A cursory look at a story in The Atlantic would lead readers to suspect that the creation-evolution debate is over, and Darwin won. You can even watch the victory lap in the embedded video clip. Bacteria at both ends of a rectangular grid, made out like a football field, race to the midline, overcoming antibiotics first 10, then 100, then 1000 times the strength needed to kill them. It’s survival of the fittest!
Beyond any applications in research and medicine, the MEGA-plate also makes for a wonderful teaching tool. It makes the abstract concrete. It vividly brings the process of evolution to life—and to view. “We’re visual creatures,” says Baym. “Seeing is believing.”
Darwinian evolution was incapable of crossing fitness landscapes requiring more than two coordinated mutations. Malaria parasites could sometimes survive antimalarial drugs, but only by “throwing stuff overboard” – i.e., engaging in desperate attempts to survive through loss of information.
To succeed in demonstrating Darwinian evolution, Baym would need to show
(1) realistic starting conditions,
(2) the unguided emergence of new genetic information,
(3) positive selection,
(4) fitness increase over wild type,
(5) speciation,
(6) some innovative heritable structure capable of leading to new branches of organisms, and
(7) successful competition of the winners in the real world, alongside other organisms in the ecology. Let’s examine the paper for these requirements.
Realistic starting conditions? The Materials & Methods section shows that they used a “strain from the Keio collection of E. coli K-12 BW25113 knockout variants.” The platform on which the experiment was run was highly artificial, consisting of purified agar, with several rounds of artificially-selected bacteria as starters. The environment contained no other organisms that wild E. coli were likely to encounter in the wild.
New genetic information? The authors discuss mutations, but there is no mention of beneficial mutations or gain-of-function mutations. Michael Behe claims that over half the identified mutations amount to loss of function.
Positive selection? There is no mention of positive selection in the paper among the 11 mentions of the word.
Fitness increase? There is no mention of fitness increase in the paper among the 5 words “fit” or “fitness”.
Speciation? The organisms at the beginning and end of the experiment are still not only E. coli, but descendants of the original strain of E. coli.
Innovation? The word “innovation” is lacking in the paper. The word “novel” is only mentioned as a possibility for future experiments:
Competition in the wild? No mention is made of releasing the winning germs back into the wild to see if they could survive and proliferate in real-world conditions against their less-evolved progenitors.
In short, a visual aid that demonstrates nothing of Darwinian evolution can nonetheless serve as a “useful” teaching tool to promote Darwinian theory. Useful to whom? “In other words, the MEGA-plate does not correspond to the real world and may be irrelevant to medicine,” Behe says. “Instead, its value will be primarily to indoctrinate students in evolution.” CEH
I applied mine heart to know, and to search,
and to seek out wisdom,
and the reason of things,
Ecclesiastes 7:25
