Conservapedia goofiness

While writing about the Lenski experiment, I recalled the hilarious episode when Andrew Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia and the son of conservative icon Phyllis, concerned about the support this experiment gave to evolution, tried to discredit Lenski and his work and got a polite but severe smacking from him, resulting in Lenski’s work becoming even more widely known. [Read more…]

New results from the Lenski E. coli experiment

One of the most beautiful experiments in evolutionary biology is the one by Michigan State University’s Richard Lenski and his team, most recently Zachary Blount, who started out in 1988 with a single strain of E. Coli bacteria, separated it into twelve genetically identical lines, and then did experiments on them to see how each strand evolved. By now 55,000 generations have occurred, a crucial fact since in evolution it is the number of generations that is the appropriate measure of time, not years. [Read more…]