This is the perfect example of the impossibility of evolutionary development in living organisms driving the creation and progression of any living species, which you are forced to contend with if you adhere to a Darwinian worldview. It is likened to baking powder being mixed with water as opposed to vinegar. The baking powder does not choose to react differently from one to the other. It simply is forced to.
In an attempt to insist that the E. coli evolved the ability to metabolize citrate, whereas it supposedly could not do so before, this is clearly not the case. Because the natural cycle of TCA generates and utilizes citrate in a normal metabolism of carbohydrates, the existence of the TCA cycle in all non-dependant living things is very complex, involving many different enzymes and cofactors that are needed in the biochemistry of a cell. Chemical reaction is not Darwinian evolution!
As I have stated previously, the Internet disallows the claims of "so-called science" to go uninvestigated. Would you dispute this quote? "Never mind that E. coli can normally digest citrate in anaerobic conditions and that being able to digest citrate in aerobic conditions is a very common ability in many different bacterial species. Also never mind that aerobic citrate metabolism has been reported in E. coli before so this wasn’t the first time it “evolved”. Ignore the fact that E. coli already has a suite of enzymes to metabolize citrate and all its missing is a way of getting citrate molecules across its cell membrane in the presence of oxygen."
When Richard Lenski began to breed his bacteria he had hopes of getting a random and unguided increase in complexity, or, a real observable evolution in a laboratory setting. Doing so for more than 40,000 generations, with all sorts of selective environments, he clearly failed to demonstrate the emergence of a new species or even a truly spontaneous complexity. He showed that the bacteria did adapt to their environment, but all of the bacteria were not only still bacteria, they clearly remained the same type of bacteria.
And quite obviously, this is not at all what Darwinian Theory proposes. This sort of variation is what we witness everyday as exemplified in hair color, flower color, dog breeds, and finch beaks. No one disputes these sorts of genetic variations. But they do not change the sort of thing the organism is: the human remains a human, the rose a flower, the dog, a canine, and the finch a bird and more specifically, still a finch bird.
As I read the PNSA article, I noted various contradictory statements that I found therein. Such as: "The long-delayed and unique evolution of this function might indicate the involvement of some extremely rare mutation. Alternately, it may involve an ordinary mutation, but one whose physical occurrence or phenotypic expression is contingent on prior mutations in that population."
I am curious to know what is considered a rare mutation as opposed to an ordinary mutation. And if the environment remained the same, would not all of the mutations have been "contingent on prior mutations in that population"? Admittedly, there were no mutations prior to gen. #30,000. By their own definition, "selection requires heritable variation generated by random mutation, and even beneficial mutations may be lost by random drift." Heritable variation is passed down and not random.
What is witnessed by this type of research proves what Michael Behe called "The Edge of Evolution", a limit. In what is commonly espoused in Darwinian evolution, much more than these results are proposed. It declares that there must be enough directional change, one after another through many successive generations, to change what was once a unicellular organism into the various life forms witnessed today. This example of "evolution" does not display a viable mechanism and this mutation does not display special change.
This is what Michael Behe likens to "trench warfare, wherein the role of mutations in antibiotic resistance and pathogen resistance, destroys some of the functionality of the target or host to overcome susceptibility. It’s like putting chewing gum in a mechanical watch; it’s not the way the watch could have been created." Through single mutations, such as malarial resistance, as stated previously, which in its homozygous form, confers the sickle cell disease, in antibiotic resistance and so forth, we do not see mutations accumulating to produce a new species, in neither form nor function. As a matter of fact, we witness that the majority of mutations we do see are quite negative, and overwhelmingly deleterious to the organism involved.
Time after time, what is realized within the confines of a laboratory setting is later found to be inviable when the environment is not so favorable. Such is the case of antibiotic resistance changes. Those that seemingly may not harm the organism, in fact weakens the organism in any other environment except the specific one in which that change helped it survive. The article closes with this as part of a summation of the research: "If the Cit+ lineage is indeed evolving into a new species, then we expect, with time, that more and more of the beneficial mutations substituted in that lineage would be detrimental in the ecological and genetic context of its Cit− progenitor."
It is interesting that on the PBS program "NOW" in December of 2004, Richard Dawkins said that "Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it hasn’t been observed while it’s happening." I could not find a response from him on what he thinks of this specific research. It is very recent and there is not much on it yet.
The moral of this story? After many thousands of generations, the E.coli bacteria remain E.coli. Fruit flies forced into mutating remain fruit flies. The edge of evolution has a name: biological stasis. It will go this far and no further. I am waiting for the research about the research that we all know will be coming. Let's look at all the evidence in an unbiased light and see the truth.
Does the scientific consensus overwhelmingly support evolution? Yes, it does. They are overwhelmingly of a Darwinian worldview. They must accept evolution!
