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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) by maxwell demon on Saturday October 04 2014, @01:14PM
To make an analogy: They made a simple air expansion experiment, found that the air expands the same way twice, and conclude that the weather would result in the same way.
Yes, the expansion of a gas is highly predictable despite the movement of individual atoms not being very predictable over the long time. But that does not mean that it is completely predictable in all situations.
And anyway, even if you could with 100% reliability predict how evolution reacts to environmental factors, if we started over, those environmental factors would certainly differ. To make an extreme example: What is the probability that a dinosaur-killing comet would again hit at the equivalent point in time?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 04 2014, @01:32PM
Well, let's think this through. The earth is 4.9 billion years old. Dinosaurs were around for 1.3 billion of those years. Astronomers today have cataloged over 740 million objects larger than a house within our solar system alone that could potentially collide with earth and produce an extinction-type event.
Pardon my notation (SN _needs_ to support MathML!), but if we do the stats here, we find that: d[E(1,300,000,000; 740,000,000) / (1,300,000,000 * 740,000,000)]/dX * d[740,000,000/1,300,000,000]dY = 0.641. So that's about a 1 in 3 chance of it happening again.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday October 04 2014, @04:08PM
The meteorite striking at the beginning of the dinosaur era would have had a very different effect on evolution than the meteorite striking at the time it did.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.