14 DAY TRIAL // A group of investigators recently discovered that some organisms may outlive others, even if they are less adapted to their environments than the latter. The finding came as a shock for evolutionary biologists, who have now set out to clear this mystery.
The theory of evolution through natural selection was first proposed by Charles Darwin, and its tenants have been verified over and over again for more than a century. Yet, the new findings have nothing in common with how these organisms were supposed to behave under the said tenants.
The basic premise in the theory is that nature favors the survival of the species that is most fit to take advantage of its environment. Those who are incapable of doing so must evolve new adaptation mechanisms, or face extinction.
Instances of this occurring have been recorded countless times, and yet experts at the Michigan State University were able to discover poorly-adapted organisms that survived longer than their fully-adapted counterparts. This should not happen according to theory.
In a paper published in the March 18 issue of the top journal Science, MSU microbial ecology professor Richard Lenski and his team explain how the fight for survival can take on new angles and complex meaning that were not even hypothesized to exist before.
With funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the team began shedding more light on the intricate and complex nature of evolution, adaptation, natural selection, and the equilibriums that form between them.
“This remarkable long-term study continues to yield surprises, providing unprecedented detail on the richness and complexity of evolution," explains scientist Saran Twombly.
“In this case, experiments reveal how and why the tradeoff between long-term success and short-term gain confers evolutionary success, providing evidence of a compromise long theorized to exist,” she adds.
Twombly holds an appointment as a program manager with the NSF Division of Biological Infrastructure, which provided the funds for the MSU investigation.
According to Lenski, the new experiments were conducted on Escherichia Coli bacteria, a microorganism commonly used for such research. Two different genotypes were involved, of which one was fit to the culture environment, whereas the other was just introduced.
Though the latter was at an initial disadvantage, experts determined it was more likely to express the type of important, beneficial mutations that in the end assured its survival over the adapted genotype.
Video Credit: NSF