Michael Desai from Harvard University created hundreds of identical worlds in order to watch evolution displays its natural selection work. Every of his meticulously controlled environments is home to a separate strain of bakers yeast. Every 12 hours or so, Desais robot assistants pluck out the quickest increasing yeast in each world, by selecting the fittest to live on and discard the remainder. Michael Desai from that point forward monitors the strains as they evolve over the course of 500 generations. His examining experiment, which other scientists claim is unprecedented in scale, seeks to gain insight into a question that has long bedeviled biologists: It goes like this, if biologists start all over with their examining, would life evolve the same way as today? Theyre a handful of biologists argue that it wouldnt, that chance mutations early in the evolutionary journey of a species will profoundly influence its fate. Desai said by paraphrasing an idea first put forth by the biologist Stephen Jay Gould in the 1980s added, If you replay the tape of life, you might have one initial mutation that takes you in a totally different direction. According to results published in Science back in June, all of Desais yeast varieties arrived at roughly the precise evolutionary endpoint regardless which precise genetic/phenotypic path each strain took, et al!
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 20:44:28 +0000
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