Can Scientists Predict the Future of Evolution? | Simons Foundation

Can Scientists Predict the Future of Evolution? | Simons Foundation:

And yet scientists have been surprised to find that bacteria evolve predictably inside a host. Isabel Gordo, a microbiologist at the Gulbenkian Institute of Science in Portugal, and her colleagues designed a clever experiment that enabled them to track bacteria inside a mouse. Mice were inoculated with a genetically identical population of E. coli clones. Once the bacteria arrived in the mice’s guts, they started to grow, reproduce and evolve. And some of the bacteria were carried out of the mouse’s body with its droppings. The scientists isolated the experimental E. coli from the droppings. By examining the bacteria’s DNA, the scientists could track their evolution from one day to the next.

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Each new example of predictable evolution is striking. But, as Losos warned, we can’t be sure whether scientists have stumbled across a widespread pattern in nature. Certainly, testing more species will help. But Doebeli has taken a very different approach to the question: He’s using math to understand how predictable evolution is overall.

In the early 1960s, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology namedEdward Lorenz developed one of the first mathematical models of weather. He hoped that they would reveal repeatable patterns that would help meteorologists predict the weather more accurately.

But Lorenz discovered just the opposite. Even a tiny change to the initial conditions of the model led, in time, to drastically different kinds of weather. In other words, Lorenz had to understand the model’s initial conditions with perfect accuracy to make long-term predictions about how it would change. Even a slight error would ruin the forecast.

Mathematicians later dubbed this sensitivity chaos. They would find that many systems — even surprisingly simple ones — behave chaotically. One essential ingredient for chaos is feedback — the ability for one part of the system to influence another, and vice versa.  Feedback amplifies even tiny differences into big ones. When Lorenz presented his results, he joked that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas.

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