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To: Right Wing Professor

After reading the complete article, I would hardly characterize Behe as being anything other than sceptical of Lenski's work.


62 posted on 09/26/2005 4:06:57 PM PDT by connectthedots
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To: connectthedots
After reading the complete article, I would hardly characterize Behe as being anything other than sceptical of Lenski's work.

I don't see where Behe is at all skeptical of Lenski's work. Behe in fact specifically brings up Lenski's work, and says if anything cool came out of it, that would convince him. And Lenski says something cool has in fact come out of it. We'll have a wait a couple of weeks to find out what that is.

Behe said he might find the mainstream scientists' argument compelling if they were to observe evolutionary leaps in the laboratory. He pointed to an experiment by Richard Lenski, a professor of microbial ecology at Michigan State University, who has been observing the evolution of E. coli bacteria for more than 15 years. "If anything cool came out of that," Behe said, "that would be one way to convince me."

Behe said that if he was correct, then the E. coli in Lenski's lab would evolve in small ways, but would never change in such a way that the bacteria would develop entirely new abilities.  

In fact, that is what appears to have happened. Lenski said his experiment was not intended to explore this aspect of evolution, but "we have recently discovered a pretty dramatic exception, one where a new and surprising function has evolved," he said.

63 posted on 09/26/2005 4:23:38 PM PDT by Right Wing Professor (Why is FR censoring mainstream science?)
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