Today's entry on the
Least Popular Greatest Discovery in Human History is, a demonstration of the fact of evolution in controlled laboratory conditions. This is a royal flush..
The cornerstone of good science is being able to test your theory over and over again. In repeatable, controlled, conditions and achieve results that match your theory.
The following can't do justice to the greatness of this experiment. And rather than write in my own words, it's copied from wiki, change of tactic..
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment
The Experiment. The E. coli long-term evolution experiment is an ongoing study in experimental evolution led by Richard Lenski that has been tracking genetic changes in 12 initially nearly identical populations of asexual Escherichia coli bacteria since 24 February 1988.[1] The populations reached the milestone of 50,000 generations in February 2010.
Since the experiment's inception, Lenski and his colleagues have reported a wide array of genetic changes; some evolutionary adaptations have occurred in all 12 populations, while others have only appeared in one or a few populations. One particularly striking adaption was the evolution of a strain of E. coli that was able to grow on citric acid in the growth media.
For comparison 50,000 generations in humans takes us back about a million years. Not much, but plenty of time for evolutionary change.
Basically, the E.coli were put into 12 separate beakers full of food source, glucose, and other food sources that E.coli
cannot eat. If you put Bacteria in a beaker with food the population growth is exponential, until all the food runs out. At the end of every day, a drop of the surviving bacteria, are put into a new flask with exactly the same conditions.. This is done with 12 separate, initially identical strains.. Perfect environments for evolution..
In these conditions, evolutionary theory predicts that any bacteria that is better adapted to utilize a fluctuating food source, bonanza, starvation, bonanza, starvation, will out compete its fellows. And thus be the only ones transported into the next beaker..
Results. In the early years of the experiment, there were several common evolutionary developments shared by the populations. The mean fitness of each population, as measured against the ancestor strain, increased-rapidly at first, but leveling off after close to 20,000 generations (at which point they grew about 70% faster than the ancestor strain). All populations evolved larger cell volumes and lower maximum population densities, and all became specialized for living on glucose
But then, in 2008, this **** just got real..
In 2008, Lenski and his collaborators reported on a particularly important adaptation that occurred in one of the twelve populations: the bacteria evolved the ability to utilize citrate as a source of energy. Wild type E. coli cannot transport citrate across the cell membrane to the cell interior (where it could be incorporated into the citric acid cycle) when oxygen is present. The consequent lack of growth on citrate under oxic conditions is considered a defining characteristic of the species that has been a valuable means of differentiating E. coli from pathogenic Salmonella. Around generation 33,127, the experimenters noticed a dramatically expanded population-size in one of the samples; they found that there were clones in this population that could grow on the citrate included in the growth medium to permit iron acquisition. Examination of samples of the population frozen at earlier time points led to the discovery that a citrate-using variant had evolved in the population at some point between generations 31,000 and 31,500. They used a number of genetic markers unique to this population to exclude the possibility that the citrate-using E. coli were contaminants. They also found that the ability to use citrate could spontaneously re-evolve in populations of genetically pure clones isolated from earlier time points in the population's history. Such re-evolution of citrate utilization was never observed in clones isolated from before generation 20,000. Even in those clones that were able to re-evolve citrate utilization, the function showed a rate of occurrence on the order of once per trillion cells. The authors interpret these results as indicating that the evolution of citrate utilization in this one population depended on an earlier, perhaps non-adaptive "potentiating" mutation that had the effect of increasing the rate of mutation to citrate utilization to an accessible level
You can see the cloudy culture in the middle, it's cloudy because of the Bacteria ar having a citrate orgy..
Game, set, match, just one of the 12 strains developed the ability to eat citrate, all on it's own.. It's like us being able to digest tree bark...
)
much worst that global warming or nuclear annihilation 
You will be grateful for our PM to has all it all right, forget this stupid tax and everything ....
How many tits has dolphin? 
