Bacteria
Bacteria have been iterating for 3.5 billion years straight - longer than any other replication system on Earth - by breaking every rule large organisms follow.
Bacteria have been iterating for 3.5 billion years straight - longer than any other replication system on Earth - by breaking every rule large organisms follow. They don't invest in individual quality. They don't protect their offspring. They don't plan for the future. They divide every 20 minutes, copying three million chemical letters with one error per billion, betting that speed and volume beat precision and care.
This is r-selection in its purest form: produce many, invest little, rely on iteration. In stable environments, bacteria clone proven designs faster than competitors can react. When conditions shift, most clones die - but a few random mutations survive, and those survivors inherit the Earth within hours. The entire population can pivot in a day because no individual bacterium matters.
But bacteria's real genius isn't cloning - it's horizontal gene transfer. They steal DNA from other bacteria, even different species, without waiting for reproduction. This is why antibiotic resistance spreads so fast: one bacterium solves the problem, and the solution propagates across the entire community horizontally, like open-source code. Large organisms inherit vertically from parents; bacteria share solutions laterally across the network. They've been running the world's most successful innovation platform for 3.5 billion years by treating genetic material as a commons, not a legacy.
Notable Traits of Bacteria
- Single-celled organisms
- Require cell membranes for survival
- Vulnerable to antibiotics that target cell walls
- Rapid reproduction
- Short lifespan
- High mutation rate
- Fast iteration
- Binary fission every 20 minutes
- One error per billion base pairs
- Horizontal gene transfer capability
- 3.5 billion years of continuous replication
Bacteria Appears in 4 Chapters
Bacteria exemplify how cellular life requires functional membranes to survive. Antibiotics like penicillin work by preventing proper cell wall construction, demonstrating that membranes are the difference between life and death.
Membrane Fundamentals →Bacteria represent r-selection strategy: many offspring, little investment each, relying on speed and volume. The startup parallel: iterate fast, fail frequently, bet that 1 in 10 experiments succeeds.
r-Selection Strategy →Single-celled organisms at the smallest endpoint of Kleiber's Law. The same 3/4 power metabolic scaling that applies to blue whales applies to bacteria - scale invariance across twelve orders of magnitude.
Metabolic Scaling →The central model for replication: dividing every 20 minutes with astonishing fidelity for 3.5 billion years. Invented horizontal gene transfer, allowing bacteria to acquire DNA from other species without inheritance - why antibiotic resistance spreads so quickly.
Replication & Gene Transfer →