i'm an evolutionary biologist. that's my job. i study the evolution of bacteria. usually when people ask, i tell them that i study how bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics, or why some bacteria cause disease and others don't. and it's true, more or less.

but the question i'm really interested in is: what's the difference between an organism and a bag of genes? individual organisms as we know them are not so much independent, indivisible entities as they are communities of genes that work together to create this thing, a body, in such a way that copies of these genes are more likely to be present in future generations.

this was the basic idea of richard dawkins' the selfish gene, the book that got me started onto evolution in the first place. if you haven't read it, i'd recommend it. it's very readable for nonbiologists (as i was when i first read it), but it deals with real scientific issues in a clear and sensible way.

the reason i work with bacteria is because very often the genes for antibiotic resistance, or the genes specifically involved in causing disease, are transmitted infectiously from one bacterium to the next by things that are basically viruses. it'd be like getting a cold that, in addition to making you sick, lets you breathe underwater and makes you impervious to bullets. wierd, huh?

so, i'm trying to understand why this is. meaning, why would antibiotic resistance and disease genes that can be infectiously transmitted among bacteria outcompete variants of these genes that are not infectiously transmitted? and why is it these types of genes and not others that behave in this way?

my hope is that understanding this wierd phenomenon in bacterial genetics will help us eventually to understand what it is that, most of the time, keeps organisms together working as an apparently unified whole, but sometimes breaks down in a way where it's hard to tell where one organism stops and the next begins.

so there you go. if you're interested, more technical details about what i do can be found on my professional page.