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OK, but they cant be immediately erased as you said. Natural selection would only cause the calculation to restart at the next generation, therefore the probability of 100^26 would occur at each iteration.



How often must I repeat that evolution does not work this way? It works in small consecutive steps, like characters in a sentence. The characters already written are preserved in the gene pool when they aren't deleterious. Evolution never suddenly creates a sentence as a whole.

The 100*26/2 seconds are calculated this way. Imagine you want to write "creationism requires Voodoo.". The monkey just types "a"..."z" in random order. The average number of different letters you need until hitting "c" is 13 (half of the letters available). If we allow the monkey to hit the same key several times, it would be 26. We now have the "c" and the monkey continues to type. Everything but the "r" is now erased. Again it needs 13 seconds average time to hit the "r". And so on. Resulting in 1300 seconds for a 100 character sentence. I hope this is understandable.

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for the cave fish you now have a replication period of 1 day, because drosphilia lay eggs every day(and I have done experiments with drosphilia so I know this experiencially). Using the same process of 2 mutations per generation, now you have reduced your period from 100,000 years to 100,000 days.

If you replace the cavefish for e.coli bacteria, then your replication period goes way way down to a place where the entire 100,000 years should be easily observable in the lab.



But we have observed lots of mutations on e.coli and drosophila in the lab:

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Chao et al. (1977) grew wild type E. coli B in a chemostat. Once the vessel reached steady state they innoculated it with bacteriophage T7. The bacteria are sensitive to infection by T7. Needless to say, T7 grew like mad on the bacteria. After a short time, though, a mutation attributable to a single gene appeared in a cell surface receptor site which gave the bacteria complete resistance to T7. This bacterial stain was designated B1. Shortly after this a mutation occured in the virus which allowed it to infect strain B1 (strain T7.1). A second mutation occurred in B1 which made it resistant to this second virus strain as well as to the original virus strain (strain B2). All five of these critters happily coexisted in the same chemostat.



There were also mutations observed on drosophila. Other bacteria aquired the ability to eat nylon. However - what else can a bacteria develop in a chemostat with a bacteriophage, other than resistence to that bacteriophage? Species only aquire features within their possibilities and on selection pressure from the environment. For instance, you won't ever see a bacterium to grow ears or eyes. We can't observe in a lab what you call "macro-mutations". Large scale mutations only develop on complex species, and require many steps and a lot of time.

What you could see, theoretically, in a lab is the evolution of a new fly or bacteria species. I don't know if this was observed so far, but I think it's entirely possible.

However, "macro-mutations" leading to speciation are very well observed in nature - in the fossil record. Birds evolved from dinosaurs and mammals evolved from reptiles within some 10 million years. We have enough transient fossils to conclude that we observed most steps of both evolutions.