A Feast of Bugs

In the past few months, the New York Times science section has been putting together some special packages of articles, and this week's bundle is on the topic of evolution. You can read John Noble Wilford on hominids, Nicholas Wade on recent human evolution, Carol Kaesuk Yoon on the evolution of animal development, and more. No animals for me, thanks--I got the microbes. Which is just fine with me. It's a world of evolution I get all to myself. In my article, I take a look at experiments in which scientists watch microbes evolve, testing out hypotheses about natural selection and other processes. I was already quite familiar with experiments on E. coli, which I learned about during the research for my next book on that particularly lovable species. But it was fascinating to get better acquainted with some of the many other experiments being carried out on other microbes, ...