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[Dr Jonathan Osterman PhD]

“ We find they are getting less fit in the ancestral niche over time,” Lenski said. “I would argue that citrate users are — or are becoming — a new species.”

Yes, I do agree, they are still becoming a new species.

I will be patiently waiting until they finally become a new species.

It is just a matter of time, of course. In a mere few billion years,
these bacteria will evolve into super-intelligent flying monkeys with giant brains.

However, I would argue that Darwinian evolution is about survival of the fittest,
and NOT about becoming less fit in the ancestral niche over time.

The idea of Darwinian evolution has just been experimentally FALSIFIED.

[Dr Jonathan Osterman PhD]

“ We find they are getting less fit in the ancestral niche over time,” Lenski said. “I would argue that citrate users are — or are becoming — a new species.”

Yes, I do agree, they are still becoming a new species.

I will be patiently waiting until they finally become a new species.

It is just a matter of time, of course. In a mere few billion years,
these bacteria will evolve into super-intelligent flying monkeys with giant brains.

However, I would argue that Darwinian evolution is about survival of the fittest,
and NOT about becoming less fit in the ancestral niche over time.

The idea of Darwinian evolution has just been experimentally FALSIFIED.

The quote below is from an article in the Harvard Gazette called "Evolution in Real Time", about an experiment with bacteria, which seems (to me) to be an example of the Polaroid version of evolution you seek:

After 30,000 generations, researchers noticed something strange. One population had evolved the ability to use a different carbon-based molecule in the solution, called citrate, as a power source.

BREAKING NEWS !!!
One population had evolved the ability to use a different carbon-based molecule!!! WOW


From: EVOLUTION NEWS — www. evolutionnews. org

Lenski’s Long-Term Evolution Experiment: 25 Years and Counting

Dr. Richard Lenski is an optimistic man, and always accentuates the positive. In the paper on mutT and mutY, the stress is on how the bacterium has improved with the second mutation. Heavily unemphasized is the ominous fact that one loss of function mutation is "improved" by another loss of function mutation — by degrading a second gene. Anyone who is interested in long-term evolution should see this as a baleful portent for any theory of evolution that relies exclusively on blind, undirected processes.

Still, the important question to ask is, what exactly has Dr. Lenski's project shown us about evolution?

The current issue of Science carries a four-page panegyric (Pennisi 2013) highlighting the career of Richard Lenski on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the beginning of his long-term evolution experiment. In 1988 Lenski started what then seemed a slightly wacky project — to let cultures of the bacterium Eschericia coli grow continuously under his watchful gaze in his lab at Michigan State University. Every day he or one of a parade of grad students and postdocs would transfer a small portion of the culture into fresh media in a new test tube, allowing the bacteria to grow 6-7 generations per day. Twenty-five years later the culture — a cumulative total of trillions of cells — has been going for an astounding 58,000 generations and counting. As the article points out, that’s equivalent to a million years in the lineage of a large animal such as humans. Combined with an ability to track down the exact identities of bacterial mutations at the DNA level, that makes Lenski’s project the best, most detailed source of information on evolutionary processes available anywhere, dwarfing rival lab projects and swamping field studies. That’s an achievement well worth celebrating.

The study has addressed some narrow points of peculiar interest to evolutionary population geneticists, but for proponents of intelligent design the bottom line is that the great majority of even beneficial mutations have turned out to be due to the breaking, degrading, or minor tweaking of pre-existing genes or regulatory regions (Behe 2010). There have been no mutations or series of mutations identified that appear to be on their way to constructing elegant new molecular machinery of the kind that fills every cell. For example, the genes making the bacterial flagellum are consistently turned off by a beneficial mutation (apparently it saves cells energy used in constructing flagella). The suite of genes used to make the sugar ribose is the uniform target of a destructive mutation, which somehow helps the bacterium grow more quickly in the laboratory. Degrading a host of other genes leads to beneficial effects, too.

The Science story references a new paper from Lenski’s lab (Wiser et al. 2013) showing that the bacterial strain continues to improve its growth rate. The chief talking point of the paper is that the rate of improvement follows a curve that will not max out — improvements would continue indefinitely, although at an ever-slowing rate. The natures of the newer beneficial mutations, however, are not reported — whether they, too, are degradative changes, or minor, sideways changes, or truly constructive changes. (I know which way I’ll bet….)

In one supplementary figure the authors show that the increasing growth rate is built on some previously known, beneficial-yet-degradative mutations. Earlier this year Lenski’s lab (Wielgoss et al. 2013) identified a mutation that built on a previous mutation, too, which may prefigure what kind of changes the unidentified mutations in the current paper will turn out to be. Over the course of the project several of the dozen separate strains developed what is called a "mutator" phenotype. In English, that means that the cell’s ability to faithfully copy its DNA is degraded, and its mutation rate has increased some 150-fold. As Lenski’s work showed, that’s due to a mutation (dubbed mutT) that degrades an enzyme that rids the cell of damaged guanine nucleotides, preventing their misincorporation into DNA. Loss of function of a second enzyme (MutY), which removes mispaired bases from DNA, also increases the mutation rate when it occurs by itself. However, when the two mutations, mutT and mutY, occur together, the mutation rate decreases by half of what it is in the presence of mutT alone — that is, it is 75-fold greater than the unmutated case.

www. evolutionnews. org/2013/11/richard_lenskis/

[Dr Jonathan Osterman PhD]

And tell me why in male Humans the urinary and reproductive tracts share plumbing. I mean, it was such a dumb idea.

Well, from your limited and subjective point of view,
it might seem dumb to you. OK, I see no problem here.

However, the Almighty Creator God Yahweh who created Adam and Eve, works in mysterious ways as it has been widely acknowledged in Catholic Theology at the Vatican for over 1700 years.

Vatican Theologians, upon careful and detailed in-depth analysis of the entire Old Testament, discovered that the reason why urinary and reproductive tracts share plumbing, was just a one little of Almighty God Yahweh's punishments of Adam and Eve for their Original Sin.

Lagayscienza, you may keep denying it as much as you want,
but the simple fact is that you are a dirty little sinner, too, like me.

So, be humble and grateful to your supernatural divine Almighty Creator
for giving you even this dumb little penis to play with,
while you watch gay porn on-line, pal.

Lagayscienza, let's praise our supernatural Almighty Lord, Creator God Yahweh !!!

AMEN, brother.

God bless you, Lagayscienza, because "La Gay Scienza" means: The Homosexual Science.

P. s.

It was our supernatural Almighty Lord, Creator God Yahweh,
who performed the Miracle of Abiogenesis,
without so little as batting an eyelash :

viewtopic.php?p=451502#p451502

[chewybrian]

“ We find they are getting less fit in the ancestral niche over time,” Lenski said. “I would argue that citrate users are — or are becoming — a new species.”

Yes, I do agree, they are still becoming a new species.

I will be patiently waiting until they finally become a new species.

It is just a matter of time, of course. In a mere few billion years,
these bacteria will evolve into super-intelligent flying monkeys with giant brains.

However, I would argue that Darwinian evolution is about survival of the fittest,
and NOT about becoming less fit in the ancestral niche over time.

The idea of Darwinian evolution has just been experimentally FALSIFIED.

It seems you either didn't read or didn't get the point of the study which I was quoting. They set aside the original generation of bacteria in the freezer and allowed their brothers and sisters to reproduce for many generations. Along the way, they gradually changed environmental conditions. The end result was that they "boiled the frog", but the frog survived! The later generations were able to survive in conditions that the initial generation could not withstand. They gave millions of original bacteria the chance to survive the new environment but none did. This seems to show that survival was the result of an accumulation of mutations best suited to the new environment, rather than a single big mutation.

The experiment seems to offer slam dunk proof of survival of the fittest, rather than disproving the concept, as you seem to think.

The quote below is from an article in the Harvard Gazette called "Evolution in Real Time", about an experiment with bacteria, which seems (to me) to be an example of the Polaroid version of evolution you seek:
After 30,000 generations, researchers noticed something strange. One population had evolved the ability to use a different carbon-based molecule in the solution, called citrate, as a power source.

BREAKING NEWS !!!
One population had evolved the ability to use a different carbon-based molecule!!! WOW

Sure it's a big deal. Imagine increasing the percentage of bourbon in peoples' diets until, many generations later, they had only bourbon for nutrition. Neither of us could survive if we were transported to that environment. Something important would have changed to allow the new generations to survive. Survival of the fittest(drunkest?) would have played out.

[Dr Jonathan Osterman PhD]

Along the way, they gradually changed environmental conditions.

The end result was that they "boiled the frog", but the frog survived!

Brian, thank you for your clear scientific summary.
Much appreciated.

Now I get it, finally!

So, first, they started with a normal frog.

Then, due to the slow boiling of the frog over a long period of time,
the frog randomly but gradually evolved into a new specie
of Homo Boiled Frog sapiens, and with its increased brain capacity,
the new frog started to slowly but gradually understand the evolutionary
necessity of escaping her old slow boiling water environment,
and due to this evolutionary environmental pressure, the new frog
randomly evolved a pair of wings and flew out of the Lab's open window,
already as a new specie of Homo Flying Frog sapiens.

Last time I heard, there were numerous reports of sightings
of what can only be described as a massive Homo Flying Dinosaur sapiens
in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern California.

The Homo Flying Dinosaur sapiens has finally nested
inside an old volcano's caldera in the equatorial Africa
and immediately randomly and spontaneously laid a dozen of giant eggs.

And Dr. Richard Lenski has been indicted on criminal charges
of gross negligence and dereliction of duty for keeping the window open
while smoking a cigarette. There was a big red NO SMOKING sign in the Lab.