wow!!!!

As journalist Carl Zimmer reported not long ago in the New York Times, “Wired Bacteria Form Nature’s Power Grid: ‘We Have an Electric Planet.’” Electroactive bacteria were running current through “wires” long before humans discovered electricity. Now that is worthy of note and analysis. How did they learn this very sophisticated trick?

In a tweet, Zimmer did not hide his amazement, admitting that that the “discovery that microbes build electric wires all over the world is mind-blowing.” Though an outspoken advocate of unguided Darwinian evolution, Zimmer in his article did not explain how bacteria might have gotten that ability by evolutionary means.

Zimmer isn’t the only one to confess his astonishment. Electroactive bacteria were unknown until 1993, when Derek Lovley at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst discovered and described Geobacter metallireducens. As Lovley told New Scientist in 2010:

They grow biological wires to share energy in the form of electrons…. I think it’s probably one of the most surprising things I’ve seen working in microbiology. [Emphasis added.]



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