Re: Créationnistes: quel est votre "Hovind rating"?
Publié : 12 juin 2008, 15:47
Julien : Non, non, non, ce n’est pas un exemple parmi d’autres mais plutôt exactement le même type d’argument tordu pour abruti fanatiquement convaincu. Comme d’habitude, la bactérie possédait déjà les enzymes nécessaires à la digestion des citrates. Sachant cela, comment qualifier le propos suivant : "Dans les faits, on a engendré (sans aucun "dessein" précis) un E Coli qui bouffe des citrates."PKJ a écrit :Dans les faits: on a engendré (sans aucun "dessein" précis) un E Coli qui bouffe des citrates.
Et ce n'est qu'un exemple parmi d'autres.
Vous faites quoi mercredi soir prochain ? Vous êtes libre pour venir en parler à un diner que j'organise avec des amis ?
Darwinism Demonstrated in the Lab 06/10/2008
June 10, 2008 — Lenski’s done it. The champion of Avida, a computerized evolution demo (see Evolution News) has demonstrated Darwinian evolution with real live organisms. His achievement announces his inauguration into the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.1
Lenski and team ran one of the longest-running evolution experiments ever with E. coli bacteria. After more than 30,000 generations, some of the bacteria traversed several random mutations to achieve a new function: the ability to digest citrate. This occurred without any guidance and quickly made the new variety more fit in the culture. New Scientist trumpeted this as a demonstration of a “major evolutionary shift in the lab” that has unfurled right before the researchers’ eyes.
Darwin critic Dr. Michael Behe, biochemist at Lehigh University, author of Darwin’s Black Box, seems unconvinced. He thinks, as he discusses on his Amazon blog that Lenski has only demonstrated something far less Darwinian: the Edge of Evolution. A response was also posted on Access Research Network.
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1. Zachary Blount, Christina Borland and Richard E. Lenski, “Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, June 4, 2008, 10.1073/pnas.0803151105.
It’s a good thing Dr. Behe quickly dispelled the significance of this experiment. It saves us a lot of work having to trudge through the overhyped claims in the paper. Basically, the E. coli already had the machinery to digest citrate, but just lacked a gateway to get the nutrient inside, which was not that improbable a hurdle for a couple of mutations to permit. This accomplishment is orders of magnitude simpler than the kind of luck required to build the machinery in the first place. It’s like blindly pushing and finding a weakness in a fence. This is all the longest-running lab experiment in evolution was able to accomplish in 20 years of trying, with almost 40,000 generations. Are you impressed? If you can tell a lawyer is lying when his lips are moving, you can tell an evolutionist is lying when the reporters go wild about how Darwin has been vindicated.
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Behe :
In his new paper Lenski reports that, after 30,000 generations, one of his lines of cells has developed the ability to utilize citrate as a food source in the presence of oxygen. (E. coli in the wild can’t do that.) Now, wild E. coli already has a number of enzymes that normally use citrate and can digest it (it’s not some exotic chemical the bacterium has never seen before). However, the wild bacterium lacks an enzyme called a “citrate permease” which can transport citrate from outside the cell through the cell’s membrane into its interior. So all the bacterium needed to do to use citrate was to find a way to get it into the cell. The rest of the machinery for its metabolism was already there. As Lenski put it, “The only known barrier to aerobic growth on citrate is its inability to transport citrate under oxic conditions.” (1)
Other workers (cited by Lenski) in the past several decades have also identified mutant E. coli that could use citrate as a food source. In one instance the mutation wasn’t tracked down. (2) In another instance a protein coded by a gene called citT, which normally transports citrate in the absence of oxygen, was overexpressed. (3) The overexpressed protein allowed E. coli to grow on citrate in the presence of oxygen. It seems likely that Lenski’s mutant will turn out to be either this gene or another of the bacterium’s citrate-using genes, tweaked a bit to allow it to transport citrate in the presence of oxygen. (He hasn’t yet tracked down the mutation.)