Since you dove right in and took the bait, and proceeded to proclaim this as evolution in the laboratory, and accepted her experiment without qualification, I propose that they continue with this experiment to validate their absurd claims. I know it can hurt for darwinists to actually follow a premise to conclusion, but keep reading and I promise it won't hurt TOO much.
My conjecture is that the resistant algae existed in the population, and only came to the fore when it became obvious that the resistant ones were the only ones still undergoing mitosis (the rest were eaten, of course).
WHERE THIS CAN BE DISPROVED is if she were to then take the fully-resistant algae (and this time, ONLY the resistant algae, not a mixed sample with both resistant and fast-growing algae) and introduce it into an environment that DID NOT FAVOR resistance, but rather favored FAST GROWTH. In fact, make it so that their little cellular lives DEPENDED on fast growth, just like in the first experiment, if you want to be dramatic.
If she guarantees that the population starts with ONLY those algae that are resistant, then she should be able to reverse the conditions in the first test, and "evolve" them back to the way they supposedly were when they were supposed to favor fast growth and not resistance.
It won't work, of course. You know it, I know it, and she knows it -- but hey, don't let a nice story and a thesis premise get in the way of logic.
Either they can cause laboratory evolution, or they can't. If they can (and they have now stated that they CAN), they can reverse the changes.
Should make for a nice Doctoral thesis this time.
Of course, there won't BE a doctoral thesis, because the experiment will prove that she had a contaminated population to begin with when she is unable to reverse the changes from a non-contaminated population of resistant-only algae to a population of fast-growing algae.
"I know it can hurt for darwinists to actually follow a premise to conclusion, but keep reading and I promise it won't hurt TOO much."
Instead of beating around the bush, why don't you tell us how it all happened?
I disagree. I am confident you would evolve more rapidly growing algae by selective pressure on a monoclonal culture.
So why don't you try it?
That is evolution
It won't work, of course. You know it, I know it, and she knows it -- but hey, don't let a nice story and a thesis premise get in the way of logic.
Why won't it work? Evolution of resistance from non-resistant bacteria works, why not the other way round?
Of course that doesn't explain how resistance evolves in colonies starting from a single cell.
Actually they were all eaten by the rotifers. The resistant strain was able, a greater percentage of the time, to pass through the rotifer undigested. (The evolutionary trade-off was that the resistant strain couldn't reproduce as fast as the others.)
I don't know what the heck "mitosis" has to do with anything, but the researchers never claimed anything like what you're making a big show of refuting. I haven't seen the full article, but I read the abstract earlier today. They started with clones, I think two fast growing types and one digestion resistant type. There was never any claim that the types evolved during the experiment. The experiment started with them.
The point, if I understood what I read, was to track evolution (changes in population genotypes) in real time, and thereby prove that the rates and patterns of the evolution matched a mathematical model the experimenters had previously proposed.