Pseudomonas fluorescens bacteria viewed with an electron microscope DENNIS KUNKEL MICROSCOPY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
There has been much theoretical debate about whether and how organisms can evolve to become better at evolving, but now a team of researchers has made it happen in a lab – and documented almost every single mutation along the way.
Michael Barnett at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany and his colleagues put bacteria in an alternating environment where they had to evolve to survive. Many lineages of bacteria died out, but some became better and faster at evolving.
