Ashley Ramos

Aisha Sidibe

English 21003

31 October 2018

 

Radiolab Podcast: Infective Heredity

Before starting to listen to the podcast my first thought was, this will be about the heredity of humans but I was completely wrong. They started to talk about a butterfly who had evolved in the next generation born as a black butterfly but in the previous generation the butterflies would not blend in with their environment but then there was an infective change in the heredity of the butterfly causing it to turn black due to the ashes which made the trees black. I found this podcast very interesting because they speakers question things we thought we already knew. They added interesting sound effects and music to set a mood which very much made the topics they spoke about each different from each other. By adding jokes they always have the audience hooked to what they talk about, they never make the podcast uninteresting. The thesis/topic they were going to talk about was very clear and stated in the beginning. They started off with a story which caught my attention , a simple butterfly evolving in the blink of an eye. Evolution is quicker than we believed, mutations are happening every second which can be passed over to completely different species.

This topic is important because Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was in the past, we are seeing many changes today in evolution which is causing the sharing of heredity genes. They then talked about a bacterium which was known to be the “ predicted primitive Bill Gates by 3 billion years” who was selfish and did not want to share his DNA. This would have caused a species to lose a gene in which was necessary for survival. They then talked about how bacteria is figuring out how to share itself and teach its neighbors to react the same way the negative bacteria would be acting.. Someone in the hospital who has strep throat may pass their bacteria which is immune to penicillin. When received in another person their new bad bacteria will teach old bacteria to fight the same way causing all the bacteria to be immune to penicillin.

It is important to the world at large because evolution can happen faster than we thought. The thought of evolution needs to be updated according to some scientist. He believed that Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution instead of being celebrated should have been a day of rage because his theory was not supported in our time period. Busted bacteria was possessing the DNA causing the sharing of mutations. Due to the mutations in which the baterias become immune to antibiotics it has become a global health crisis. It is a crisis because it is killing many people just because the antibiotics can not do their jobs, the DNA is coming into us sideways causing a 8% in viral DNA has coming  into us sideways. This becomes harmful to us causing thousands and thousands deaths a year.