Submission + - Evolution Fails More Often than it Succeeds
Hugh Pickens writes: "Olivia Judson writes in the NY Times about the illusion that evolution is more powerful than it is because we keep studying evolutionary rescues, not evolutionary failures and are misled by laboratory experiments on the resilience of species. "Whether a population can evolve to cope with new circumstances depends on how much underlying genetic variation there is: do any individuals in the population have the genes to cope, even barely, with the new environment, or not?" writes Judson. "If not, everybody dies, and it's game over." Judson posits a population of algae living for generations in a comfy freshwater pool where due to a ghastly accident the pool becomes super-salty. Will the algae evolve and survive? "If the population immediately goes extinct, you have no experiment (at least, not one you can publish)." Judson adds that where no previous capacity exists, evolving a brand new trait can be a slow and haphazard affair and writes that in one noted case it took bacteria 31,000 generations to evolve the capacity to process an alternative food source. "If most organisms have to wait 31,000 generations to evolve a useful new trait they will probably go extinct first. Worse, many natural populations are shrinking fast, further reducing their evolutionary potential. In short, we can expect that if the environment continues to change as rapidly as it is at the moment many creatures will fail to meet their evolve-by dates.""
