Another one bites the dust

Do you believe that the theory of evolution has never been observed? That it is purely theoretical and has never been, can never be, demonstrated in the laboratory?

Well, it appears that this ICR and AIG favorite is no longer a sustainable argument:

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers’ eyes. It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens.

This population of E. coli was observed to evolve a new trait known as Cit+, the ability to metabolize citrate. What’s really interesting is that the inability to metabolize citrate has previously been one of the distinguishing features of E. coli. This is more remarkable than it may seem on the surface. How so?

Just think – it only took twenty years for this population to evolve this ability. What say we give it another hundred years? Remember, we’ve spent the last hundred and seventy years or so developing the kind of procedures that would allow for this type of accurate scientific observation and analysis, and only the last third of that did we really know what to look for. Who knows what other significant changes might happen in the next hundred and seventy years? Or the next? My point is that we have observed one species-defining characteristic change; a couple more, and we might be able to demonstrate in the laboratory the illegitimacy of that other great special creationist claim that “kind begets like kind”, where only infraspecific evolution (“microevolution”) is allowed as a possibility. Of course, if that happened, the special creationist opponents of interspecific evolution would claim that there was no such thing as intergeneric (from one genus to another) evolution [which, I have been reminded, is the more common special creationist argument].

Now don’t get me wrong – this is not the first example of observed evolutionary processes. What’s remarkable about this particular one is the complexity of the change: the Cit+ feature is apparently not a simple one, as other populations have not been observed to reproduce it. But be honest: it’s harder than ever to argue that there has been no demonstration of the possibility of evolutionary change as predicted by evolutionary theory. And while this doesn’t prove common descent from single-celled organisms, it is definitely a feather in the cap of the theory that predicts common descent through just such means as we have seen here.

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