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Other scientists are watching individual microbes evolve into entire ecosystems. Paul Rainey, a biologist at the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study at Massey University, has observed this evolution in bacteria, called Pseudomonas fluorescens, that live on plants. When he put a single Pseudomonas in a flask, it produced descendants that floated in the broth, feeding on nutrients. But within a few hundred generations, some of its descendants mutated and took up new ways of life. One strain began to form fuzzy carpets on the bottom of the flask. Another formed a mat of cellulose, where it could take in oxygen from above and food from below.

But Dr. Rainey is only beginning to decipher the complexity that evolves in his flasks. The different types of Pseudomonas interact with one another in intricate ways. The bottom-growers somehow kill off most of the ancestral free-floating microbes. But they in turn are wiped out by the mat-builders, which cut off oxygen to the rest of the flask. In time, however, cheaters appear in the mat. They do not produce their own cellulose, instead depending on other bacteria to hold them up. Eventually the mat collapses. The other types of Pseudomonas recover, and the cycle begins again, with hundreds of other forms appearing over time. “The interactions are everything you’d expect in a rain forest,” Dr. Rainey said.

Scientists have long known that underlying these visible changes were genetic ones. But only now are they documenting the mutations that allow this evolution to happen in the first place.

Dr. Palsson has been running experiments in which E. coli must adapt to a diet of glycerol, an ingredient in soap. He found that within a few hundred generations, the bacteria could grow two to three times as fast as their ancestor. He then selected some of the evolved microbes and sequenced their genome. He compared their DNA with that of their common ancestor and pinpointed a few mutations that each line had acquired.

Dr. Palsson then inserted copies of these mutated genes into the ancestor and found that it now could thrive on glycerol as well. But the order in which he inserted the genes made a big difference to the bacteria.

Some mutations were beneficial only if the bacteria already carried other mutations. On their own, the mutations could even be harmful. Dr. Palsson’s results offer a detailed picture of what biologists call epistasis — the intimate ways in which mutations can influence the effects of other mutations during evolution.

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[…] as far as accepting evolution as the sole explanation for the development of life, what I require is a demonstration of a novel morphological change (novel organs, limb types, body plans, functional capabilities) which is the product of multiple (five in my mind is statistically improbable, and yet necessary to explain certain structures) separate yet interdependent mutations (which aren’t simply changes to genetic regulation) which have the effect of producing increased viability (meaning the population is more successful than the population from which it derived) in a separate, interbreeding population distinguished by said morphological changes.

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ORIGINAL: Rasico

I'll be honest, I have no clue right now how to discredit that.

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ORIGINAL: Rasico

I'll be honest, I have no clue right now how to discredit that. But I also have faith theres more truth than we're seeing here, although I am by no means accusing Rainey of being dishonest. Simply put, if nothing else comes from this then this is indeed powerful positive evidence for evolution at the bacterial level. I'm also not versed well enough in this subject to actually comprehend everything said here, so I'll leave that to the others. But I challenge those who believe as I do, and are versed in the material to investigate it and not ignore this post.

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Very fascinating, indeed. When I said that bacteria can be promiscuous with their genetic material, I guess I had no idea what I was talking about until now.

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ORIGINAL: DanJames

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ORIGINAL: Rasico

I'll be honest, I have no clue right now how to discredit that. But I also have faith theres more truth than we're seeing here, although I am by no means accusing Rainey of being dishonest. Simply put, if nothing else comes from this then this is indeed powerful positive evidence for evolution at the bacterial level. I'm also not versed well enough in this subject to actually comprehend everything said here, so I'll leave that to the others. But I challenge those who believe as I do, and are versed in the material to investigate it and not ignore this post.

Rasico, the purpose of being a skeptic is NOT to discredit scientific research to which we are exposed. The purpose is to find out what the truth is. If God's word is true, then information about the natural realm included in His word is true. You shouldn't want to disprove or discredit any research. Just have some discernment to know when a determination based on the worldview of the interpreter has been made.

Now I'm gonna go ahead and read the article.

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ORIGINAL: Rasico
You seem to misinterpret what I meant, which is probably my fault, I'm generally not precise.

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ORIGINAL: PromiseLander

Mutations do not create new information... Good grief people... It's like people claiming that the "big bang" started everything as we know it. That is so stupid that it defies logic - when was the last time that you EVER heard of an explosion ever causing order?

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ORIGINAL: Agahnim

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Very fascinating, indeed. When I said that bacteria can be promiscuous with their genetic material, I guess I had no idea what I was talking about until now.

I don’t think they’re really more “promiscuous” than any other organism; they just reproduce faster. The changes described in this article required several hundred generations to occur, which would take several hundred years for anyone to observe in an organism that reproduces once per year. But since bacteria reproduce so much faster than that, it’s possible to directly observe these sorts of large-scale changes evolving in them.

Has this data altered your opinion of evolution at all, or did you already believe that mutations were capable of producing these types of new abilities and lifestyles?

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THE ONLY THING that would support evolution would be for a cat to turn into a parrot. (So to speak, but you get the idea) That whole survival of the fittest thing, and "speciation" does NOT support evolution... You only get a new KIND of dog, or a new KIND of cat - you do not get dog into cat transformations. As much as evolutionists would like to say that speciation supports them, it doesn't - it supports Biblical Creation.

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ORIGINAL: EcclesFruitcake

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THE ONLY THING that would support evolution would be for a cat to turn into a parrot. (So to speak, but you get the idea) That whole survival of the fittest thing, and "speciation" does NOT support evolution... You only get a new KIND of dog, or a new KIND of cat - you do not get dog into cat transformations. As much as evolutionists would like to say that speciation supports them, it doesn't - it supports Biblical Creation.

Please tell me what the original discrete kinds are then and which particular traits are the unique ones used to identify an original kind - what keeps a cat "a cat" said the parrot.

That is, once you accept that speciation happens, as you have, what mechanism prevents a continuous lineage from one 'kind' to something that is more reminiscent of another kind.

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ORIGINAL: EcclesFruitcake

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THE ONLY THING that would support evolution would be for a cat to turn into a parrot. (So to speak, but you get the idea) That whole survival of the fittest thing, and "speciation" does NOT support evolution... You only get a new KIND of dog, or a new KIND of cat - you do not get dog into cat transformations. As much as evolutionists would like to say that speciation supports them, it doesn't - it supports Biblical Creation.

Please tell me what the original discrete kinds are then and which particular traits are the unique ones used to identify an original kind - what keeps a cat "a cat" said the parrot.

That is, once you accept that speciation happens, as you have, what mechanism prevents a continuous lineage from one 'kind' to something that is more reminiscent of another kind.

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ORIGINAL: PromiseLander

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ORIGINAL: EcclesFruitcake

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THE ONLY THING that would support evolution would be for a cat to turn into a parrot. (So to speak, but you get the idea) That whole survival of the fittest thing, and "speciation" does NOT support evolution... You only get a new KIND of dog, or a new KIND of cat - you do not get dog into cat transformations. As much as evolutionists would like to say that speciation supports them, it doesn't - it supports Biblical Creation.

Please tell me what the original discrete kinds are then and which particular traits are the unique ones used to identify an original kind - what keeps a cat "a cat" said the parrot.

That is, once you accept that speciation happens, as you have, what mechanism prevents a continuous lineage from one 'kind' to something that is more reminiscent of another kind.

Well, animals have changed a great deal over time - keeping within their kinds that is. Breeding changes, environmental changes and so forth - I suppose a very readily apparent environmental type of change could be human skin color - but humans are still humans, and though superficially changed from their original ancestor (scientists now even say that all humans are decended from one woman, and wouldn't you know it, they've decided to call her Eve) but they are still humans - same as the original model.

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Indeed, I think the answers would be apparent faster if they were inclined to consider them as the researchers considering bacterial resistance did. Indeed, I would say this rises to the level of a prediction, based on an ID paradigm.
...
Just a few short thoughts on the subject.

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Jhud, I’d like to make sure I understand your point: it seems like what you’re saying is that since the people performing these experiments haven’t documented the exact order and nature of these changes, we can’t assume them to be only the result of random mutations. Some sort of design process might have been involved as well. Is that an accurate summary of your post?

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I am not sure how you got that out of what I said.

If you read what I posted rega