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Another waste of money on this "study." Hm...any time you put two living things together that are disparate in strength and/or size, the stronger one will win, will it not? Okay - unless the weaker one has weapons. But barring external things like that, natural selection will favor the stronger. Do not really need a study to reach that conclusion!

Another waste of money on this "study." Hm...any time you put two living things together that are disparate in strength and/or size, the stronger one will win, will it not?

You're not reading the article correctly.

There weren't two living things put together to fight it out. There was a single strain of bacteria. Over time, mutation caused new strains to evolve. At one point, there were 6 vying for dominance. One finally came dominate all the rest.

This stain was not part of the original culture. It evolved.

Another waste of money on this "study."

I'm getting the distinct idea you didn't understand the article. You get that different genotypes were selected by fitness (the primary fitness criteria being efficiency of high-heat metabolism), but you seem not to realize that all but one of the genotypes competing for dominance were not present in the original population. This is an example of novel beneficial mutations being fixed in a population due to natural selection.

natural selection will favor the stronger. Do not really need a study to reach that conclusion!

You think this research was done just to provide evidence that natural selection occurs? Yes, you definitely didn't understand the article.

Scientists aren't arguing any more about whether natural selection, or evolution, or genetic drift, etc. occur. Sorry to disappoint, but that train has left the station. Rather, scientists perform experiments such as this to try to determine how and in which specific ways they occur, under what conditions.

In this case, the experiment examined the apparent number of evolutionary pathways available for this fitness test. The most interesting part, in my opinion, is the observation that four of the six differentiating genetic variations occurred in regions which are identical in heat-resistant and non-heat-resistant strains.

There's a lot that's interesting here. Don't be bored simply because these scientists aren't focused on convincing you that the most basic tenets of biology are correct.