There may be a lot of traits that exist for no good reason at all.
We know examples from the wild too. There are subterranean caves that have been completely closed off from the outside world for millions of years. And when people went into those caves and sampled bacteria that had never been in touch with human civilization, they found that these bacteria were resistant against multiple antibiotics. And some of these antibiotics are not natural molecules — they are molecules that occur only in the laboratory.
It could seem almost like these bacteria are clairvoyant, you know? Like they anticipated that at some point they would need to be resistant against antibiotics when humanity came along, right? But there’s a very mundane explanation that has to do with these latent kinds of traits that we identified in experiments in the lab. So these traits really exist out in nature. They’re not just artifacts of experiments.
- Interview with Andreas Wagner author of the new book Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture
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