2021-08-01, 06:11 PM
(2021-08-01, 11:14 AM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]In a search for experimental confirmation of the hypothesis that there is a creative Mind in nature that fosters evolution it's interesting to look at the results of Lenski's long-term multigenerational attempt to demonstrate Darwinian evolution of a large total population of E. coli bacteria in the lab.
"The E. coli long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) is an ongoing study in experimental evolution led by Richard Lenski that has been tracking genetic changes in 12 initially identical populations of asexual Escherichia coli bacteria since 24 February 1988." (Wiki)
This experiment has been a failure as far as demonstrating evolution of any new innovative complicated or irreducibly complex designs. It has mostly been devolution - broken genes, that had an initial moderate fitness benefit at the cost of loss of genetic information and eventually a dramatically lower fitness, as predicted by Michael Behe. The only innovation of any kind was the development of aerobic citrate metabolism, but it involved little new information - it utilized the already existing genetic design for anaerobic citrate metabolism.
From https://evolutionnews.org/2020/06/citrate-death-spiral/, about a recent paper on this research:
It occurs to me that if there really were a Mind in nature that in response to environmental pressures to change, creatively designs and redesigns organisms for their survival, then Lenski's experiment would have yielded at least a couple of novel and innovative new designs. It didn't - it yielded mostly drastic genetic degradations. That certainly seems to falsify the above hypothesis. The experiment also falsifies neo-Darwinist processes at least in the area of innovative new designs as opposed to devolution.
Of course, the all-permeating Mind could have all sorts of additional powers such as picking and choosing where and when it creates new designs, and accordingly realize that it would be pointless to innovate during a human experiment. But this is so ad hoc.
I read about this experiment in Behe's "Darwin Devolved". A couple of things occurred to me:
1) Since the environment was constant, there didn't seem to be a lot for evolution to do, and RM+NS could go wild throwing out genetic mechanisms that would not be needed in that particular environment. However, intelligent evolution couldn't do much either. A much more interesting experiment would have been to progressively change the food source to something that the original bugs could not metabolise.
2) In a model in which the evolutionary intelligence doesn't reside in the actual organisms, does one intelligence process multiple environments or does the intelligence split?
David