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Tue 13 Jan, 2009 09:04 pm
'Reverse Evolution' In Real Time Provides Key Insights Into Basic Mechanisms Of Evolution
Scientists have turned back the clock on the evolution in the fruit fly to provide key insights into the basic mechanisms of evolution.
In his book, Wonderful World, Stephen Jay Gould writes about an experiment of 'replaying life's tape', wherein one could go back in time, let the tape of life play again and see if 'the repetition looks at all like the original'. Evolutionary biology tells us that it wouldn't look the same – the outcome of evolution is contingent on everything that came before. Now, scientists at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ci?ncia (IGC) in Portugal, New York University and the University of California Irvine, provide the first quantitative genetic evidence of why this is so.
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