Re: Lenski experiments: an important correction

On 5/10/24 2:05 PM, Ernest Major wrote:

On 10/05/2024 21:31, Arkalen wrote:

I recently found out that Richard Lenski of the eponymous long-term E.coli evolution experiment had a blog, and in it I found a correction I thought was relevant to the way those experiments are typically invoked as evidence in evolution/creationism debates:
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https://telliamedrevisited.wordpress.com/2024/04/01/a-small-correction/
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I hope we'll all have the integrity to take this new information into account properly.

 Did you look at the date? I suspect it's an April Fool. (Or did you identify it as an April Fool, and ran with it?)

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"Since transferring the LTEE to Jeff Barrick’s lab at UT-Austin in 2022, we’ve been going over the old lab notebooks, making sure everything looks good. It turns out, though, that I made a small error when I started the LTEE back in 1988. I thought that transferring 10 ml into 10 ml was a hundred-fold dilution because there’s a 0 right there after each of the 1s, and 100 has two zeros. QED: a hundred-fold dilution. Right?
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Well, it turns out I was a bit off. That’s only a two-fold dilution because, apparently, the correct way to do the math is 10 / (10 + 10) = 1/2. Who knew? New math, I guess. Anyhow, everyone in the lab thought I had figured it out, since I was the perfesser, and they just kept doing the same thing all these years. So instead of 75,000 generations, it was only something like 11,250 when we sent the ^H^H^H^H^H^Hstupid amazing LTEE to Taxes. Oh well, still a big number.
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We also discovered another tiny error. You know, I always thought some ^H^H^H^H^H^Hsucker hard-working student came in and did the transfers on weekends and holidays. I never quite knew who it was, but I figured someone did the ^H^H^H^H^H^Hunpaid ^H^H^H^work transfers. Well, it turns out, not so much. OK, never. Fridays were ok at 40%, and Mondays were even better at 53%. On Tuesdays, we maxed out at 73%. Not bad! We trailed off a tad at 59% and 47% on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
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Anyhow, after correcting for these tiny oversights, the LTEE had gone past 4,300 generations before we sent it down to Taxes. Speaking of Taxes, I hope I don’t get audited again this year. But I hear you can stall if you’re a big shot. Being a PI qualifies, right?"
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You beat me to it!  This from the 01Apr19 entry is my favorite:
"The LTEE has been running for more than 31 years and over 71,000 generations. It’s time to close up shop, as of today.
It’s been a hell of a lot of work, and we have almost nothing to show for it. As some brilliant commentators have noted around the web, the creatures in the flasks are still just bacteria—creatures, just as they were created.
If you read the first LTEE paper*, you’ll see we predicted the bacteria should become yeast by about 5,000 generations, nematodes at 15,000 generations or so, and fruit flies by 30,000 generations, maybe 35,000 at the outside.
After that, we’d have to stop the experiment anyhow, because we wouldn’t be able to freeze and bring them back alive any longer.
Plus, we’d have to get IRB approval for human experimentation if we ran it much past 50,000 generations.
Well, we’ve given the LTEE all this time, and still … they’re just bacteria. Same old same old.  I guess we’ve proven that Charles Darwin was wrong after all."