Conservapedia - The Lenski Affair

The Lenski affair is one of the most embarassing moments in the history of the fundamentalist Christian blog, Conservapedia.

in 2008, owner and overseer of Conservapedia, homeschool teacher Andrew Schlafly, attempted to discredit Professor Richard Lenski and his work demonstration the evolution of E. coli. A full report on the Lenski affair, including emails, discussions and Conservapedia's attempts to censor parts of the exchange can be seen at:
http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Lenski_affair

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[IloveYOUviruses]

@johnnyp76 3) heh, and what a spin, after you were saying that the vast amount of specimens required for the LTEE couldn't be extrapolated to humans... here you are extrapolating their fitness increase to a population diametrically different: mammalians.

Again, if I were you, I'd re-evaluate my beliefs about the past.

[IloveYOUviruses]

@johnnyp76 2) If a bacterial population of billions of specimens per generation surveys every point, dual and more combinatory mutations, is it surprising to find some beneficial mutations after 50k generations?

Is it not clear that every human beings has 100+ denovo mutations while only 1 out of 1000 E Coli will be mutant?

You can't see the difference do you?

[johnnyp76]

@IloveYOUviruses ...In fact, the Lenski long-term E. coli experiment shows the contrary: an initially rapid increase in fitness, followed by a long plateau of stable or slightly increasing fitness for over 35,000 generations [46]. This demonstrates that Sanford is wrong." You are simply wrong on observable evidence!

[johnnyp76]

@IloveYOUviruses ... be even more vulnerable to the buildup of deleterious mutations, since they would have less opportunity to reshuffle genes to help weed out the bad ones. If Sanford’s thesis were correct, we might expect an initial bump up in fitness as the bacteria adapted to some new conditions, followed by a reversion to a secular decline in fitness as the supposedly relentless accumulation of deleterious mutations proceeded...

[johnnyp76]

@IloveYOUviruses "If all the problems ((a)-(h) above) with natural selection were as dire as Sanford claims, even microbial populations should be subject to mutational meltdown, though perhaps at a lower rate per generation than other life-forms. Microbial life-spans can be days, rather than decades. If the buildup of deleterious mutations were a real phenomenon, it would become apparent over thousands of generations in laboratory flasks of bacteria. Indeed, asexual populations like bacteria ...

[johnnyp76]

@IloveYOUviruses This is the point of Lenski's work. In organisms with less frequent mutations, for twelve out of twelve populations, a significant increase in fitness was observed. Whatever was the percentage of beneficial mutations, they were numerous and effective enough to drive the evolution of each of the experimental populations to improved fitness. This is empirically evidenced. Margaglione et al, Groenemeijer et al, Galton et al, Mikkola et al etc = evidenced human beneficial mutations

[IloveYOUviruses]

@johnnyp76 4) If you go on wishful mode, there are big problems for significant good mutations too, for they will be eliminated most of the time depending on their fitness increase. Remember we are talking about one nucleotide among 3 billion.

For example, IF the new trait is in a dominant allele and IF it has a fitness effect of 1%, the dreamed mutation has a 99% chance of being lost.

Meanwhile, every embryo inherits 100 mutations more.

[IloveYOUviruses]

@johnnyp76 3) since you are aware that most new traits (frequency=1) will be lost by drift, you must also recognize that this is a problem for good mutations.

Like deleterious mutations, most beneficial muts have a "very slight" effect, and therefore are subject to the same careless random drift, this means that you'd require 10k-30k trials (in the typical ape population) for one of them to reach fixation.

[IloveYOUviruses]

@johnnyp76 2) Fixation rates it's an excellent point.

I never claimed that ALL VSDM would reach fixation, statistically, most of them would be lost due to random genetic drift, I expect it to be self evident since there are more mutations with every newborn, and inevitably some mutations will reach fixation (cuz most mutations fall in Kimura's no-selection box and are subject to genetic drift). This is the case for every generation, with more are more damages accumulating in the genome.

[IloveYOUviruses]

@johnnyp76 1) Altough I don't agree 100% with Dr Sanford, the basis of my argument can be traced to his book.

oh, btw, the STAN4 isn't even a good critique, it focuses it's case in bacterial populations ignoring Sanford's clear statements on how bacterial populations can be saved from genetic deterioration due to their smaller genomes, huge populations and hyper fertility.