What a lost opportunity! Darwin could have found wonderful experimental material for the study of evolution in populations of microbes (where reproduction time is measured in minutes) [...] Pasteur and his successors in microbiology could have avoided decades of confused reasoning around variation in bacteria. The biotechnology revolution could have begun a few decades earlier (Lederberg, 1998; Kolter and Maloy, 2012)..
Microbial genomes are increasingly being sequenced. By comparing microbial genomes from different infections, we can infer phylogenies and date divergence events in phylogeny. The way microbes spread leaves traces in their genomes. The origins of certain pathogens may be recent (HIV, Ebola).
