Sunday, December 1, 2013

Elizabeth Pennisi writes about Richard Lenski's long-term evolution experiment

Elizabeth Pennisi has written about the long-term evolution experiment of Richard Lenski [The Man Who Bottled Evolution]. The experiment is in it's 25th year and it is entirely appropriate that Science magazine devotes several pages to describing the results. There have been some remarkable discoveries.

But I want to focus on a couple of things that Pennisi says in her article. There has also been a discussion on Panda's Thunb: Lenski’s experiment: 25 years and 58,000 generations. Pennisi writes ...
Lenski's humble E. coli have shown, among other things, how multiple small mutations can prepare the ground for a major change; how new species can arise and diverge; and that Gould was mistaken when he claimed that, given a second chance, evolution would likely take a completely different course. Most recently, the colonies have demonstrated that, contrary to what many biologists thought, evolution never comes to a stop, even in an unchanging environment.
Let's talk about two issues in that paragraph.

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