Beneficial mutations observed

 As a follow up to a post of mine from June 2008, I thought I’d take this opportunity to point out the excellent blog from the BioLogos Foundation called ”Science and the Sacred“, which today featured an article on the same study I mentioned in my post from over a year ago. The fact that stuff is still slowly trickling out on this study highlights the commitment of true science to exhaustively vetting even potentially good news, instead of throwing stuff out there just to get it published and making their view look better.

Twenty-one years and 40,000 generations later, an experiment looking at the evolution of a population of single-celled E. coli bacteria has finally reached its conclusion. The results “beautifully emphasize the succession of mutational events that allowed these organisms to climb toward higher and higher efficiency in their environment,” says Dominique Schneider, a molecular geneticist and member of the research team…

…While Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been extensively tested and supported in various ways over the years, never before has it been studied for so many generations and in such enormous detail.

By the midpoint (20,000 generations), the team found 45 mutations in the surviving bacteria. Just as Darwin’s theory proposed, these mutations did indeed confer some advantage to the bacteria. Thanks to advances in genome sequencing since the project began 21 years ago, the team was able to precisely see which mutations were beneficial, and how they improved adaption to the cells of their environment. Says Michigan State University professor and team member Richard Lenski, “It’s extra nice now to be able to show precisely how selection has changed the genomes of these bacteria, step by step over tens of thousands of generations.”

source: Evolution in an Erlenmeyer Flask

The best part is that the article from Scientific American referred to in the S&tS post points out some promising practical results. “The findings might eventually help scientists better understand mutations in human diseases and infections. ’Cancer progression is a fundamentally similar evolutionary process…’ “

Here’s one to point people to when they cite the old creationist bromides about ”no beneficial mutations” or evolution never having been observed.

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