Ariew and Lewontin, "Fitness Confusions"

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@stcordova

@Rumraket

@stcordova

So called “selection” was not able through slight successive improvements that were even only as little as 5-bases away from a solution to Lenski’s LTEE. That’s why it took Lenski like 30,000 generations over 15 years to evolve Cit+ when Scott Minnich was able to evolve Cit+ in less than 100 generations and a matter of days.

That’s literally diametrically opposite to fact. It is exactly because Scott Minnich and co-authors set up their experiment so the environment much more strongly favored the Cit+ trait that it evolved faster in their experiment, than in the LTEE. So in fact environmentally-dependent selection was what made all the difference.

Nope, Minnich started with the K-12 strain that didn’t have the defect of the B strain that Lenski used that had a defective dcuS gene.

Irrelevant to your statement that natural selection doesn’t help in evolving the Cit+ trait.

You said selection wasn’t able to help in evolving the Cit+ trait, which you contrast as having taken 15 years in the LTEE vs a period of several weeks by Van Hofwegen et al. That makes it clear it’s the Cit+ trait that matters, and that you think selection doesn’t make a difference.

That you are incorrectly obsessing about target series of mutations—the exact way in which Dawkins WEASEL also is unlike reality as we have all been saying now for decades—is your own fault. The trait evolved, and selection made a colossal difference in how fast that happened. That it didn’t happen by incrementally resurrecting a broken gene, or by re-evolving by the same series of mutations that happened in the LTEE is completely irrelevant. The trait evolved and natural selection made a huge difference.

So Dawkins was right about selection making a huge difference in times to adaptation in reality (this time in a concrete real-world experiment), but his program had the same shortcoming your own thinking displays: You think there are targets. There isn’t.

@stcordova

There was a 5-base pair frame shift inducing deletion mutation in the dcuS gene of E. Coli B that isn’t present in K-12. If misnomered “natural selection” acted in the way Dawkins Weasel suggested, it could have reconstructed the dcuS gene quickly and restored the gene.

If you treat the dcuS gene as a target that can be sort of incrementally restored. In that respect Dawkins program is unrealistic. Evolution works because cumulatively fixing adaptive mutations in effect just finds some path to an adaptive trait (in this case the Cit+ trait), it doesn’t somehow try to find a specific target (or a specific path to it.)

@stcordova

But that didn’t happen in practice because Dawkins Weasel doesn’t represent experimental reality, it’s the way Dawkins and Darwin and many evolutionary biologists fantasize how evolution builds complexity by accumulation of slight successive modifications.

No. Biologists agree that the Weasel with it’s target is unrealistic, but what is realistic about it is that accumulating slight successive modifications under selection really does make a huge difference to the time it takes an adaptive trait to evolve. What happened in the experiment with strong selection was much faster than in the LTEE. As your new favorite authority John Roth explains in his article, that is why it evolved faster in the Van Hofwegen et al. experiment.

Sorry that the example you invoke so utterly debunks your own talking points. Yes, Dawkins weasel program has an unrealistic shortcoming, but you’re still wrong about selection not making a difference. It has been proven empirically, by direct “observational science” in the Van Hofwegen et al. experiment, that it makes a colossal difference. Numerous slight successive modifications fixed under strong selection made the Cit+ trait evolve in weeks, instead of 15 years.

Sorry buddy, off you go.