This is a burning question on my mind lately. As a microbiologist I've been taught that antibiotics exist for the medical profession to help treat infectious diseases, and oh yeah, for scientists to use in their experiments (for a plethora of reasons). Obviously antibiotic production didn't evolve for humans to take advantage of it....so why did it evolve?
Important things to keep in mind:
1. Antibiotics as they are used in medicine, agriculture, and aquaculture are at concentrations orders of magnitude higher than what would be produced naturally by the organisms in which their production evolved.
2. Bacteria (and other microbes) are known to exist in nature very differently than they do in the laboratory.
Bottom line:
The way(s) antibiotics affect bacteria in the lab may not be the way they affect bacteria in nature. More on this later...
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