More interestingly, would you ever make an appearance?
Quanta via Wired:
In his fourth-floor lab at Harvard
University, Michael Desai has created hundreds of identical worlds in
order to watch evolution at work. Each of his meticulously controlled
environments is home to a separate strain of baker’s yeast. Every 12
hours, Desai’s robot assistants pluck out the fastest-growing yeast in
each world — selecting the fittest to live on — and discard the rest.
Desai then monitors the strains as they evolve over the course of 500
generations. His experiment, which other scientists say is unprecedented
in scale, seeks to gain insight into a question that has long bedeviled biologists: If we could start the world over again, would life evolve the same way?
Different
strains of yeast grown under identical conditions develop different
mutations but ultimately arrive at similar evolutionary endpoints.
Many biologists argue that it would not,
that chance mutations early in the evolutionary journey of a species
will profoundly influence its fate. “If you replay the tape of life, you
might have one initial mutation that takes you in a totally different
direction,” Desai said, paraphrasing an idea first put forth by the
biologist Stephen Jay Gould in the 1980s.
Desai’s yeast cells call this belief into question. According to results published
in Science in June, all of Desai’s yeast varieties arrived at
roughly the same evolutionary endpoint (as measured by their ability to
grow under specific lab conditions) regardless of which precise genetic
path each strain took. It’s as if 100 New York City taxis agreed to take
separate highways in a race to the Pacific Ocean, and 50 hours later
they all converged at the Santa Monica pier....MORE
The Santa Monica pier is a few hundred feet from the western terminus of Route 66: