Witnessing Evolution

From AlphaGalileo, which dubs itself "the world's leading resource for European research news," comes a report of an experiment that allowed scientists to watch new organisms evolve by natural selection. It is, as they say, what Darwin only dreamed of:

Since publication of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin 150 years ago, it has been known that one of the dynamics of evolution is natural selection. Its results depend on environmental conditions and interactions between the species present (competition, predation, parasitism, cooperation). Some twenty years ago, a new field of research - experimental evolution - started to develop, and it has enabled scientists to better understand the mechanisms underlying evolution. For example, one idea was to cultivate populations of bacteria under well-controlled conditions over a large number of generations. These populations are made up of numerous individuals that were initially identical from the genetic point of view. And because the turnover of generations was very rapid, just a few months were sufficient to observe the emergence of new mutants, constituting a source of genetically-different lines. Instead of reconstituting the past, the scientists thus became eye-witnesses to the appearance of new species.

In the experiment, predator and prey bacteria are grown up together for hundreds of generations. Both evolve: the prey evolves to better evade its predator; the predator evolves to better catch its prey. (Link via NoBeliefs.com.)

Comments

[Miriam Gaddis]

I don't understand. If it was bacteria when it started, and they still had bacteria at the end of the project, where is the evolution? It's still bacteria. I want to see an actual evolvement from a fish to a bird, or from a fish to an insect, or from a fish to a human, or even from a bacteria to a fish. If that is impossible, then the theory evolution is impossible.