its membrane from leaking and being porous. They would have had the first semipermeable membrane which stopped this constant random change of DNA and eventually all other bacterium would follow pursuit, starting Darwinism. Carl Woese, most popularly known for defining Archaea in taxonomy, was the one to make this discovery and scramble all of our previous teaching on evolutionary Darwinism. Infective heredity is actually still happening today in our bodies and in life, which can explain the reason why antibiotic resistant is so difficult to fight. Once one bacterium is able to swap DNA with another bacterium and in an instant that individual is resistant to penicillin. This is the way we are have been affected by visits from other genes, which is usually by viral DNA (8% of our genome) and part of it is nothing and the other is actually making functions.

In reality we are more than who we believed to originally be, having a life form that contains a mosaic of genetic material from the world that surrounds us. Infectious heredity has given us the ability to evolve in a form that could never been conceived. Our individuality is no longer a result of this long time frame of change in fact it changes everyday, and we don’t even know how.