The Longest-Running Evolution Experiment
Why Hacker News recommends it
Linked as the go-to overview of the long-running bacteria experiment whenever real-time evolution or resistance comes up.
What it is
Veritasium visits Richard Lenski's lab to explain the decades-long E. coli evolution experiment, which asks how repeatable evolution is and shows bacteria evolving to use a new food source.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2021 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Cites BatteryMountain · 2021-08 · on “Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions”
(Speculation ahead!) Interesting point in video posted recently by Veritasium: Basically, they are doing experiments to track evolution in "realtime" of some organisms. During the conversation the guy mentions that the population growth of their organisms are controlled by adding or removing glucose for them to consume - basically as long as glucose is available, there will be growth. (First 5 minutes of video) This is really not my field at all, but I found it interesting that sugar has that great an effect on growth. Considering how much sugar most humans eat, considering the gross amount of other organisms in our bodies.. there must be some kind of measurable effect on our microbiome by e
Cites reuben364 · 2021-10 · on “The danger of hidden functional roles”
Here is a video on the topic of bacteria in an experiment evolving to use a second source of food: [this video] . I'm not sure if they depend on it being present though.
Cites fernanDOTdo · 2022-12 · on “Recursive Game of Life”
The longest-running evolution experiment uses bacteria and it has been running for more than 30 years. There's a Veritasium video about it: [this video]
Cites vecter · 2023-03 · on “Fungus Candida auris infections spreading across US, CDC warns”
There are two factors now which make things different: 1. As other commenters have pointed out, the ease of spread of any disease is orders of magnitude higher now than it was during cave-man days. With crowded cities, public transit, and air travel, pandemic-level diseases can spread across the world in a matter of days or weeks. 2. Much more importantly, our use of medicines (antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, etc.) have put extreme selective pressure on pathogens to evolve to become resistant to them. We are, in a sense, selectively breeding pathogens that are both good at infecting humans and resistant to our treatments. That is a focused selective pressure that has never existed befo