(Credit: yod67/Shutterstock) Can we predict the course evolution will take? That's the question an international team of researchers decided to tackle, using a quarter-century of stick insect observations. Comparing the first half of the data set to the latter half, they set out to see if they could forecast the path of natural selection.
As it turns out, it's really hard. The researchers were able to predict some simple evolutionary changes, but the rest were subject to forces they couldn't account for. Mother nature is still too complex for us to truly foretell the future. The researchers were using a dataset that stretched back 25 years — an impressively long time period for a study of a single insect. Since the early 90s, one of the study authors and another researcher routinely ventured into the California mountains with nets and captured more than 34,000 stick insects. They found that the ...
