Is Dawkins pulling the wool over our eyes?
Dawkins:
“Lenski and a different set of colleagues investigated this phenomenon [bigger cells] by taking two of the [E. coli] tribes, called Ara+1 and Ara-1, which seemed, over 20,000 generations, to have followed the same evolutionary trajectory, and looking at their DNA. The astonishing result they found was that 59 genes had changed their level of expression in both tribes and all 59 had changes in the same direction. Were it not for natural selection, such independent parallelism, in all 59 genes independently, would completely beggar belief. The odds against it happening by chance are stupefyingly large. This is exactly the kind of thing creationists say cannot happen, because they think it is too improbably to have happened by chance. Yet it actually happened. And the explanation, of course, is that it did not happen by chance, but because gradual, step-by-step, cumulative natural selection favoured the same – literally the same – beneficial changes in both lines independently.” The Greatest Show on Earth pp. 124-125
Behe:
“Another change was in a regulatory gene called spoT which affected en masse how fifty-nine other genes worked, either increasing or decreasing their activity. One likely explanation for the net good effect of this very blunt mutation it that it turned off the energetically costly genes that make the bacterial flagellum, saving the cell some energy.” The Edge of Evolution p. 142