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.

Well, I suppose it’s good that someone in authority has finally realised that whole thing is a colossal waste of time and money, in which the only possible winners are the publicity-seeking opportunists who’re still, after ten years, trying to make some money or grab some fame through their association with the princess.

Really, we don’t _need_ an inquest into her death; I would have thought that the fact her car hit a concrete wall at speed, while she wasn’t wearing a seat-belt, would be clue enough into how she died. Of course, there are always conspiracy theorists when a much loved public figure dies suddenly, but that doesn’t mean we should give them a publicly funded platform from which to shout.

There’s a great article over at the BBC, about what happens when you give the climate change denialists a chance to present their side of the argument. You get

The sum total of evidence obtained through this open invitation, then, is one first-hand claim of bias in scientific journals, not backed up by documentary evidence; and three second-hand claims, two well-known and one that the scientist in question does not consider evidence of anti-skeptic feeling.

While I’m not surprised that these people complete failed to back up their claims of systemic bias in the scientific community, I don’t share Mark’s view that the whole exercise was a waste of time. Sure, we knew they wouldn’t come up with the goods, but it’s worth doing the legwork to prove that to the public at large, especially if you can get that result published on a hugely popular site like the BBC.

Also, if someone goes through these motions every once in a while, then it gives the denialists less scope to claim they’re being oppressed. Of course they won’t stop; they’ll just claim that this a piece of establishment propaganda, but for every article like this that is published, the public at large will be less inclined to give those claims credence.