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 that has long bedeviled biologists: If we could start the world over again, would life evolve the same way?
The post If the World Started Over, Would Life Evolve the Same Way? appeared first on WIRED.
from WIRED » Science http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661470/s/3f158149/sc/4/l/0L0Swired0N0C20A140C10A0Cevolution0Epaths0Efitness0C/story01.htm
via Science News
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