Undeniable by Bill Nye Page B

from the Greek word for eating. Phages eat the insides out of bacteria.) In other words, even bacteria, these relatively uncomplicated single-celled organisms, have great difficulties with phage viruses, whose sole function in life, or along the border of life, is to hijack a bacterium’s metabolism and use it to make copies of themselves.
    A striking feature of phages is how specific they are. That is to say, a specific phage only attacks a specific type of bacterium. The surface of the phage identifies and sticks to a specific protein on the specific bacterium. The main defense a bacterium has against a phage attack is to somehow modify or reconfigure the protein pattern on its outer membrane. Now, individuals cannot change themselves, as such. Instead, their descendants, their offspring, can have modifications as their DNA is replicated. Random changes may or may not help them resist a phage. Keep in mind that we’re talking about bacteria. They may not change very quickly, from one generation to the next. But they reproduce like crazy, doubling over just the course of a few hours for most species, so bacteria produce almost uncountable numbers of descendants. In those lots are bound to be new configurations of imperfectly copied genes, some of which will have the ability to resist or just not be identified by phages that could have killed their ancestors.
    It is this fast replication of bacteria, viruses, and other not-too-complicated parasites that can cause us big organisms trouble. The germs are out there reproducing and chancing upon ideal protein-pattern-attachment genes, which are well suited to infecting us. Meanwhile, big organisms like you, me, and redwood trees cannot reproduce over the course of a few hours. It takes redwood trees centuries. It takes us months and months, then years more to get ready to do it again. So to stay in the evolutionary game, we, and especially our ancestors, have (had) to come up with a different scheme, or we would never have been able to keep up with all the phagelike viruses out there all set to take our cell metabolism and turn it against us. Put more accurately, our distant ancestors did indeed come up with a different scheme; otherwise you and I wouldn’t be here to ponder the question(s).
    The key to fighting germs and parasites seems to be sex. At one level, this may bring you down. All the lipstick, high heels, hair products, salary seeking, sports cars, and weightlifting seem to be a result of germs. But then, so are art, and music, and good cooking. By having sex, organisms like dandelions, sea jellies, perch, parakeets, and termites can stay ahead in the game of life just enough to have offspring that succeed in producing more offspring in a subsequent season.
    By relatively recent tradition, this is called the Theory of the Red Queen. The charming sobriquet comes from the fictional Alice of Lewis Carroll’s books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass . In this story, Alice has an encounter with the Red Queen. (By many accounts, Mr. Carroll smoked some form of marijuana from time to time, and perhaps enjoyed a glass of wine or two.) Somehow the Red Queen is a sort of hybrid chess piece/person, who slides along, on something akin to a Chess Board of Life. So when one is with the Red Queen, her whole world is moving … somehow. So, Alice is constrained to run like crazy to have a conversation. This is the Red Queen’s day at the office or day at court. Alice remarks, “Where I come from, if you run all day, you end up somewhere else.” The Red Queen, as she raises her royal-chess-piece-person eyebrows, remarks, “Why, that seems like a very slow sort of country. Here it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”
    Apparently, the process of evolution that you and I, and every other living thing on Earth, are caught up in is like the land or country of the Red Queen. In evolution, we