Lenski’s new results; Behe’s red herring

Richard Lenski is an evolutionary biologist who studies evolution by analyzing changes in bacterial populations.  Perhaps he is most famous for his long-term experiment where his group identified a population that evolved to use a nutrient (citrate) that E. coli normally can’t use.  This was a very important finding as it provided proof-of-concept that random [...]

Michael Behe compares apples to oranges while waiting for two mutations

A recent scientific article published in Genetics criticized Michael Behe and “exposed flaws” in his thinking.  The article in question, Waiting for Two Mutations: With Applications to Regulatory Sequence Evolution and the Limits of Darwinian Evolution, provides a mathematical model of the rate for two different mutations to occur in order.  They show that the [...]

Flock of Dodos: The Intelligent Design – Evolution Circus

After waiting patiently for it to reach the top of my Netflix cue, I recently watched Randy Olsen’s “Flock of Dodos”.  Although I haven’t seen Expelled yet, I believe “Flock of Dodos” is its antithesis.  Randy Olsen, PhD is a trained marine biologist and former tenured professor, while Ben Stein was a political speech writer and professor [...]

The evolutionary numbers game

In my last post, I brought up how Michael Behe used the fact that 40,000 generations of E. coli were necessary for Richard Lenski’s experiment to find an E.coli who could utilize citrate. In this post, I am going to run through some numbers to show how 40,000 generations is nothing to evolutionary time.  [...]

Behe Doesn’t Believe in Evolution in a Tube

Michael Behe writes on June 6th a post entitled: Multiple Mutations Needed for E. Coli. This post came from his amazon blog, where he is trying to push his book. Behe is writing of course about Richard Lenski’s (et al.) recent publication in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). In the [...]