Scientists Discovered That Evolution Itself Is Evolving

• A new study from the University of Michigan suggests that organisms could get better at evolving over time.
• Researchers used a computer program to simulate organisms switching between beneficial and harmful environmental factors.
• The study showed that populations don’t lose their “evolvability,” even if conditions remain the same for many generations.

One of the most famous examples of evolution is Darwin’s finches. Scientists believe the 17 species of finches on the Galapagos Islands can be traced back to one common ancestor: the dull-colored grassquit. According to Darwinism, the grassquit adapted to the islands over generations through genetic mutation and natural selection, eventually becoming several distinct species.

Other organisms evolve much faster time-wise, however. For instance, bacteria reproduce rapidly (sometimes in as little as 20 minutes!), so antibiotic resistant bacteria may develop much quicker than, say, a finch species with the ideal beak for cracking open nuts. Whether it be birds or germs, evolution is clearly everywhere. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that evolution might be so successful because it itself evolves.

“Life is really, really good at solving problems,” Luis Zaman—lead author of the study—said in a statement. “If you look around, there’s so much diversity in life, and that all these things come from a common ancestor seems really surprising to me. Why is evolution so seemingly creative? It seems like maybe that ability is something that evolved itself.”

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The study used a computer program with sets of logics using beneficial and harmful environmental factors. In one of the environments simulated in the study, red berries were beneficial to a virtual population of generic organisms, and blue berries were poisonous. In the other environment, the conditions were the opposite. The “organisms” in each environment could only evolve to eat one of the berries at a time, not both, meaning they couldn’t succeed in both environments simultaneously.

To test the organism’s “evolvability” (or a population’s ability to adapt over time), researchers ran a scenario where they flipped between the sets of conditions, forcing the population to adapt. Amazingly, they did and even got quicker at adapting to new environments over time. Researchers also found that cycling between environments caused populations to have an exponential increase in mutations, allowing them to successfully switch between being the red berries and the blue berries.

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But there was a catch: if conditions changed too quickly, populations couldn’t keep up. Researchers discovered this caveat by experimenting with how often they cycled through each environment. They compared populations that remained in a given environment for one generation versus those that were there for ten and 100 generations respectively, but found that evolvability didn’t increase when the environment changed too rapidly. Over extremely long periods of time however, researchers found that the organisms don’t lose their evolvability.

“Once a population has achieved this evolvability, it seems like it didn’t get erased by future evolution,” Zaman explained.

As for future studies, researchers suggest that work be done to test whether their results can be harnessed for directed evolution—a lab process that mimics natural selection to engineer biological molecules. Long story short, evolution might actually be evolving, and the research around it certainly is.

Connor Lagore has been a news editor for Popular Mechanics since July 2024 after spending five years in the newspaper business as an award-winning features reporter. He graduated in 2019 from the University of Missouri, where he learned to correct your grammar. He is usually at the movie theater or watching basketball. His dog, Charlie, handles his finances.

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