E. coli: Takes a licking, keeps on ticking
Posted on April 21st, 2008 by blue collar scientistOver at The Loom, science writer extraordinaire Carl Zimmer writes about some recent experiments on E. coli:
Scientists randomly rewired the network of genes that control much of the microbe’s activity and found that it generally just kept humming along.
Wow. And here I always thought that the genome was sensitive to changes, and that wholesale re-arrangement would seriously mess things up for an organism.
Turns out that was a little corner of my thinking that had been contaminated by silly creationist claims:
This conclusion also flies in the face of the popular misconception among opponents of the evolutionary theory, who believe that the genetic code is irreducibly complex…. Engineered devices are generally designed to work just above the point of failure, so that any tampering with their construction will result in catastrophe…. But nature does not have that option. To survive … organisms must be able to tolerate random mutations, deletions and recombination events.
In other words, here we have yet another prediction of intelligent design creationism which has been blown apart by scientific experiment.
I encourage reading the whole thing - very instructive.
Tags: creationism, e coli, experiment, mutation
