This is close to a week old now, and I’m not entirely sure how I missed it.
The Daily Kos, is reporting that New Scientist is reporting that Richard Lenski has observed, tested and confirmed the evolution of Citrate digestion in a laboratory culture of e. coli. It’s a pretty interesting read (if a little smug,) and worth your time.
Of course, this isn’t an entirely new development; evolution has been observed in the lab (and the wild) countless times. What’s interesting this time is how a gradual accumulation of mutations eventually led to a radical increase in fitness in a reproducible way. It’s a really powerful argument in favour of slow, gradual evolution, rather than the marco-mutations-only caricature the creationists like to throw about.
Don’t expect this to convince the denialists though; the mutation in question took tens of thousands of generations to occur, so they’re bound to claim that at a rate of one beneficial mutation every fourty thousand generations, we’d still be flapping around in the mud. Oh, and expect to hear the the usual chorus: since Lenski is intelligent, this is clearly a case of intelligent design.
5 Comments
Leave a comment
Site Design :
The fact still remains that even if evolution is proven, we cannot fully explain where the materials for life originated in the first place.
Frank,
Do we need to prove the origin of materials to prove the existence of evolution? Obviously not. We don’t have proof of the origin of gravitation but we certainly use its affects every day. You don’t need to prove everything before you can make hypothesis from observations*. If that was the case, then science would not be able to move forward. There’s no blind leap of faith being used here, it’s a series of conclusions derived from observed processes. At no point is any scientist claiming that this proves the origin of duplicating cellular life, that just is in the big pot of ‘things we don’t know yet’, along with the origin of gravitation.
* Unless you’re a pure mathematician.
Rob,
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. I was only implying that there are greater questions (to me at least) to be answered. Of course we must start somewhere, and discover more along the way, but what is the goal? For some it is origins.
Bravo to Lenski et al for observing evolutionary adaptation at work. I look forward to more discoveries.
Frank,
Oh right! Jolly good point, then. Apologies for the hyperbole.
[…] week or so ago, I blogged about Richard Lenski and his long-term research into Evolution of e.coli cultures in the lab, that […]