Researchers Ran a Massive Yearlong Experiment to Get Bacteria to Evolve. Guess What Happened?
It's a struggle out there. You have to be fit to survive. When the pressure is on, nature favors the ones who can take the heat. It's a theme that has been drummed into our heads since school. It's a cultural meme. Social Darwinists used it to justify atrocities. Today's kinder, gentler Darwinists downplay the violence in the struggle for existence, yet the fact as they see it is inescapable: environmental circumstances select random genetic mutations that confer fitness, i.e., survival, by allowing organisms to adapt. That in a nutshell explains the development of complex life forms. We're assured there are gobs of evidence for it, too. Looking into a recent paper in PNAS about evolutionary fitness tradeoffs, you have to feel sorry for a team of five evolutionists from UC Irvine who did their level best to produce clear evidence for the favored story.