6476963
story
Comments: 461 +- Science: Observing Evolution Over 40,000 Generations on Sunday October 18, @04:01PM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Sunday October 18, @04:01PM
from the every-day-in-every-way dept.
from the every-day-in-every-way dept.
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicbiotech.gif); width:42px; height:65px;
biotech
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicscience.gif); width:62px; height:75px;
science
Last year we discussed the work of Richard Lenski, who has been breeding E. coli for 21 years in a laboratory in Michigan. Then, the news was that Lenski's lab had caught direct, reproducible evidence of a genetic mutation with functional consequences for an organism. Now Lenski's lab has published in Nature a major study comparing adaptive and random genetic changes in 40,000 generations of E. coli (abstract here). "Early changes in the bacteria appeared to be largely adaptive, helping them be more successful in their environment. 'The genome was evolving along at a surprisingly constant rate, even as the adaptation of the bacteria slowed down,' [Lenski] noted. 'But then suddenly the mutation rate jumped way up, and a new dynamic relationship was established.' By generation 20,000, for example, the group found that some 45 genetic mutations had occurred, but 6,000 generations later a genetic mutation in the metabolism arose and sparked a rapid increase in the number of mutations so that by generation 40,000, some 653 mutations had occurred. Unlike the earlier changes, many of these later mutations appeared to be more random and neutral. The long-awaited findings show that calculating rates and types of evolutionary change may be even more difficult to do without a rich data set."
Related Stories
Bacteria Make Major Evolutionary Shift In the Lab 1185 comments
Because I don't need to worry about finances I can ignore Microsoft
and take over the (computing) world from the grassroots.
-- Linus Torvalds
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2010 Geeknet, Inc.
fuck that (Score:5, Funny)
god did it
Re:fuck that (Score:5, Insightful)
god did it
Which one of them?
Parent
Re:fuck that (Score:4, Funny)
Is a "your mom" joke appropriate in this particular case? :>
Parent
Re:fuck that (Score:5, Funny)
god did it
Haha I thought it was funny.
It reminded me of Bill Hicks, the master of the use of comedy for the opening of minds.
"[The Earth being] 12,000 years old. I asked the guy, c'mon man, dinosaur fossils, what's the deal? He goes, 'God put those here to test our faith'. I think God put you here to test MY faith, dude. I think I figured this out. That's what this guy said -- does that bother anyone here, the idea that GGOODD might be fuckin' with our heads? Anyone have trouble sleeping restfully with that thought in their head? God's runnin' around, burying fossils, 'huh huh huh, we'll see who believes in me now! Huh huh, I'm a prankster God, I am killing me ha ha ha". You die and go before St. Peter, he says 'Did you believe in dinosaurs?' Well yeah, there were fossils everywhere! 'What are you, an idiot, God was fuckin' with you! Giant flyin' lizards, you moron, that's one of God's EASIEST jokes!' It seemed so plausible, aaaahhhhhh!"
Parent
Re:fuck that (Score:4, Funny)
I prefer this bible reading [youtube.com] :-)
Parent
Creationists response: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Creationists response: (Score:5, Informative)
51% of people believe god created man as he is.
30% said god created us and we can evolve
15% say humans evolved with out god.
These figures are a terrifying example of humans ability to deny what should be blatantly obvious. If we can do this imagine how many things people must get completely wrong no matter the level of obviousness.
Parent
Re:Creationists response: (Score:5, Insightful)
Meant as a joke but it will sadly happen like this. It is incredible that we can have this level of clear investigation into evolution. And it is something that people have innately known since early agriculture (replanting grain using the best seeds, genetic engineering). Yet in the US:
51% of people believe god created man as he is.
30% said god created us and we can evolve
15% say humans evolved with out god.
These figures are a terrifying example of humans ability to deny what should be blatantly obvious. If we can do this imagine how many things people must get completely wrong no matter the level of obviousness.
These figures are incredible examples of how much money [virtualtourist.com] you can make on peoples stupidity.
Parent
Re:Creationists response: (Score:4, Insightful)
That is not entirely fair.
It's more like 45% against the 51% which is far less terrifying than you make it out to be. What about the other 4%?
I'm all for the impartial analysis of data and I fully recognize that being proven wrong can be just as valuable as being proven right.
Faith is not the enemy of Science, and therefore, the enemy of logic and reason. I have always believed that Faith is simply the believe in a hypothesis that currently lacks the ability to reach any conclusions. Science is not without Faith in that regard. Faith can be a healthy component of our existence and provide meaning, purpose, and comfort. Regardless of your opinions, it is a well used coping mechanism by the majority of the planet to deal with the very fact we exist and we have questions without answers.
The problem that you seem to have, and that I have as well, is when people who have Faith (sometimes commonly grouped into the Christian Faith) ignore all evidence in front of them and hold on to beliefs that have already been proven wrong beyond all reasonable doubt. Those people that would belligerently refuse the truth that has been revealed to them because admitting they are wrong somehow destroys their faith.
More problematic, and downright destructive and counter-productive to human growth, are those that will not only refuse to have a dynamic adaptive Faith that can change with new data and observations, but cannot accept anyone else having a Faith different than their own.
That 30% do not fall into that category necessarily are certainly not the most destructive. They are acknowledging that evolution as a process is real and observable. I cannot see how that is denying anything you hold to be "blatantly obvious". Neither you or I can prove that God does not exist and currently we have no data or observations that can disprove that God did not set into motion the creation of the Earth, and through evolutionary processes, all life on Earth. Of course, I think we have reasonably disproved the whole so-called 7 day "theory" and that Earth is only a few thousand years old. However, to me that only proves the Bible was a book created by a bunch of men with vivid imaginations. Disproving the Bible, in whole or in part, does not disprove the existence of diving being(s).
Your post is rather insulting to that 30%. I don't think they are your "enemies" in this case or part of the problem. Heck, the very fact they are willing to acknowledge Evolution means they are meeting you half way and can be reasoned with.
The 51% are probably a lost cause. That is not intended as an insult, but people can take that for what's it worth. When Faith cannot change because it has been delivered by Doctrine, than it is not really their Faith at all. I agree with you and those people concern me greatly since they seem to like laws that legislate their Faith upon others which is deeply and tragically ironic considering that my country (USA) was ostensibly founded with opposition to such behavior.
Parent
No, this is a creationist's response (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/aid/v2/n1/a-poke-in-the-eye [answersingenesis.org]
"Previous research has shown that wild-type E. coli can utilize citrate when oxygen levels are low."
In some of my previous posts, I've tried to convey the idea that perhaps we're not seeing new characteristics generate - rather we're seeing a reconfiguration / recombination / whatever of existing information.
As the quote says, it already knew how to use citrate. Creationists are fine with that. I think when you look closely at each exampl
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If it is so blatantly obvious, what is your discrimination criteria between the last two options?
I mean, most people say that they can't tell, but since you take the opposite approach, I'm curious what your data is?
Oh? Just your presupposition that God doesn't exist proves that God doesn't
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Standard nonsense and moving the goal posts. 30 years ago creationists defined "macroevolution" to mean speciation. Now they use it to mean some vague broader category. Indeed, speciation at this point is so accepted that Answers in Genesis one of the largest young earth creationist ministries list the claim that speciation does not occur as an argument that creationists should not use. http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-answers/topic/arguments-we-dont-use [answersingenesis.org]. As far as I can tell, "macroevolution" when used
Re:Creationists response: (Score:5, Informative)
http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Lenski_affair [rationalwiki.com]
Parent
Re:Creationists response: (Score:4, Insightful)
Richard Lenski could have saved himself a lot of time if he had asked himself "was any new information created when it mutated" . The answer of course is NO!
Even though you're a troll, I'm feeling generous today. This is completely and utterly wrong, and if you understood what information was, you'd agree with me — and all of biology — that evolution occurs within a species. (Speciation will have to wait for another day.)
Claude Shannon, of Bell Labs fame, invented Information Theory in the late 1940s for the utterly practical purpose of cramming more data onto copper wires. What he discovered, with a bit of a shock quite soon after, was that the equations were identical to those describing thermodynamic entropy. In fact, thermodynamic entropy turned out to be a special case of Information Theory. After discovering this, Shannon took to calling his discovery "information entropy".
Fundamentally, thermodynamic entropy is the unpredictableness of a physical system. The more unpredictable a physical system is, the more information it takes to describe the system. This was the link between the two.
About 10 years later in computer science, two researchers named Kolmogorov and Chaitin [wikipedia.org] independently invented a hypothetical measure for the complexity of any arbitrary data: measure the length of the shortest possible computer program that can produce that data. Again, random data has the highest complexity: if the data has a pattern, then a short program can compute the pattern starting from a tiny piece of the data; but if there is no pattern in the data, the program must be large enough to duplicate a full copy of the data.
Getting back to biology: mutations add randomness to DNA. Therefore, they make the DNA less predictable, and therefore they add information and complexity to the DNA. After that, natural selection acts on that mutation: if the mutation was harmful for the cell, the cell makes fewer copies of itself; if the mutation was beneficial for the cell, the cell makes more copies of itself.
(Aside: It helps that DNA duplication is a fairly common event, especially in kingdoms like the animal kingdom where virus-like transposons infect all of our genomes. If you're a cell, and you have two copies of a gene, and one copy is mutated into something useless by a mutation, then nothing bad happens to you. In fact, if having the extra copy was a bad thing, making the copy shut up or do something else is a good thing. A lot of new proteins arose because the gene coding for them was copied then modified until it finally did something useful again, like the mammal blood clotting cascade or the photoreceptor pigments for color vision.)
Natural selection provides a filter: it layers meaning on top of the information in the DNA, in much the same way that "English" is a filter that layers meaning on top of "light-emitting screen that displays funny squiggly marks". If information "A" means "cell lives", and information "B" means "cell dies", then natural selection is the process that distinguishes between "A" and "B" by giving them meaning. Information is complexity. Information is unpredictability. Information is randomness. Information is not meaning. Meaning is something you do with information, not something the information inherently has.
Once you understand the difference between "information" and "meaning", you necessarily realize that DNA was the final, unequivocal proof that microevolution logically must exist in biology and that it's silly to argue otherwise. Your beliefs are contradicted by reality itself.
Parent
Yes, that Lenski (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yes, that Lenski (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Another account of the story is at RationalWiki: http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Lenski_affair [rationalwiki.com]
RationalWiki is a site that exists to poke fun at Conservapedia and the anti-science movement. (I particularly like its WIGO page, "What Is Going On At CP? [rationalwiki.com]".) Conservapedia forbids any mention of RationalWiki, going so far as to ban members who make oblique references to it. In fact, the part of Lenski's letter that was censored on Conservapedia as "Ed.: citation omitted due to spam filter" was, originally, a referenc
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia [wikipedia.org]
A very interesting thought, (Score:3, Interesting)
would be, if you could say, that there are parallels to human evolution.
At first, E. coli adapted to the environment. But when there was nothing to adapt to, because nothing changed anymore, mutation almost switched to a different "mode", where random changes got bigger. My guess: In the battle to stand out of the crowd and become dominant.
Now the parallel would be, that humanity also now dominates the planet, and very little can eradicate whole humanity. So for all of humanity, the risk is very close to zero. Which could mean that now, we also rather fight ourselves, in the battle to stand out and become dominant.
I mean after all, even with "global peace" (something that will never happen), "everyone is equal", and all that stuff, it's still an evolutionary game, where those with even the slightest advantages, will in the end "win".
Just that now we are perhaps evolving in a "mode" where it's not for the best of whole humanity anymore, because that became insignificant.
My guess here, is that this is, how diversification into different species (at the very beginning) starts to happen...
Not Convincing to Public (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not "dramatic" enough to convince the general public of the power of evolution. A more interesting experiment would involve the Mud-skipper fish; a fish that can hop on land for short durations but has no close relationships to amphibians or lung-fish, being the "fan ray" fin type.
I'd like to see an attempt to breed them via nation-wide contests to evolve the fish into a more efficient walker or hopper. Races could be held at high-schools and colleges, and the winners would be bread with other regional winners to produce a more land-friendly next generation. The gradual process could be observed by all.
I discarded the chimp version of this after watching Planet of the Apes :-)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Mmmm, breaded mudskipper.
I thought this sort of thing... (Score:4, Interesting)
took millions of years. Nobody with eyeballs doubts that things change over time. What we're finding out finally is just how long it actually takes for things to change.
Nobel? (Score:3, Insightful)
No Nobel (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, they're saving the next Nobel Prize in Medicine for Obama...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not yet.
The creationists will blindly and steadfastly cling to their mysticism-based pseudoscience until two chimps mate and produce a homo sapiens offspring.
Which of course is not how evolution works.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think you shouldn't participate in any discussions about evolution until you acquire some elementary biology knowledge.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. Evolution is nothing more than organisms adapting genetically to their environment. These bacteria are doing exactly that.
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
ALL mutations are random. If they are advantageous, great, than it is likely that they will be passed along.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If more harmful mutations are being passed along than favorable, then either you're misclassifying mutations are harmful or your population is, in fact, evolving to a dead end that may result in population death.
If it doesn't, then what's the basis for the "harmful" classification?
Re:hmmm (Score:4, Informative)
Evolution is a two-step process - the first part is the production of mutations, which is a random process (and, given how finely balanced organisms are, the majority of these random events will probably be negative, on balance). The second part is selection - if there is genuine competition between these strains, then the beneficial mutations will be selected, so the fact that they are relatively rare will have little effect on their eventual domination of the population.
Parent
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
This also allowed the total population in that group to explode (there's now more food in total, glucose + citrate).
Another cool thing is that this smashes the "Irreducible Complexity" argument. The ability to metabolise citrate is developed by two separate mutations, which, on their own achieve nothing. Some of the populations developed the first mutation and some developed the second one, but none of them had previously developed both. This shows that the "preliminary" mutations were not harmful to the bacteria, so they just "hung around" until one of them was lucky enough to get the second mutation too.
Anyway, look up Lenski's work, I'm sure his papers (and those of his students/colleagues) are better at explaining it all than me...
Parent
Re:hmmm (Score:4, Funny)
*kisses karma goodbye*
My issue in general here (yes, I am a creationist...I'm a delusional moron, I know) is that while 40,000 generations of E. Coli did show some form of usable mutation, it doesn't account for many other inconsistencies with evolution as the be-all and end-all for how we got where we were. My biggest issue is that, to my knowledge, there has never been a documented observance of life coming from non-life.
But the one more relevant to your point about this disproving the concept of irreducible complexity has problems of its own. Yes, there was indeed an evolution of the bacteria being able to process citrate. However, that's a smaller step than, say, if E. Coli bacteria started to be able to perform photosynthesis, or vice versa. There are other extremely wide gaps (asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction, live birth vs. egg laying, visual and audible processing, etc. etc.) that are still a challenge for gradual, incremental evolution to explain. The most immediately memorable example of this for me is the bombardier beetle. The system it's got in place to ward off predators relies on a series of chemicals and an expulsion system that incremental evolution can't account for. If any of those pieces evolved improperly, there would be no fossil record because the beetle would have a Fourth-of-July special internally before it ever got to reproduce.
I'm not one of those crazed creationists who believe that everything we see today is exactly how God created it, but full-blown, evolved-over-billions-of-years-from-a-singularity-filled-with-energy evolution is still a challenge for me to accept. If that makes me $DEROGATORY_COMMENT, well, I already said goodbye to my karma points.
Parent
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
"Look, I believe in evolution, but never has there been found a parent species to something alive today. In other words, scientists can not point at any two distinct species, living or extinct, plant or animal, and say that this species evolved directly from that one."
Of course not. That's kind of like pointing to two leaves on a tree and saying one leaf came from the other. It doesn't work that way. They are both on the terminations of the branches, and the node where they branched into two is in the past. Ordinarily, the common ancestor is long dead. The nice thing with these E. coli is that the researchers kept a portion of the ancestral population intact, and the specimens are clones, so while not the actual ancestor of the lineage that kept going, they are genetically identical.
There are plenty of fossils that are close to branch points, and as more fossils are found there are still plenty of gaps left, as there always will be, but the changes necessary to span those gaps get smaller and smaller as the sampling improves. For example, Anchiornis [wikipedia.org] was just discovered in the last couple of years, and a new specimen described a few weeks ago. Dinosaur? Bird? It's rather arbitrary to decide. It's either a wing-clawed, long-tailed, toothed bird like no modern bird, or it is a flight-feathered, gliding dinosaur. As if they were the leaves on a tree, birds and reptiles look distinct now, but follow the branches back far enough and they get mighty blurred together. This is hardly an isolated example.
There are fish that look so tetrapod-like that when the skull was initially found separately they thought it was a tetrapod [devoniantimes.org]. Then workers found the rest of the body and realized it was a fish. There are other tetrapod-like fish, such as Tiktaalik [uchicago.edu]. But go back 100 years and these species weren't known at all.
I really don't know what more skeptics are expecting. Perfection? It won't happen. It's not like we'll ever have every twig on the tree. Good fossils are rare. But the statistical pattern with increased sampling is quite robust.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
To use an analogy, let's compare the evidence to a murder trial:
Wait, can you put that in a filesystem developer analogy?
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Explain crocodiles. According to the fossil record they have hardly changed from their ancestors millions of years ago. But they *have* changed. And we don't "only find the dead end". There is no dead end if there are descendants. What you're forgetting is that fossilisation only happens in relatively rare circumstances, so the vast majority of the record is not preserved at all. That unfortunately is where the step by step evolution would be easily recognised. But you can still fill in the gaps with insight and close examination. After all, the current generation came from somewhere, and it's pretty unlikely it started from scratch as is.
Regarding crocodiles, the current species get to between 20 and 30 feet in length. Crocs in the Cretaceous period were around 40 feet in length. But back then they were dealing with prey much larger than is available today. Overall, most species on earth are smaller than their ancestors, except of course humans, who have no real predators and are able to take advantage of a wider range of foods.
We have played our part in the destruction of the chain of evidence too. If you buy fish, you may have seen a halibut on the counter. Maybe it's a couple of feet long, probably less. But specimens have been caught that are 7.5 feet long and weigh over 621 pounds. They only get that big through long life, and these days we are catching them before they ever get that big. Future paleontologists will wonder why the "giant halibut" died out relatively suddenly, but there will be no missing link fossils because we ate them.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They already demonstrated the E.Coli bacterium evolving the ability to metabolize citric acid... that makes it a new kid of bacterium (the inability of E.Coli to metabolize citric acid is one of its defining characteristics).
And the color white was a "defining characteristic" of swans until they found a black one.
And the black swan (Cygnus atratus) is, in fact, a separate species. So even by your own argument-by-analogy, you've agreed that the new bacteria should also be considered a new species, and thus evolution has been observed to occur.
Look, I believe in evolution, but never has there been found a parent species to something alive today.
My grandparents have all passed away, but I'm pretty sure I'm still related to my cousins.
In other words, scientists can not point at any two distinct species, living or extinct, plant or animal, and say that this species evolved directly from that one.
We've had plenty of genetic evidence from preserved material to say exactly that. But the big news about Lenski's experiment is that not only do we have living examples of a species which
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You missed the evolution of the ability to metabolize citric acid.
There's no luck involved here- there's just a mindbogglingly high number of mutations and tests of those mutations over the course of history. You say "even over the lifetime of the universe", but it's unclear to me that you really understand just how large a number of generations there have been even since the rise of life on Earth, let alone the entire span of the universe. That's a lot of individuals, a lot of generations, a *lot* of mutat
Re:uhh? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. You are missing the fact that this experiment has been running for the last 20+ years. Time is the major factor here. Furthermore, they did a bit more than simply comparing the DNA from the current strain to the original strain. THey kept samples of strains of the bacteria every 500 generations or so and compared them. Even running parallel experiments using these stored strains allowing them to effectively repeat the experiment in order to understand the evolution of the new metabolic pathway allowing for the utilisation of Citrate.
Parent
Re:uhh? (Score:5, Informative)
A main purpose of the study is to investigate evolution of phenotypes, not just genomes--- i.e. how the functions and capabilities of bacteria change over generations due to evolution. Just showing there was a change in the genetic sequence doesn't do that, since it might be a change that isn't expressed.
Parent
Re:uhh? (Score:4, Informative)
That would be one way to go about it, all right. There are a couple of problems though. Current state of the art DNA sequencing runs somewhere in the range of a few tens of thousands per (for humans, perhaps a bit less for something like E Coli). That's a technological advancement, all right, considering when they first started sequencing genomes it was a billion dollar project. It's also not instantaneous. Much faster than it used to be (years or decades) but not instant. Note that the samples he's looking at are ones that have been frozen periodically over the last twenty years. Apparently the price of sequencing genomes has dropped to the point where his lab has the funding to actually do it now.
The diff part isn't trivial either. The genome for E. Coli is around 5 million base pairs long, which doesn't sound like much, if you're just looking for point mutations. The problem is, there are lots of other things that can happen to a genome besides point mutations. Genes can hop around or get copied into the wrong location, which you might count as no mutation, or one mutation, but either way you still have to figure out where it came from. Also, although E. Coli reproduce asexually, they do share genetic information through conjugation, so you get gene shuffling that way. There's also at least some genetic diversity in the colony, meaning you'll be dealing with several different genomes.
Once you've worked all that out, it's not all that interesting just to look at now vs. then. If you wanted to do that you could go dig frozen bacteria out of ice cores or something. The point of this experiment was to be able to watch as the genome changed. So you have to do lots and lots of comparisons, from samples taken at different times (every 500 generations, IIRC, meaning about 80 timepoints). Oh, and there were multiple, isolated populations.
On top of all that, what's really interesting is functional changes. Counting mutations is fine and all, but you really want to know what (if anything) those mutations are doing. The headline event was a mutation that allowed the E Coli to metabolize citrate, for example.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Easy" DNA sequencing (e.g. short-read sequencing systems) are still rather expensive, and require a good deal of skill. Even archiving and preparing 40,000 samples would be an enormous challenge. The costs for a "full genome" read of an E.Coli genome (say, 1 or 2 lanes on an Illumina short-read sequencer) would run in the
Re:Someone needs to tag this "Inbreeding".. (Score:4, Informative)
Is that are joke or are you intentionally dense? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding [wikipedia.org].
You should be reading this page instead http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asexual_reproduction [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re:Evolution or just surving? (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations! You've just described the process of evolution.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
On this particular subject, and I know this is unrealistic on slashdot, it would be good to read the article. The techniques used in this study were brilliant, they are specifically designed to investigate the criticisms that are usually leveled on studies of evolution and they do so beautifully. I'll try for a quick explanation of why your criticism is invalid.
First, how the experiment worked. They put E. Coli. into dishes with a growth medium of glucose and other nutrients with glucose as the limiting
Re:Mutation does not equal Evolution (Score:4, Informative)
The standard method of identification of bacterial species is to determine what compounds they can eat. E. coli is defined as not being able to eat citrate. They evolved something from E. coli which can eat citrate. The new bacteria is not E. coli by the standard method of identification.
But I guess you're right... it's still just some random nigh-invisible animalcule that nobody really cares about. I mean it didn't turn into a dolphin, did it?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I agree. I've been following physics lately and it's weird how the "scientists" only test micro-gravity -- it's like they are trying avoid building planet size objects for their tests even though it's clearly required before their theory could be taken seriously. "Theory of Gravity", hah!