As I said in my last post, I just celebrated my 60th birthday with lots of friends and family. Several folks produced new artistic works, including two lovely haikus that celebrate the E. coli long-term evolution experiment.
Here’s one from Mike Wiser, who did his doctoral research on the long-term lines. A highlight of his work was a paper showing that fitness trajectories in these populations tend to follow a power law, which has no upper bound, rather than an asymptotic rectangular, as I had previously assumed.
Living things adapt.
Evolution keeps going.
No peak yet in sight.
[The power-law model (blue) predicts future fitness gains much more accurately than does the hyperbolic model (red). Image modified from Wiser et al. (2013, Science 342: 1364-1367) and shown here under the doctrine of fair use.]
Telliamed Revisited 