[PatrickHenry]

To investigate how the trait might have evolved, Anatoli Pavlov and his colleagues from the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in St Petersburg tried to induce it in E. coli.

They blasted the bugs with enough gamma rays to kill 99.9 per cent of them, let the survivors recover, and then repeated the process. During the first cycle just a hundredth of the lethal human dose was enough to wipe out 99.9 per cent of the bacteria, but after 44 cycles it took 50 times that initial level to kill the same proportion.

Lab-induced evolution bump.

[VadeRetro]

. . . after 44 cycles it took 50 times that initial level to kill the same proportion.

Not bad for 9 hours 22 minutes of work!

[Aric2000]

Come on Patrick, you know that Evolution is a theory and all who claim to study it are charlatans....

watch for the blue man and his crazy zealots to get on here and explain how this DOES NOT prove evolution or that it never happened.

Pretty cool experiment though.

Survival of the fittest in a record amount of time.

[RightWhale]

It's an interesting experiment. Probably not proof of Martians over any Confidence Interval. Would they let us do this in Sophomore chemlab?

[AndrewC]

During the first cycle just a hundredth of the lethal human dose was enough to wipe out 99.9 per cent of the bacteria, but after 44 cycles it took 50 times that initial level to kill the same proportion.

Lab-induced evolution

What does 50 times one one hundredth come out to?

I'll give you a hint 50 * .01 = 0.5. Their numbers don't hunt.

[dubyagee]

Lab-induced evolution bump.

They were bugs before and they're bugs now. Micro-evolution bump. ; * )