Antibiotics, such as penicillin, are drugs that kill or prevent the growth of bacteria. when antibiotics were first discovered, they seemed to represent a miracle cure for human diseases like pneumonia, typhoid, bubonic plague, and gonorrhea. today there are resistant strains of bacteria that cannot be killed by antibiotics. can you pick out the statements that accurately describe the development of antibiotic resistance? antibiotic resistance is not an example of natural selection. mutations may be a source of variation in any population of bacteria. when antibiotics are used at first, all the disease-causing bacteria are killed. there is always variation in a population and might include resistant bacteria. bacteria that are not initially killed by the antibiotic, reproduce passing the resistance on to offspring.