It seems clear that plasmids are designed features of bacteria that enable adaptation to new food sources or the degradation of toxins. The details of just how they do this remains to be elucidated. The results so far clearly suggest that these adaptations did not come about by chance mutations, but by some designed mechanism. This mechanism might be analogous to the way that vertebrates rapidly generate novel effective antibodies with hypermutation in B-cell maturation, which does not lend credibility to the grand scheme of neo-Darwinian evolution.
11 Further research will, I expect, show that there is a sophisticated, irreducibly complex, molecular system involved in plasmid-based adaptationthe evidence strongly suggests that such a system exists. This system will once again, as the black box becomes illuminated, speak of intelligent creation, not chance. Understanding this adaptation system could well lead to a breakthrough in disease control, because specific inhibitors of the adaptation machinery could protect antibiotics from the development of plasmid-based resistance in the target pathogenic microbes.
