Both mere adaptation and mere genetic drift are evolution.
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Oh, so for example, the ability to digest nylon should count as âsomething new?â
That threshold was crossed decades ago by any reasonable meter. What are you hoping to accomplish by repeating the exact same suggestion here that I responded to a few days ago at length? If youâve modified your post at all, Iâve missed it.
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Hi Nonlin - Hope youâre enjoying Godâs blessings today. Thatâs a good point. Unlike humans, they do not reproduce sexually. That could make direct comparisons just a little difficult.
And that could make direct comparisons just a bit difficult, too. You see, our population has plenty of variation in our genome going back hundreds of thousands of years.
And now you have identified another problem: under natural conditions E Coli can and do use lateral transfer that crosses species boundaries, quite unlike humans.
Many of these questions are answerable in an E Coli experiment like the one you described. It turns out Lenski and Mittler, among others, have already answered a whole lotta interesting questions about mutation rates and genetic drift and what happens to a bacteria populationâs genome when you introduce a stressor such as antibiotic agents.
Like this?
Richard Lenski at MSU did not obtain anything other than his baseline E.coli, Barry Hall at U. Rochester and Paul Rainey at Oxford only confirmed adaptation, Miller Urey did not demonstrate abiogenesis without which Common Descent is a nonstarter.
What about Common Descent? How do you test for that? You know Common Descent is the whole point of Evolution, right?
âSomething newâ is not the point. Common Descent is, and needs to be tested as proposed.
The point is not comparing against humans, but obtaining a new organism different from the Baseline by a predetermined Threshold. Itâs testing Common Descent. I only mentioned humans to estimate âHow long should the experiment last?â
Lenski started and ended with E.coli. That is not experimental proof of Common Descent.
You can breed a population of bacteria in a lab as long as you want, and then genetically test them up, down, and backwards, and I bet you will find that they have commonly descended from the same bacteria you started with. What you hope to prove by this, however, other than how good your genetic testing techniques are for determining common ancestry, I cannot quite tell.
On the other hand, people genuinely curious about evolution would want to know whether you can evolve multicellularity in the lab. Donât you think?
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Well, yes, that would be fascinating if you could pull it off. Do you get to start with colonial organisms?
Nope, you have to start with brewerâs yeast. Unicellular. And I guess you have to start with the crazy thought that a single-celled organism could evolve aspects of multicellularity. People who know about Dictyostelium (aka slime molds) will be predisposed to such madness. 
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I suppose artificial gene insertion is also cheating? Good luck, sir. I think thatâs one project that will turn out far more complicated than it sounds!
No need to raise the bar that high. Another bacteria would be fine as long as, If Baseline is E.coli, the result IS NOT E.coli.
Feel free to cheat.
Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) may also prove Common Descent despite these being primarily examples of Intelligent Design. Venterâs Minimal Bacterial Genome in particular almost meets this Threshold if the new organisms were not just degraded versions of the Baseline. To date, other GMO experiments have obtained enhanced versions of the original, but not new organisms that meet the Common Descent Threshold as defined here.
Heh. Itâs been done. (I thought youâd see what I was up to.)
In yeast:
Experimental evolution of multicellularity
then
Improved use of a public good selects for the evolution of undifferentiated multicellularity
and
Multicellularity makes somatic differentiation evolutionarily stable
In single-cell algae:
Experimental evolution of an alternating uni- and multicellular life cycle in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii
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[quote=âNonlinOrg, post:105, topic:34703â]
What about Common Descent? How do you test for that?[/quote]
By analyzing sequence data for nested hierarchies. I know that anyone who blows this off as vague similarity isnât looking at the evidence.
[quote]You know Common Descent is the whole point of Evolution, right?
[/quote]No, I didnât.
Do you have any idea how arbitrary species definitions are once youâre not using sexual reproduction to be able to tell? Basically, it would be a matter of opinion and probably not useful for settling a major controversy.
E. coli has been evolving roughly a hundred million years, in the guts of all mammals since their divergence from birds. This is probably an easier number to calculate than the entire bacterial history of the earth; have at it.
You really need to do a bit more to define your threshold than Iâve seen so far.
Hi Steve,
Thanks for supplying those links! It took just 315 generations in one of the studies to select for simple multicellular configurations. Thanks for filling us in on this important research.
Best,
Chris Falter
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Medicine is based on clinical studies (very narrow extrapolations), not on the fossil record or similarities between organisms.
What do you demand from your pharmaceutical providers? Would you be happy if they only tested on mice?
I do. Did you even read what I said: âThis may be contentious as biological classifications such as Population, Strain, Species, Genus, etc. are all subjectiveâ? Did you understand?
I launched the challenge and can contribute at defining the threshold but it has to be negotiated. Your answer seems to be âcanât be doneâ which really doesnât make any sense. What are you afraid of?
You must be kidding. Those are âsocial studiesâ on unicellular organisms. No new organism is named and clusters are most definitely not at all dissimilar from the individual Baseline organisms.
Do you form a new organism of a new species when you get together with your buddies?