Oh thats right, what am I thinking?, there is_no_rate_of_evolution anywhere...why? Because there is no evolution. If you had evolution, you would have a rate of change because evolution = change. You also might need to know what proteins would have needed to be changed,which this article gives no indication.
That's just plain old circular reasoning. I agree with you on the protein thing, but obviously this whole thing came about a bit unexpected.
Nothing about this rate and these numbers seem plausible to me, so my guess is there is some sort of screw up with these experiments. they probably have some strange hybrid in their population, there are a lot of strange and undiscovered bacteria,
The rate at which evolution takes place isn't constant. It makes perfect sense that a large being like a dinosaur takes a couple of million years to change 'into' a new species, just like it makes sense that a couple of 'cells' in a lab only take a few years adapting to their environment. Apparently there must have been conditions that forced a change.
there is a lot about ecoli dna codes we dont know, they might have had the ability to digest this stuff inherent in thier existing genome.
As far as I know they did extensive research on this. I doubt they knew exactly what had to change to cause a certain feature to become 'active' though, so it wouldn't really matter that much.
A strange hybrid is the most likely possibility. Bacteria are everywhere. The likelyhood of some other species creeping into the line in a 20 year period is extremely high. Scientists cannot even identify some bacteria because others come in and take over before they can make a distinction. That happens all the time when dealing with extremophiles.
Which actually says more about evolution happening around us than you'd think. A lot of researchers think the extremophiles are the key to figuring out what happened in some of the earliest moments of the evolution of life.
Some of these morons are getting funded so they have to show SOME results to keep their money coming in, so they have to show some results even faulty results to keep their meal ticket.
Good point, but in this case I don't think results were distorted.
Also this citrate metabolism is not a beneficial mutation, so its not evolution at all, its de-volution.
A change is a change... the overall outcome is evolution. It doesn't have to be beneficial for it to be part of evolution,
Cheers
