Episode Details

The details behind the story of how bacteria mutated in order to grow bigger and better by eating oranges, instead of sugar.

Last week, we talked to a member of the Long-Term Evolution Experiment, Dr. Zachary Blount. He and his colleagues followed 75,000 generations of bacteria competing for a limited food resource — sugar — and described many different kinds of genetic changes in 57 different genes. Creationists and ID-proponents dismiss this as “simply breaking genes.” In this episode, we take a very deep-dive into the story, and show how this is actually a prime example of evolution proceeding through gene duplication, progressive modifications, and the building up of new regulatory pathways and metabolic functions. How it is that well educated anti-evolutionists, especially the biochemists among them, can only see this as destructive and detrimental either says something about them being biased and misled … or deceptive!?

Before we asked Zach to give us the details, we provided some background introductory information:

• evolution often involves duplication of stretches of DNA, followed by modifications which eventually lead to new functions, while leaving the original copy intact. This is NOT “breaking the gene”
• we give a crash course on how bacteria extract energy from glucose (see the color image attached below)
• evolution often happens in three steps:
  • (1) prepare for new function (or “potentiation”) – changes occur which by themselves don’t appear to affect function, but they set the stage for something else
  • (2) get the new function (or “actualization” or “instantiation” – the “something else” suddenly appears as a new function, although usually in a very weak and inefficient form
  • (3) refine the new function