from Hacker News

The man who bottled evolution

by ramgorur on 3/2/18, 7:32 AM with 20 comments

• by Kattywumpus on 3/2/18, 5:58 PM

  Whenever I read about this experiment, I think about Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God", and experience a moment of profound disappointment:

  https://tinyurl.com/microcosmicgod

  I won't spoil it for you. It's still a great bedtime read.

• by _greim_ on 3/2/18, 4:56 PM

  > The LTEE is special because it allows the team to “replay” evolution and thereby probe the effects of prior history on later events. After every 75 days (500 generations), the bacteria are frozen. This serves as an organic data backup of sorts, allowing scientists to thaw and revive living “fossils.”

  This is just amazing. Kudos to this team of scientists.

• by rrmm on 3/2/18, 4:13 PM

  This is an amazing experiment which took an amusing detour through scientific denialism via Phyllis Schlafly's son.

  Here's a summary I found surrounding the issue. https://arstechnica.com/features/2008/06/conservapedias-evol...

• by ha8o8le on 3/2/18, 10:28 PM

  I have a friend who is somewhat of a "evolution denier" (he's not religious and actually very intelligent). I was thinking about this from his perspective and would like someone else perspective.

  "On human terms, the LTEE generations span the equivalent of well more than a million years of human evolution."

  Haven't we evolved a lot more in 68,000 generations than the bacteria have? Or put another way, all the bacteria has done in this time period is go from consuming glucose to citrate, nothing else in its shape, structure, etc. So how did humans and other creatures evolve so much over 68,000 generations?

  I am 100% on board with evolution, I'm just curious about this. This is only 6-7 times more generations than when humans split from chimps (quick google search said 6-7 million years ago).

  Is it because we have way more interaction with our environment and these bacteria are just in a little petri dish? Sounds likely.

  Has anyone ever heard of people questioning evolution? I think he was saying something about how impossible it would be to have every single thing we see in nature be pre-written in DNA - it has just been all expressed in genes over the millennia through natural selection.

• by ramgorur on 3/3/18, 1:09 AM

  Harvard medical school did a similar experiment on fast evolution of bacterial resistance to antibiotics on a petri-dish. It also clearly shows the lineage of evolution. Very interesting.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8

• by joobus on 3/2/18, 4:30 PM

  FYI, the ecoli used in the LTEE experiment reproduce asexually, so defining 'evolution' in this sense is entirely at the discretion of the scientists. For sexually reproducing organisms, speciation occurs when an organism can no longer reproduce with its predecessor, a feat which science still can't prove.