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In his fourth-floor lab at Harvard University, Michael Desai has created hundreds of identical worlds in order to watch evolution at work. Each of his meticulously controlled environments is home to a separate strain of baker’s yeast. Every 12 hours, Desai’s robot assistants pluck out the fastest-growing yeast in each world — selecting the fittest to live on — and discard the rest. Desai then monitors the strains as they evolve over the course of 500 generations. His experiment, which other scientists say is unprecedented in scale, seeks to gain insight into a question ( http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140717-the-new-science-of-evolutionary-forecasting/ ) that has long bedeviled biologists: If we could start the world over again, would life evolve the same way ?
Many biologists argue that it would not, that chance mutations early in the evolutionary journey of a species will profoundly influence its fate. “If you replay the tape of life, you might have one initial mutation that takes you in a totally different direction,” Desai said, paraphrasing an idea first put forth by the biologist Stephen Jay Gould in the 1980s.
Desai’s yeast cells call this belief into question. According to results published in Science in June ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24970088 ), all of Desai’s yeast varieties arrived at roughly the same evolutionary endpoint (as measured by their ability to grow under specific lab conditions) regardless of which precise genetic path each strain took. It’s as if 100 New York City taxis agreed to take separate highways in a race to the Pacific Ocean, and 50 hours later they all converged at the Santa Monica pier.
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/evolution-paths-fitness/
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 04 2014, @01:09PM
I'm not convinced that having the fastest growth rate really indicates that they're the fittest for survival.
Just look at our modern world. Areas like Africa, India, and Bangladesh have tremendously high population growth rates. Yet these places are, to put it politely, generally complete shitholes in which to live and survive.
The Western world, with its much lower population growth rate, is a significantly better place to live and survive. Energy isn't wasted shitting out tens of children per mother, many of whom will die early, and those who become adults will die relatively young.
Instead, in the West, energy and knowledge are used sensibly to ensure that a small number of children almost all live to become adults, and then survive well into old age.
It isn't just a matter of geography, either. Europe, North America, Australia, Japan and South Korea are vastly different ecosystems, in very different locations. It is all about the people.
The fact that so many of these third-worlders try to flood into places like Europe, North America and Australia should show that the Western way is the fittest.
Fitness is about making the most effective use of the resources that are available. Shitting out numerous children, with this leading to poverty, disease, and hunger, isn't a signal of fitness; it's a signal of a lack of fitness.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by helel on Saturday October 04 2014, @02:46PM
If only the fastest survive and all the rest die then, by definition, they are the fittest. Think of it like chickens. Tastiness is an incredible fitness trait when it makes you one of the most populous birds on the planet.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 04 2014, @07:10PM
Even by that definition, the only reason many Africans and Indians are alive today is because of Western innovations in massive-scale commercial agriculture, combined with billions of dollars in financial assistance provided to African nations and India by Western nations.
I don't consider one to be "fit" if his or her survival is wholly dependent upon others in such a manner.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 04 2014, @05:31PM
I'm not convinced that having the fastest growth rate really indicates that they're the fittest for survival.
Stop saying "survival of the fittest". The point of evolution is survival of the most adaptable species and the extinction of ones that cannot adapt to the changes. It's survival of the fittest to the environmental conditions, not survival of the fittest in modern colloquium. It has nothing to do with "fastest" or "strongest" or "best looking" or "sharpest teeth". It is always which life survives in a given environment when said environment changes.
Fitness is about making the most effective use of the resources that are available
You are wrong on many many levels here. See above. And your examples are wrong too. By almost all measures, people in India are much more efficient with their use of resources than people in the "West". Look up energy usage per capita in India vs. USA. In either case, that has nothing to do with anything. Human race is above evolutionary pressures, at least for now. That's why human population is increasing and will continue to increase until people become busy with other things (like in the "West") or carrying capacity is surpassed and disease and starvation does the job instead. But in either case, this has little to do with the process of Evolution.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Saturday October 04 2014, @06:43PM
The human race is neither "above evolutionary pressures" (whatever that means) nor isolated from them. We have actually been evolving quite rapidly for such a large animal with such a slow reproductive cycle.
The only sense that you could possibly be correct is that since we have created rapid transportation, we have been merging into a single gene-pool, but I'm not convinced that's really happening, and even if it were this still wouldn't isolate us from evolutionary pressures. What you might mean is that our current evolutionary pressures are quite different from those of our ancestors of 10 generations ago. That's probably correct, but changed pressures isn't at all the same as absence of pressure.
It is quite plausible that on a few decades genetic engineering will become common enough that you could reasonably claim that we have isolated ourselves from evolutionary pressures. I would still be dubious, but in that situation there would be reasonable grounds for the claim, and a need to take it seriously. But whenever there is differential survival in a population that isn't due to random chance there are evolutionary pressures....unless the descendants don't reflect their ancestors (which is why genetic engineering might make an arguable difference).
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 04 2014, @08:31PM
The races are negroid, caucasoid, mongoloid, and australoid.
Human is a species.
On top of this, race is a pseudoscientific thing.
Though Abel and Baker may appear to be of the same race, Abel's genome could easily be closer to Charlie's--even though Charlie appears to be of a different race than Abel and Baker.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by art guerrilla on Sunday October 05 2014, @12:57PM
thank you...
some poodles think their shit don't stink, and make a point of putting down the mixed cur dogs,
but we are all the same dog, dog...
some dogs have curly hair, some dogs do not;
some dogs have darker coats, some dogs lighter;
some dogs have larger phenotypes, some smaller;
but we are all the same dog, dog...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 04 2014, @08:29PM
...you only have to be good enough.
As long as you live long enough to produce another generation of viable offspring, you have been successful genetically.
Yes, people have to stop repeating this "fittest" crap.
FTFS: selecting the fittest to live on
This reminds me of the original "Cosmos", where Sagan showed the crabs that got thrown back into the sea because their shells were thought to look like the face of a samurai.
The more a human perceived you to resemble a warrior, the greater chance you would not get eaten by a human that week.
The criterion were completely artificial and outside what would normally drive their evolution.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday October 05 2014, @04:39AM
Within the 'world' provided by the experiment, it was the one and only criterion of fitness and so that's what they adapted for.
As for the real world, we have to also consider that outside influences have changed the 'rules' in Africa in very short order from the standpoint of evolution and social change. We have the same basic genome in the West, but conditions are such that we naturally have less children. Make those conditions true of Africa and the same will happen there.