Mexican blind cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus)

All of this is besides the point and easily overcome if I am correct. Don’t you know it would be easy to falsify my idea? Just put one of these non-resistant bacterium under the right conditions and watch it multiply. And there you have it - either I am right or I am wrong.

What are “the right conditions”? Lay out the actual experimental design, and describe the outcome you think would support your idea versus the outcome would falsify it.

I will let the lab decide that.

Then run the experiment again, and again, and again. Run it 100,1000 times. A million times. Each time notate how many resistant strains the single bacterium is providing for survival. Then average the ratio. You should find some kind of pattern in the numbers. That would indicate deliberateness rather than randomness.

(I don’t have enough funding. :slight_smile: )

So you can’t come up with an experiment and results that would falsify your claims? That makes it sound as if your idea is not falsifiable.

So what pattern would randomness produce in this type of experiment? How would we falsify “deliberateness”?

Are you kidding me?

Literally all of those questions are dealt with with common plate streaking methods. You can rather simply isolate a single bacterium, let it grow to a colony size on a plate, pick the colony and grow it in a liquid medium, and then dilute the culture and grow it on plates. That way you know the differences among any bacteria you get are due to mutation, because they all derive from a single isoclonal population. Hence, any phenotypic differences among them are due to mutation.

The numbers will tell a story. Or they will not. You already know that. We would just have to see the numbers.

You should be able to tell us what numbers your hypothesis predicts for both randomness and deliberateness without needing to see the results beforehand.

What should the numbers look like if random mutations are responsible for these changes?

No you are erecting an impossible situation for me since I am not in such a lab. So tell us, how many total bacteria were in the Lederberg culture and of that number how many were found to be resistant to antibiotics? Do they supply the numbers?

You don’t need a lab to construct a mathematical model. Luria and Delbruck were able to construct a mathematical model of random mutations. You can read about it here:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c12b/57ab54094ab5ebf9f78e8f34c5c99ecbf1b1.pdf

Yes.

“The culture is fully sensitive to phage T-1, as well as to streptomycin, and like most E. coli strains give rise to resistant mutants at rates of approximate 10^-7 and 10^-10 per division, respectively.”
https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/bbabfj.pdf

This means there is 1 resistant colony out of every 10 billion divisions.

…and 1 out of every 10 million divisions for phage T-1.

Gosh, I never had hoped for numbers that good. You mean my idea has a possibility of being correct? So, if correct, and if the resistant mutations are being directed, what would be directing them toward such near precise ratios?

If.

But there is no good explanation (in a random world) for why those ratios should recur with such periodicity…!!!

… he declared, with staunch conviction. Yet he was just making blind assertions without a clue.

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What would the numbers look like for random mutations?

Random processes produce precise ratios all of the time. That’s how casinos in Vegas are able to make money.

I am still waiting to hear what types of results would falsify your claim of deliberate mutations.

I don’t understand why you think those numbers are good for your argument. Are you saying that if mutations were random, the numbers wouldn’t be so precise?

SERIOUSLY???

Have you ever gambled? Ratios with periodicity is the hallmark of random processes. The odds of rolling a hard 12 in craps is 1 in 36, and that ratio is precise over millions of rolls. The roll of the dice is still random.

Now who is conflating terms? The odds are not random. The ratio is not random. Randomness ceases when a periodic “odds” is reached.

Then you would agree that the processes which produce mutations are equivalent to rolling dice?

Then you would agree that the odds of mutation are equivalent to saying the overall process is directed?