User:Bob M/Lenski

In June 2008 the popular science magazine New Scientist printed a story about Professor Richard Lenski's twenty year project examining the evolution of E. coli. They reported that, as a result of a beneficial mutation, his organisms had acquired the ability to metabolise citrate. This was an entirely new ability for this species - an increase in complexity provided by a beneficial mutation. This beneficial trait was then fixed in the population by natural selection.

His group did not use genetic engineering to modify the organism (to design it) and they in no way expected it to happen and they took no steps to encourage the process - it was produced entirely by the  evolutionary process.

It is a beautiful example of evolution in action.

General problems for creationists
Creationists come in many different flavors, but the process as outlined above will cause problems of one sort or another for many of them.


 * Some Young earth creationists deny that any form of evolution occurs and this clear demonstration of the process is an obvious challenge to them.
 * Others will claim that mutations are inevitably harmful and this beneficial mutation will be hard for them to accept.
 * Yet others claim (erroneously) that the Second law of thermodynamics would not not allow evolution to generate more complex life forms - yet here we see it doing just that.
 * Many creationists hold to a false dichotomy of Microevolution and macroevolution. By this they mean that organisms may change, for example, their size or color but that they are unable to develop wholly new traits.  But again, this experiment shows them doing exactly that.

Problems for Intelligent design
Believers in intelligent design maintain that as something looks as though it was designed then it was, in fact, designed. Some go no further than that and have no interest in timescales or details and do not see the "design" part as a process. Others see the "design" part as ongoing process which they try to fit into evolutionary theory in some way or another. Professor Lenski's experiment also causes problems for these groups.


 * After the beneficial mutation which gave it the ability to metabolize citrate had been fixed in the population the bacteria, they would have looked like organisms "designed" to metabolize citrate. But in this case we have seen that this ability came about as a result of the evolutionary process. As it can be seen that evolution and not Intelligent design was the driver then it clearly shows that the apparent evidence of design is in no way real evidence of design.

Problems for more science-friendly creationist ideas
Professor Lenski's results might also give problems to ideas such as guided evolution and theistic evolution.

The idea behind guided evolution is that the process of evolution is somehow guided by God. However the actual nature of this guidance is rarely, if ever, articulated. If however the idea is that all evolution is guided, then the inference surely is that God intervened Professor Lenski's experiment in order to give his bacteria this new ability. Whether guided evolutionists would actually want to go this far is an interesting question.

Although theistic evolutionists sometimes take care to avoid making claims that they have a scientific theory, it is difficult to see how, in practice, they would not fact the same question.

Creationist reaction
Seeing many of their favorite myths so clearly under challenge, it is not surprising the creationists would like to undermine Professor Lenski's results. As of June 2008 the most appallingly unsuccessful attempt was that made by Andy Schlafly the founder of Conservapedia and which resulted in his receiving a remarkable public spanking in the Lenski affair‎.