How a 30-Year Experiment Has Fundamentally Changed Our View of How Evolution Works One evolutionary biologist has been growing bacteria for 30 years. His epic experiment shows that evolution never stops.
It’s 1988. A young scientist sets up a simple evolution experiment involving small colonies of bacteria growing in flasks. To be safe, he tries out two variations, each with slightly different parameters. Though they exist side by side, these two experiments are essentially parallel universes, mirrored versions of each other with just a few pieces swapped out.
Witnessing Evolution At its core, evolution is a paradox. It is driven by a seemingly random process — the appearance of mutations — and yet the results are anything but indiscriminate. Untangling the mechanisms that carve order from chaos is the ultimate goal of Lenski’s experiment.
Generation After Generation In Lenski’s 12 glass universes, the temperature is 37 degrees Celsius, the same as your body’s 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s been 37 C for the past three decades. More than 70,000 generations of bacteria have lived and died inside flasks just like these.
