jgnat,
I read the whole article. There was a self-congratulatory tone to the article. However, this seems to be the point:
"the granddaddy of these experiments--the 11-year, 24,000-generation E. coli cultures in Lenski's laboratory--is telling stories about predictability, chance, and history that other experiments have echoed. All 12 of Lenski's cultures experience the same stresses: a daily boom-and-bust cycle, in which the bacteria are transferred to fresh glucose medium every 24 hours, then undergo 6 hours or so of plenty followed by 18 hours of starvation. All 12 lines have adapted to this regimen; when the researchers do a head-to-head comparison between the evolved bacteria and the ancestral strain, plucked from the freezer and revived, the descendants now grow about 60% faster in their standard glucose-containing medium. All 12 populations show other parallel changes, too--for example, a still-unexplained, twofold increase in cell size."
Big deal. They started with bacteria and ended with bigger bacteria. It's still bacteria. Rather than supporting Macro (Darwinian) Evolution, this seems to demonstrate the incredible resistence of organism to change outside of their "kind" over time. How do you go from this to the outrageous, sweeping claims Darwin made?