Can Life Ever Be Perfectly Adapted to Its Environment?

Can an organism ever become perfectly evolved? In Richard Lenski’s lab at Michigan State University, scientists are trying to see if that’s possible. The idea grew out of the lab’s Long-Term Evolution Experiment, started in 1988, with Escherichia coli; in 2010, they celebrated 50,000 generations (500 occur every 75 days). The lab has 12 populations of the bacteria inhabiting their own climate-controlled flasks of swirling nutrient solution, each like a finch-less Galapagos—an experiment in evolution by natural selection, but one that has been stripped to its bare essentials. 

For the past 28 years, there has been essentially no change in the—Lenski would seem to have created it. Yet, the bacteria keep evolving year after year. Some of the researchers in Lenski’s lab, wondering if the bacteria would ever stop, decided to take a closer look. They began plotting the rate at which the bacteria in their 12 flasks were becoming better adapted. The team measured their rate of evolutionary change by periodically taking samples from each of the 12 flasks and putting them together into a new one, where they would compete against a reference strain of . After 24 hours or more, they would compare the number of reference strain to the experimental . The higher the number of experimental , the better it was adapting to its environment.