1. Do bacterial species exist?

   Any of my friends or colleagues who have had the "pleasure" of talking about science with me for more than a few hours know that I am prepared, at the drop of a hat, to rant extensively about several standing debates in biology which I consider merely semantic. For instance:

   Q: Are viruses alive?

   A: Who CARES!? Viruses do what they do. Cellular organisms do something else. What difference does it make if we decide to allow our middle-schoolers to draw little dotted lines around animals, bacteria, and viruses? And I don't even want to hear the word "prion".

   I have a similar level of disdain for people who try to decide on a single definition for "species". Ultimately I am a pluralist: the definition should be tailored to the scientific question. Paleontologists, you have your morphological species concept, because what else do stony fossils allow? Are you studying speciation …

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2. Even pathogens hate a cheater

   I would like to apologize for the long delay since my last post. The excuse (I keep telling myself) is that, having already written too many computational articles, it was time to prove that I could write about biology too. Unfortunately I'm not nearly as good at reading the literature as I should be. Anyway, it's done. You can stop complaining now.

   One barrier to engineering bacteria for biofuel production or any other human endeavor is that evolutionary rates are scaled by population sizes and growth rates. For an organism with massive population sizes (trillions of individuals or more) and doubling times on the order of hours, evolution can occur quite quickly. Genetic variants within the population which are capable of growing faster will quickly take over. For an organism which is, for example, wasting a huge fraction of its energy producing your future gasoline, you can bet this months …

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