Richard Lenski, "Evolvability," and Tortuous Darwinian Pathways

Several papers on the topic of "evolvability" have been published relatively recently by the laboratory of Richard Lenski.12 Most readers of this site will quickly recognize Lenski as the Michigan State microbiologist who has been growing cultures of E. coli for over twenty years in order to see how they would evolve, patiently transferring a portion of each culture to new media every day, until the aggregate experiment has now passed 50,000 generations. I'm a huge fan of Lenski et...