Experimental Evolution

So, the science I used to do, BH (before Hannah), is experimental evolution. If you have a question about how evolution works, you can either examine the fossil record and make inferences, examine DNA sequence data and make inferences, follow a population in the wild and see what happens, or, establish a population of some organism in a lab in a highly controlled environment, and let them evolve. The last is experimental evolution. It’s best to use an organism that grows quickly so you can observe a large number of generations. My favourite is bacteria – especially Escherichia coli. If you take a flask of E. coli and dilute it back 1/100, you get roughly 6-7 generations of growth until the culture gets back to its original density. Then, if you’re Prof. Richard Lenski, then you do this daily transfer of bacteria to fresh medium, for 20 odd years, and you can accumulate 50,000 generations of evolution. An even bigger bonus, is that you can freeze samples as you go along. It’s like having a fossil record that you can bring back to life whenever you want. And then, if you’re Prof. Richard Lenski, you hire me as a postdoc, and make me an extremely happy young scientist.

Predictably, this sort of work is controversial, and makes members of the lab targets for the anti-evolution crowd. Creationists. I’m sorry, I mean proponents of Intelligent Design. I’m sorry, I meant the anti-science reactionary lunatic fringe. Here’s a good story: Just recently, Rich, his fantastic grad student and a previous student published a paper on how this evolving E. coli had gained a new trait. In fact, one population of E. coli had learned how to survive on citrate; the inability to metabolise citrate is one of the defining characteristics of E. coli, so this evolutionary innovation is quite interesting. Not to be cowed by something as middling as evidence, the founder of conservapedia.com (because Wikipedia is just too liberal), Andrew Schlafly, wrote Rich asking for the original data, insinuating fraud. The whole correspondence is documented here and has been widely commented on throughout the internet, but I really encourage you to read it. Suffice to say that when I read it, I felt like Will Ferrel in Elf, bursting with joy and pride that Santa is coming to town. SANTA!!! I KNOW HIM!!!

The whole affair can be viewed from a number of angles but the most disturbing to me is the conflict between science and faith. Is there any other conflict that defines western civilization better? Is it naïve of me to think that this conflict is false? In my most cynical I think sometimes that Christianity has been moulded into something so totalitarian that Jesus would not recognize it. In my most dreamy I think science and religion explore different regions of the feeling of wonder. Neither can answer all questions, and neither, in its most pure, should pretend to. And evolution – why, why is this subject so scary? I think that deep down those of the religious persuasion worry that a universe with evolution in it leaves no room for God. I remember in particular my first lecture in Evolution 200 at the University of Victoria, a survey course. My prof was a weird troll who had spent far too many years in Northern BC studying sticklebacks. The first question he asked the class of three hundred freshmen students was “How many of you don’t believe in evolution?” Surprisingly, four students raised their hands. Surprisingly, because the University of Victoria was probably the biggest bastion of the hippy left in Canada. He then asked “How many of you don’t believe in gravity?” and I thought, oh he is SO going to get it for this! He continued: “The reason I say this is that gravity and evolution probably have the same amount of experimental evidence. If your worldview is based on evidence, then you cannot discount evolution. But what we don’t know, and can’t know, is how it started and why.”

Maybe that’s the place for God. Is it so scary to think that a whole planet, all the plants, animals, bacteria, insects, evolved from minute, random interactions, over millennia? How is what resolved from that not MORE beautiful and precious? To think that all this life, delicately balanced, is the result of innumerable accidents – how is that not wondrous? And maybe, a God who could make a universe complicated enough for His beings to get lost in its beauty, to spend their lives investigating how it works, is a God big enough and glorious enough for me to believe in.