A week or so ago, I blogged about Richard Lenski and his long-term research into Evolution of e.coli cultures in the lab, that culminated in the evolution of a novel and beneficial trait in one of those cultures. Moreover, that evolution was reproducible from an earlier culture that had a specific mutation but did not exhibit the trait, but not from other cultures without that mutation.  It’s really interesting research, and has the potential to tell us a lot about the mechanisms of evolution.

Of course, because it also, more or less as a side effect, demonstrates quite clearly that evolution happens, the creationists have been all over it, trying to discredit Lenski, his team, and anyone who has anything nice to say about his work. I’m sure there are creationists some who are approaching it at a scientific level, and trying to falsify his findings. I expect that they’ll fail, but I support their attempt. There are others, however, specifically the anti-scientific mob at Conservapedia, who have been predictably foaming at the mouth and ranting, levelling all sorts of unfounded criticisms at Lenski (he’s biased, he’s a hack, it’s a fraud or a hoax or a lie.)

Eventually, one of them got up the courage to put his money where his mouth is and challenge Lenski to defend his findings, and … well it’s worth reading it yourself.

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.