These jobs are more impressive than being famous.

For bow ties, naturally.

By now, it's an almost entirely predictable routine: a celebrity takes a tour of the Alberta oilsands for a day or two and quickly harnesses apocalyptic rhetoric in press conferences to detail the experience. Chagrined industry spokespeople lash out. News coverage dissipates after a few days. Rinse and repeat.

"From an environmental point of view locally, it's astonishing and overwhelming."

Unlike humans, who need on average 20 years between generations, these small creatures only need about 20 minutes to foster offspring. This means that the bacterium can evolve some 500,000 times faster than us. This rapid rate offers the prime opportunity to explore some of the deeper mysteries and perhaps even offer mechanisms to best predict when evolution might happen to us.

Much of this debate wasn't scientific at all, but philosophical, which makes it about as bad a miscasting as Nicolas Cage in almost anything. And the irony of it all is that in one sense they are both playing for the same team. But Ken Ham organized a football game, invited his friends, and brought a tennis racket.