Re. Lenski et M. Travisano, DYNAMICS OF ADAPTATION AND DIVERSIFICATION - A 10,000-GENERATION EXPERIMENT WITH BACTERIAL-POPULATIONS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United Statesof America, 91(15), 1994, pp. 6808-6814
We followed evolutionary change in 12 populations of Escherichia coli
propagated for 10,000 generations in identical environments. Both morp
hology (cell size) and fitness (measured in competition with the ances
tor) evolved rapidly for the first 2000 generations or so after the po
pulations were introduced into the experimental environment, but both
were nearly static for the last 5000 generations. Although evolving in
identical environments, the replicate populations diverged significan
tly from one another in both morphology and mean fitness. The divergen
ce in mean fitness was sustained and implies that the populations have
approached different fitness peaks of unequal height in the adaptive
landscape. Although the experimental time scale and environment were m
icroevolutionary in scope, our experiments were designed to address qu
estions concerning the origin as well as the fate of genetic and pheno
typic novelties, the repeatability of adaptation, the diversification
of lineages, and thus the causes and consequences of the uniqueness of
evolutionary history. In fact, we observed several hallmarks of macro
evolutionary dynamics, including periods of rapid evolution and stasis
, altered functional relationships between traits, and concordance of
anagenetic and cladogenetic trends. Our results support a Wrightian in
terpretation, in which chance events (mutation and drift) play an impo
rtant role in adaptive evolution, as do the complex genetic interactio
ns that underlie the structure of organisms.