irreverent? More like irrelevant. And I doubt seriously that the issue was to prove proof of evolution via mutation and selection. That is so old hat as to be not worth the time. More likely the study was to look at HOW evolution was happening. That some strains got to the same place by the same mutations is pretty interesting to me. And I would guess guess that these lines were started from a plated culture such that all strains would date back to a single cell at the start of the experiment. So, no, the mutations did not pre-exist in the strains.
