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Observing Evolution Over 40,000 Generations
Last year we discussed the work of Richard Lenski, who has been breeding E. coli for 21 years in a laboratory in Michigan. Then, the news was that Lenski's lab had caught direct, reproducible evidence of a genetic mutation with functional consequences for an organism. Now Lenski's lab has published in Nature a major study comparing adaptive and random genetic changes in 40,000 generations of E. coli (abstract here). "Early changes in the bacteria appeared to be largely adaptive, helping them be more successful in their environment. 'The genome was evolving along at a surprisingly constant rate, even as the adaptation of the bacteria slowed down,' [Lenski] noted. 'But then suddenly the mutation rate jumped way up, and a new dynamic relationship was established.' By generation 20,000, for example, the group found that some 45 genetic mutations had occurred, but 6,000 generations later a genetic mutation in the metabolism arose and sparked a rapid increase in the number of mutations so that by generation 40,000, some 653 mutations had occurred. Unlike the earlier changes, many of these later mutations appeared to be more random and neutral. The long-awaited findings show that calculating rates and types of evolutionary change may be even more difficult to do without a rich data set."
god did it
653 mutations? 1305 missing gaps! Proof of god! Hallelulja!
Sorry, they're saving the next Nobel Prize in Medicine for Obama...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Mmmm, breaded mudskipper.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
To use an analogy, let's compare the evidence to a murder trial:
Wait, can you put that in a filesystem developer analogy?
Harald
*kisses karma goodbye*
My issue in general here (yes, I am a creationist...I'm a delusional moron, I know) is that while 40,000 generations of E. Coli did show some form of usable mutation, it doesn't account for many other inconsistencies with evolution as the be-all and end-all for how we got where we were. My biggest issue is that, to my knowledge, there has never been a documented observance of life coming from non-life.
But the one more relevant to your point about this disproving the concept of irreducible complexity has problems of its own. Yes, there was indeed an evolution of the bacteria being able to process citrate. However, that's a smaller step than, say, if E. Coli bacteria started to be able to perform photosynthesis, or vice versa. There are other extremely wide gaps (asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction, live birth vs. egg laying, visual and audible processing, etc. etc.) that are still a challenge for gradual, incremental evolution to explain. The most immediately memorable example of this for me is the bombardier beetle. The system it's got in place to ward off predators relies on a series of chemicals and an expulsion system that incremental evolution can't account for. If any of those pieces evolved improperly, there would be no fossil record because the beetle would have a Fourth-of-July special internally before it ever got to reproduce.
I'm not one of those crazed creationists who believe that everything we see today is exactly how God created it, but full-blown, evolved-over-billions-of-years-from-a-singularity-filled-with-energy evolution is still a challenge for me to accept. If that makes me $DEROGATORY_COMMENT, well, I already said goodbye to my karma points.