Is Evolution Predictable?

An anonymous reader writes "C|Net is carrying a story about some research out of Rice University. They are exploring the possibility that we can predict the evolution of a species, given environmental factors." From the article: "Typically, the bacteria can continue to thrive when the temperature hits 73 degrees Celsius (163 degrees Fahrenheit). The experimental strain of bacteria contained a mutated version of a gene that, in the naturally occurring strain of the microbe, produces a protein that made existence possible. They then put these mutant strains in environments where the temperature rose slowly but steadily, and studied how different generations coped with the changing temperature. In the breeding that followed, millions of new mutations of the gene in question were produced, but only about 700 of those variants replicated some of the functionality of the naturally occurring gene."

Comments

Re:Kidding, right?

[Guido von Guido]

Actually, there is such a thing as recurrent mutations. You can measure the rate at which they occur in a population. Depending on what effect a recurrent mutation has, a change in the environment may make a recurrent mutation advantageous. It'd be pretty easy to make predictions about this sort of thing.

The effects of more novel mutations, though, are going to be much less predictable for the reasons you give.

Popular Media Reporting On Real Science

[m0nstr42]

We're all victims here, I think. From TFA: "Conceivably, if scientists can predict how the microbes will adapt to changes in their environment, they can develop antibiotics that won't be rapidly rendered ineffective by stronger, successive generations." That's probably the real goal, the message just gets mangled by some dumbassed reporter.

We've been working at predicting evolution and using evolutionary results to explain why animals have certain characteristics for quite some time. c.f. Evolutionary Game Theory, Behavioral Ecology, Adaptive Dynamics, etc. Of course these are mostly all theoretical results. The guys from TFA are doing experimental research that happens to verify the theories, which is in itself pretty cool - it's hard to do evolutionary experiments for obvious reasons. Using bacteria isn't a particularly new idea, but modern technology is enabling more sophisticated and precise experiments.