His team has been doing this for 33 years and not missed a single day? Now that’s commitment.

Ill do you one better, 33 years these guys have been working Lol

@S F OH MY GOD! PEOPLE NEED MONEY?

Fr that’s 12k days of consistency, I pause and think to myself only if I had that discipline, what am I giving today for a better future. I have not found the answer. 😂💯🙏

@Jake Breedlove Exactly what is living already? Sorry I did this comment a long time ago so I don't remember, so I might not know which part you're referring to.

@Jake Breedlove alright don't know why you replied to a 7 month old reply to a one year old comment

This professor is frighteningly good at explaining and keeping his audience engaged. I can see why he spoke for most of the video, and how there seems to be minimal cuts / editing of footage. Amazing! Thoroughly enjoyed grasping new concepts from listening to him.

@Benjamin Roodenburg figurative language includes words that do not have something in common with the emotion being conveyed. It is sometimes through cultural context and some additional mental steps that the intended meaning is made clear. Familiarize yourself with, for example, the use of the phrase "scary good" used to indicate a perception of unexpectedly high level of quality. "Wicked smart" is another example: intelligence is not considered a symptom of the demoniac. "Small fortune" is another. fortunes are large amounts by definition. These are all colloquialisms, meant to convey meaning in a manner outside of the limits of pure denotation. As we all gain social insight we learn more of these literary strategies and the specific examples of our speaking culture. I will be the first to admit that I still have much to learn.

i gave the 666th like, lol

@Benjamin Roodenburg Look, you asked. I don't know what to tell you other than what I know. If you want to argue, there are better ways to do it than to rope in someone who genuinely is trying to answer what I thought was an honest question.

​@Benjamin Roodenburg It's a common way to say, essentially, "awe-inspiring". It's exaggerating the awe to the point of fear, since the two often go hand in hand. Think, like, an eldritch horror or "the fear of God" or something. If you think about it, you'll probably realize you've heard people say things like "this is scary good" or "she's so hot it's scary"? Strong negative descriptors are often used to emphasize something positive. It's similar to using "crazy good" (so good it seems unreal; no literal mental illness involved) or "stupid good" (so good that you're dumbfounded; nothing to do with literal stupidity).

@Triairius exaggeration of the word scary? Why would it be scary in any kind of way? It being figurative would mean it has something in common with the emotion he’s trying to convey. I don’t think fear was the intended emotion. If I destroy someone in chess I can call it a massacre. Meaning that the opposition had not chance whatsoever. That would be the correlation, but I can’t see such a thing return in his wording.

Imagine one of these days one colony forms a multicellular structure. Or 'cannibalise' but not really and form a structure similar to mitochondria or chloroplast. That would be sooo cool.

​@GamePhysics sounds like a solid way to speed up our demise

Top comment !

@GamePhysics sadly it takes such a long time for these evolutions like on earth multicellular being came 600 m years ago so out of 4.1 b years life 3.5 billion years were spent on evolving from single to multicellular in sample as huge as earth !!

Yes! You must imagine! It's the only way that would happen...

They say this is entirely possibly what happened with multi cell organisms or even cells with multiple internal structures. On a different scale, it's also what happened to create sea slugs like the man of war, a few different growths but acting as one in the form of an organism/colony hybrid.

Wonderful. I felt like a 5 year old learning something new about my world.

I felt like I was just told there are thousands of people and labs that have no problem risking me and my family's existence

Triple thumbs up.

How many people do a repetative task for 33 years and still love it this much! This guys a legend.

Some poor undergrad is doing the actual tedious vial work lol.

What an absolutely astounding experiment I’ve never heard of. Hopefully we can keep it going

@Vinícius Machado Very good. I find the best way to learn a subject is to investigate opposing viewpoints. There is always bias on both sides and sometimes it takes a bias source to even discuss something as bias can be expressed in what we don't say as much as in what we do. If you fear reading AIG or the Discovery Institute it would be the same as me avoiding the journal Nature or Science Daily. I find interest in all sides improves my ability to critically evaluate what I see and decide, as objectively as possible, what I should believe is true. I'm glad to expose some of the topics on the forward edge of science. I made some small expression of what I think of them but hope you take the time to understand all sides and make your own objective conclusions. The more you know, the more you know you do not know. Definitive statements are at times a sign of ignorance and good pointer towards what to investigate, and that's what makes learning fun.

@jon doe I’ve never heard a biologist say that evolution breaks at protein level, but I’ve heard that it breaks down at the start of life. There is no good explanation for that yet, but we still believe in evolution. Why is pressure for adaptation not the same as selective pressure to evolve a mechanism that responds to pressure. As I said before, it’s advantageous to be able to need more or less food depending on availability of food, grow more or less depending on space, etc. Having said that, I am not a biologist, just someone that is interested in science, being evolution a strong topic in that interest. Nevertheless I am far from a specialist in the area, and as such, will not be able to carry out this discussion any longer, simply because I do not have the knowledge to argue for either side, as we got into a topic I have honestly never read much about. Nevertheless, I continue to believe evolution is the best explanation we have at the moment, and that epigenetics are part of it, even if you have made me reconsider much about how I view the theory, and am not as confident in it as I was before. I hope I was able to make you reconsider some things as well, even if you continue to believe evolution is the wrong explanation. Thanks for continuing the discussion for so long, though! It was very good to talk to someone with such a different perspective directly and respectfully!

@jon doe there is selective pressure to it, you gave an example in an earlier comment when you mentioned Darwin’s finches. They had those differences because of different gene expressions driven by food supplies. So being able to adapt as an individual is something that is useful if environment conditions change quickly. You said the theory is effective for paleontology, but doesn’t explain biodiversity. If it explains the different organisms that lived and understands why they adapted and how, why doesn’t it explain biodiversity? You said that it seems we are trying to prove evolution right, instead of looking at its flaws and finding something better. That would be a really big problem if that were the case, but I don’t believe it is. In physics, quantum field theory has some problems, but it meets observational data so well it’s hard to say it’s not right, but we know where it’s flaws lie, eu just haven’t come up with a good enough theory that explains those flaws and fits observational data. I think that the same problem happens with evolution.

The professor is so good at explaining what they do and what they have found!

That happens when you have so much knowledge to start with AND you are practicing that knowledge and trying to build onto that knowledge for 36 years..

Reminds me of my dad. Very passionate about their field of science.

It helps that it was simple, has measurable goals, and well thought out from the beginning. Also, the person was probably asking questions off a script, which was shared with the person who prepared beforehand. When there is straight stuff, down the middle, that makes it so much easier for the presenter to have a clean presentation and easier to watch and learn. What I want to know is, if the E.Coli were still E.Coli bacteria after 745000 generations?

@S. Ortola What you call a small change is actually pretty big. E. coli’s inability to metabolize citrate when exposed to air is notable to the point of being a defining feature of the species. Such a major change honestly warranted speciation. Heck, it’d be a big thing even if it weren’t a defining feature. Change in metabolic capability is very difficult to develop, which is why pandas STILL can’t effectively metabolize plants despite bamboo being their entire diet.

But if the only significant change in 74500 generations is a small change in what these bacteria digest, the logical conclusion is that there did not happen much evolution at all. If that represents 1.1 million years in humans, in what way does it confirm human evolution?

The world of bacteria and archaea is really different. Trust me when i say i was stunned when my professor said “We have more bacterial cells in our body than our cells” on my first microbiology class. Their world teaches us the ‘will to survive’ in any condition

@DQMYNATOR 2.0 take me

@EredilElexi An earlier estimate that there were about ten times as many bacterial cells in your gut as human cells in your body has been revised. A more recent published estimate is that there are about the same number, which still makes Parvathy's statement totally plausible. Nothing has been proven one way or another.

@EredilElexi Nah, it's true. Those bacterium though compared to the size of one human cell are relatively small though. So, in terms of mass of these cells we are majority human.

​@EredilElexi OK, you made a claim, provide evidence.

This has been proven wrong

How cool is Prof. Richard Lenski, damnit, was so fascinating listening to him. Interesting video, thank you!

@Kongx8 extremely well put

@S. Ortola Aerobic citrate metabolism was not the only trait to evolve in this experiment, it was the trait that Veritasium wanted to focus on. This video briefly mentioned that most of the lineages evolved hypermutability (100-fold increase in mutation rate), slower cell growth, and several mutations across multiple genes that changed the cell size and shape. In addition, Lenski's papers mention that after 50,000 generations, there were a total of 14,572 fixed single point mutations between 2 of the lineages and the ancestral strain. For the subset of that mutations that changed the animo acid sequence, 50% occurred in 57 genes that are involved in glucose metabolism, cell wall synthesis, DNA super coiling and stress responses (Tenaillon 2016) (Lenski 2017). This suggests a very strong selective pressure on these genes to adapt to this experimental environment. Again, Veritasium skimmed on this part of Lenski's research as it is not interesting as scientists documenting the "birth" of new gene. You conflating all mutations as single point mutations which as have limited impact on the evolution of "complex" traits. Single points mutations are mostly "neutral" or "bad" as genes are already optimized for a certain function and are under a lot of selective pressure to maintain that function. The main driving force behind evolution of "complex" traits are another category of mutations called gene duplications, where a set of genes gets duplicated and are inserted into the genome. Now that the two copies of the same gene exist, one copy is not under same selective pressure anymore and is free to mutate with less negative repercussions. One possible outcome of this new gene is to gain a new function and be further optimized for that function with other types of mutations. The aerobic citrate metabolism in this video is an example of gene duplication. In E. coli, the gene that enables citrate metabolism, CitT, can only be turned on in anaerobic conditions. At generation 31500, CitT was duplicated and the copy inserted behind a genetic element that allowed for the new copy to be expressed in aerobic conditions. It then took another 1500 generations for the new CitT gene accumulate enough beneficial mutations in order efficiently utilize citrate and outcompete the rest of the culture (Blount 2012).

@Sandro Félix What about the fact that mutations are practically exclusively deleterious? The mathematics of millions of bad mutations compared to a few possibly beneficial ones is difficult to explain as the source of new and ever more complex functional life forms. All cancer for example is result of mutations.

@S. Ortola humans are complex organisms. We have millions of complex cells ready for mutations all the time, also the environment around us (virus, atmosphere, etc) push our evolution toward. The experiment is based on a simple bacteria on a controlled environment, so it is reasonable that the experiment showed less mutations than you thought it would happen

That was fantastic! I'm not particularly biology-minded but the way he engaged with the subject and described the experiment had me glued to my monitor.

I'm a year late seeing this video, it is an amazingly well done educational/informative. My dad passed away a year ago, he would have loved this video. The professor remids me of him very much. Thank you, keep up the great work.

God I love science. My hat is off to everyone involved in the project, and similar projects. A rather dull daily work, eventually giving answers we can barely dream of. Absolutely fascinating.

You can tell that this professor really is interested in what he is doing.

@-- ​ Good for him! Although, I doubt that was the case for most of his career and it certainly isn't the case for *most* academics.

@ChaCha how do you know how research grants are awarded?

@elastichedgehog > academia career not for the money Apparently Lenski had a $300k annual salary in 2019, according to govsalaries. Sounds pretty good money to me for fing around for 30 years.

You think? Maybe thats why he chose to dedicate his entire adult life to studying it and making a career out of it. Go figure

This has to be my favorite video of yours. I have watched it so many times. Not just because of the topic, but because of how it was presented. Every time I watch it, it never gets old. A great video overall.

Derek, keep on telling us those beautiful stories. They are truly inspiring! Thanks

This is freaking amazing! Counting by hand when you have cameras and computers seems a bit oldschool, but I can respect the ritual.

Would be cool to see another video like this with Will Ratcliff who is doing a similar experiment with yeast to unravel the evolution of multicellularity. Sean Carroll did a podcast interview with Will which I highly recommend on Mindscape, but I'd like to see the Veritasium treatment to get more animations and visuals of the experiments.

Damn, that professor is so amazing, I'd sit on a radioactive container and eat polonium just to hear him explain genetics and biology, even a short plutonium tea party would be great! So much enthusiasm, so much knowledge, and incredible communication skills. He had me fn hooked

I love how Dr. Lenski is really happy and visibly proud of the work he and his team has done, while at the same time giving a very humble and down to earth aura.

@ugetridofit you saw the video?? You must.

@ugetridofit most people work careers where you do something repetitive for the sole purpose of making enough money to survive until you eventually die. at least lenski is doing something hes passionate about and is very much learning something really cool

@Tyrell Wellick So, to sum up, you are claiming that Lenski is either wrong or lying, or am I misunderstanding you?

@Tyrell Wellick I never said Darwinism wasn't a word. You do realize evolutionary theory is referred to as the modern synthesis, right?

I saw this video around when it came out, but I didn't comment then. It popped back into my recommended though! So happy to see the cool things the professors at my University can accomplish! And since it's been a year since I left MSU it was nice to see the locations I frequented in the background of the video. :)

Wait so are you telling me, if we had enough solution we could fill the Universe with life in 42 days?! I know it's not exactly that simple but that's pretty mind blowing!

Well, at a certain point the limit would be m/s that the bacteria can cross at a time limiting the propagation of the blob.

It is that simple. With enough solution anything is possible

This experiment is helping to refine the theory of evolution and is raising and answering really interesting questions. Great work.

The methods of the experiment really show how old it is. Like all that exachaning fluids by hand, analyzing with colours, counting by hand... Still very impressive that he had the resilience to keep it going.

The patience and commitment of these scientists is just blowing my mind ! Imagine you are observing same bacteria for 33 years . This person spend his whole life on this for the good of humanity . King 👑

People miss that the opening video of the Antibacterial-Resistant Bacteria showcases exactly why you shouldn’t overuse antibiotics.

Exactly!!!

I would hope that this team have been also spending the past 33 years coming up with a design so that this process could be automated. Sure would help to allow 100s of other automated selection processes run e.g. selecting for color, selecting for acidity, selecting for survivability under condition X,Y,Z.

Absolutely amazing. It’s the kind of science you might not even consider, but to be able to quantify evolution….just imagine the things humans could achieve if we can just avoid destroying ourselves first

That professor's passion and the way he explained things made me more interested in science than anything else has before. Very understandable.

This was mind blowing and jaw dropping. It gives me a whole new view on evolution.

I just read The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins, who outlined this exact experiment. It was amazing to have it vusialized and brought to life here. Thank you for sharing 🙂

he was so happy to tell someone about his experiment, made my heart warm xD

And to tell someone who would gift him millions of views.

srinivasula bhagat fix your irritable mood

srinivasula bhagat xD doesn't mean laugh

Insightful. Just like those bacteria, incremental improvements are made, always; but breakthroughs were only made once a long while. The team did just that, persist long enough to witness one of those breakthroughs. The breakthrough witnessed certainly changes the way I see things. I was imagining how would the team have reacted to the announcement of the covid lock-downs? I suppose, instead of the fear of contracting covid, they are probably thinking "oh, my germ experiment has to keep going!" Huge commitment, huge achievement, power of persistence + time.

Ive got a jar of pond water that has been sealed since the 18th of Jan 2018. Its reallying interesting seeing the fluctuation in the ostracod population each year. I always wonder if they are genetically distinct from wild populations. Would love to crack it open in like 40 years and see the kind of genetic variation to wild populations

Veritasium's videos are always great, but 'bacteria Fight Club' took it to the next level. Bravo!

Nice Video 💦 Nice to know that these bacteria (test objects from nature) change in a closed environment and that is "naturally" checked in this laboratory. Have they also tested it with other conditions like light and nutrition that anyone knows? Greetzz MiKa

I love Veritasium's videos. I just can't think about anything else while being glued to my screen and then I realize how much time has passed.

Never thought I'd see a YouTuber sponsored by paper towels

@AxxL that’s why you got 87 likes on that comment over a year later

Who’s Kloom?

Anyone remember that really old paper towels YouTube video? So funny.

Buying bounty indirectly supports Veratasium. Nice.

He shouldve went with charmin

beautiful video and the Professor is just what we need in our community.

That's incredible! At first, I really didn't think this would be very interesting, but it sure is a good thing that guy kept the project going.

Couldn't take my eyes off. Amazing things never more eloquently described. Thanks!

So fascinating and great testament to the dedication of the professor. I did start to wonder if despite the extremely controlled environment there are in fact some uncontrolled aspects influencing evolution. For example, if the lab techs tend to select solution from the bottom of the flask could they be selecting for bacteria that tends to grow under greater pressure? Not suggesting this is the case and such a hypothesis could be confounded by a systematic shaking of the flask but anyway, just a thought-provoking experiment/video all around.

Wow. This is an incredible experiment! So freaking cool!

Absolutely loving these videos man. Keep up the grind!!!

Yo, you're still alive? Haven't seen one of your videos since you got robbed cuz YT stopped recommending.

make me a pc

I dont like theory of evolution exist it is wrong science

The Prof is such an engaging speaker! I could hear him talk science all day

What is secksource doing here

I work for the italian agriculture research council (CREA) like an agricultural worker and just to know we too do evolution experiments, for example we took differents populations of ancient grain and we cultiveted in 2 opposite side of Italy (near Bologna and the other one in Sicily), after some years of that the researcher looked what was changed in the two different environment, this is still running so we will see.

Thats awesome. Saluti da Slovenia ;)

Fascinating stuff, as usual. Thanks! 👍

I learnt of this experiment many decades ago. It is amazing to see an update, and to learn of the new evolutionary leap forward into citrate digestion. I wonder if we'll ever see something like the bacteria becoming multicellular.

This channel is awesome! Even the people you interview are so passionate

When people are as passionate as Prof. Richard Lenski, you can't help but want to learn/ hear more

is it Richard Lenski?

@John Doe how so?

Sad that such passion is under full-scale assault in the West.

He has a wonderful mind.

It is so nice to hear people lifes observations and experiences in science. Powerfull stuff. I learned so much. :)

That would be an experiment worth doing, even if others see it as un-needed knowing why or how evolution takes place and what can come of it can lead to a very important branch of knowledge and hopefully let us understand our own evolution. I do hope their team keeps the experiment running as they chose a medium that evolves far quicker then humans, so it will give far more data. I just hope more interesting data comes out of it in the long run.

I don't care how many times I watched veritasium videos they always blow my mind

Great enthusiastic scientist. You can tell that he has his whole heart into this project. Thank you.

Very fortunate is the man (person) who loves his job!

WOAH! Pure chance, but as soon as I heard citrate was in the solution I thought to myself that that would be a secondary carbon source and that they'd oughtta keep an eye on it. Awesome!

As a human biologist, I think there are also astonishing examples of rapid evolution in humans. To give an example, a mutation occurred roughly 20 000 years ago in Europe which made people lactose tolerant. Since lactose tolerance supported survival during repeated periods of starvation, it rapidly spread to different populations and contributed to greater population growth (I made a video about this ). This mutation was so successful that we can find it in the majority of all people of European descent today!

@TW0F4C3D It's more correct to say that the mutation spread because people needed to rely on milk because a need to rely on milk doesn't develop the mutation, it's what helps the already existing mutation to spread.

What? I've always thought lactose intolerance was a rare thing. Milk is just so good

It's fascinating to hear a scientist at his level speak is entrancing. He's speaking from sheer, pure, accumulated knowledge and experience.

My impression is that it is not only so that the copying method makes different errorrs (mutations), so that the organism can adapt to new environments, it is also so that the copying mechanism fluctuates, varies in the number of errors it makes. In times of a stable environment, the variants that produce only a small number of errors are favoured, as they keep the variations around the optimally adapted form of the organism small. But this error number variation may never stop fluctuating, because in the moment a bigger change of the environment occurs, you need the ability to quickly broaden the width of variations to "find" a quick solution for the new environment; and when the adaptation is complete, the low-range variation will become stronger again.

I actually wish this video was longer!

Der Professor war mit echter Begeisterung bei Seiner Forschung - schön zu sehen :)

A meticulous process that takes pure dedication.

This video is a great example of why we should never stop funding basic science.

@Fat Birb that was a fixed trial

@IExist and how do you know the powers at be aren’t making everything up wholesale? Exactly. You don’t.

@Sean Cullen that would be a net positive overall, we’d all be living far simpler lives and we wouldn’t be reliant on hedonism and constantly overdosing on dopamine

At first I thought the fluorescent material would move with the bacteria as in a local pattern. I didn’t realize there’d be this symbiotic relationship with humans…

Kudos on your hand-held steady cam, very clean. You might like using a monopod in situations like that, that rig looks heavy! Thanks for all you do.

I noticed how both of you had did the elbow bump to avoid physical contact with each other to reduce the spread germs but the other guy still touches the door handle and the elevator's door, that everyone has touched, with his bare hands. Should of just did the hand shake.

Comment about the sponsor: keep in mind that dish cloths are more friendly to the environment, so it's better to use them to clean casual messes, instead of constantly using paper towels that sometimes aren't biodegradable, or aren't recycled. Using soap to clean the dish cloth regularly should eliminate the bacteria problem in most cases. But ofc, sometimes using paper towels is better, specially for certain messes like cleaning up after using the toilet, cleaning messes from pets , cleaning certain toxic materials, nail polish, or anything that permanently damages the dish cloth or whatever cloth you use.

A few more notes on this: you can microwave your dish cloths and sponges to sanitize them, assuming you aren't using them for hazardous chemicals and are just worried about spreading pathogens. Also, if you are going to use paper towels, there are several sources that use much more sustainable sources for the paper, from 90% or greater unbleached post-consumer recycled paper (Seventh Gen for example) to bamboo, which grows incredibly rapidly with much less land and lower water needs (Reel for example) than many of the "mainstream" paper towel, toilet paper, and facial tissue brands, which often use wood from virgin (never been cut by industrialized humans) forests to make paper which will be used at most once.

I was actually going to comment something along these lines. I feel it's better to have a bunch of towels that you cycle through and wash than to keep buying disposable towels into perpetuity.

Towels rubbed with white soap, then into a weak bleach solution at the end of each day. Bacteria problem solved. —A Cook

Thank you for sharing this with the world.

This is one of the strangest YouTube sponsorships I've seen in a while. Almost as strange as when literally everyone suddenly made videos about Dyson vacuums a few years ago

@Lucien Hughes "No one is getting seriously ill from using reusable dishcloths." No one, really? Wouldn't that depend on how reusable dishcloths are being used and the type of microbes being spread? I assume you have some empirical evidence for your contention.

Video on viruses... paper towel 🧻 sounds like a great combo to me.

@Jake Hix Can't you see whats wrong with your statement? Youre practically saying "This is far more disruptive and wasteful than that, so we should focus on this first before we can work on that" if we want to combat waste and environmental damage we should focus on as much as possible at a time. Because by the time you get to the second problem it would've probably spun out of control by then. By the way.. that means 3.600.000.000 kg's or 7.800.000.000 pounds of paper towels are NOT getting recycled and probably ending up in landfills.. and were talking from the US alone...

didn't veritasium get sponsored by google one time?

It’s weird that he accepted, knowing that disposables are contributing to global warming

This video was super cool!! Would love to see more videos on the mechanics of evolution

because it doesn't exist

I like how the researcher at the end gets so excited by the extrapolation power of his power curve. Still, a profound finding.

i wish you showed an entire house, because if anyone doesnt wash hands after touching dishcloths, these bacteria end up in quite unexpected places

Outstanding. Where else would a man like this professor get the time and opportunity to explain, IN HIS WORDS, what he and his colleagues are doing?? Very good indeed.

@S. Ortola i mean, humans are made of more complex genetics and more compex variables and are already a super adaptive species. So comparing bacteria:humans won't really line up it's just a generational amount comparison, and not what happend.

But if the only significant change in 74500 generations is a small variation in what these bacteria digest, the logical conclusion is that there did not happen much evolution at all. If that represents 1.1 million years in humans, in what way does it confirm human evolution?

Has anyone ever thought of colony counting with software to which the images of the samples are subjected?

That freezing bacteria technique, sounds like a Git for biologists.

@MASTER nobody Ok? What makes it wrong?

pretty much

@Vigilant Cosmic Penguin tbh i'm slightly concerned about pushing to master. what if we end up with an e coli super race dominating our citrus fruits?

The only difference being you don't have to worry about accidentally pushing something to master.

This video is wonderful. I actually feel bad for creationists because this… this is divine beauty.

This video was just amazing! Thank you for that!

I have to imagine that these bacteria are getting really good at replicating fast in ideal conditions.

My only question is whether each penetration was 1 strain (weird for 1 strain to share its genetics across all of a given band, but bacteria gene exchange is weird, too) or several.

At Kyoto University an experiment with flies raised in complete darkness began in 1954 and has now surpassed 1500 generations of them.

It sounds like the bacteria developed telepathy strong enough to get these humans to work to feed them yummy stuff for 30 years.

This was life's long term game. Evolve some bacteria that can work together and eventually create complex life. Then have those complex colonies of bacteria evolve in complexity until the colonies start working together with other colonies. Keep doing that until some colonies of bacteria are so complex they want to feed the single celled bacteria in perfectly safe utopias. Long term victory.

when you look at that TED talk about bacteria communication.... its not so far from truth. "How bacteria "talk" - Bonnie Bassler"

If that's the case, that'll be a damn risky game for bacteria. I mean all of them developing telepathy for only 1% of them actually getting any yummy stuff. The rest 99% of them went to bacterial crematory 🔥.

1.5 million years in bacteria timeline

lol

7:57 looks like a -80°C freezer to me. Also, Veritasium channel and Derek are really, really on the top level of Youtube science vids.

Cool experiment. My only concern is if human error can be produced faster than bacteria mutation. Too much lab work not to mess it up and contaminate once.

Now I'm wondering if you can model these populations with a logistic map in some way...

Brilliant presentation, very incitefull, evolution is a fascinating topic.

I wonder if any of those mutations could be profoundly beneficial to humans.

I hope this team gets recognised for the way in which they have experimentally proven some of the postulates we take for granted, in Biology. Keeping a Biology experiment running for 33 years, with constant monitoring of conditions, is no joke.

@Doug Stevens That's true, I don't have 100% certainty that there is no Designer. No one knows one way or the other, really, which is why I don't understand how some people claim with 100% certainty that there is a Designer.

@Doug Stevens Now you're telling me what my own opinions are. How do you think that's gonna work out for you? 'A designer is not clearly observable in the product' Right. No evidence. Maybe it's just your opinion that a designer was involved?

I just love this ads with total realistic examples and sample situations which are for sure not staged. Helps to hold up sympathy and did not harm your credibility. You really love your blue t-shirt.

I would check out updates on this daily!! Have they started to eat through the plastic yet? Hold on I have a knock at the door - It's the bacteria!!! Seriously tho this experiment needs it's own channel! ❤ G

One of my favorite videos he’s made

This is really interesting, because I always imagined evolution as something that just happens. It can be accelerated by events and co-evolution, but it will happen all the time regardless, just by chance. But there seem to be a lot of people put there who can't or won't understand that more or less mathematical part of evolution. I had a discussion in a reddit grou about closed natural ecospheres and that there are some out there which lasted for several decades as of now. And one user wondered if evolution in a closed jar, just getting light as an energy source from the outside will be possible. And for some reason there where two diffrent train of thoughts present within the commentors. One that was unsure, but liked to play with the idea that life in those jars would be able to evolve and adapt. And the other - for some reason bigger - group that absolutly dismissed this idea, as there would be no way of mutating (because there aren't any mutagens or competition happening). But competition doesn't mean predation and they totally forgot that mutation don't necessarily need mutagens, just chance to happen. So there would be no reason not to think that all this algae and bacteria and coepods would not evolve. Sure, they would not start a civilization. But they will adapt to that stable, limited envronment just like the E. Coli did. I guess.

there is competition still? in this instance, the bacteria compete against eachother in the race against time. food isn't the limiting factor. it's time and space. what do you think?

Imagine a huge warehouse with robots doing all these experiments on their own and publishing all this data on the internet. How fast we could discover things if only we had labs and all our experiments were as easy as clicking some buttons or if complex just programming them to the computer.

I could listen to Prof. Richard Lenski talk about evolution for hours. I love hearing someone passionately talk about something they love.

True

Fully agree, he is really passionate about this. I can imagine that it is really hard for him to talk about this in real life. People that do not understand the subject or are not interested.

The video was awesome and all, but the thing that most surprised me is Veritasium's (or even Youtube's) evolution. Never had I expected to see such a short sponsor.

The conclusion on never ending improvement would be interesting to put in perspective by comparing the robustness/adaptability to other environments of the ancestors versus specialized offsprings. Is the most evolved also the most fragile ??

In this case yes. They are surviving in a flask that is swirling and food provided. The e-coli didn’t need flagella to move so lost it. It actually just keeps loosing bits and genes. It only survives better than the less broken version because in the flask it doesn’t need those bits and spends less energy making and maintaining them. In a different environment the less broken ones would dominate again.

Makes me wonder what the final bacterium will be, and, by extension, how you might define the perfect cell.

But goku will get to super sayan 3 will defeat it

Perfect Cell? Ask Goku how that ended.

@anulstudios It is a key, but not because of that reason. The main problem is that of self-reference. The perfect bacterium would be the one that no matter what mutation happened to its offspring, the parent could outcompete it. The trouble for the parent is to be able to model all of these possible descendants and devise the optimal competitive strategy depending on their particular functional enhancement. That probably cannot be done genetically, due to the sheer complexity, meaning the genome would need to be massive or work like an immune system of trial and error, which takes time and space. The (or at least one possible) solution is a computational system, for example our nervous tissue of maybe what some plants use to decide on a mycorrhizal relationship (if they have any say at all!).. Point is: multicellular need. The solution is that the perfect bacterium is not a bacterium anymore. This may be why things like us exist. Just my thoughts, may be wrong. Let me know.

There isn't, that's the key. Its environmentally based, suggesting a perfect environment is possible, which if so, would likely be competitionless and therefore you create a paradox where there's no evolution that could start it either

We went over this experiment in our college Evolution course a few weeks ago.

Even in the absence of an environmental change, there are so many opportunities of smaller and smaller magnitude to continue to make progress that in fact progress would probably NEVER stop even in a constant environment. So much understanding in one sentence...

Yes, it's how we evolved from bacteria-like progenitors, and how further evolution will produce even better adaptable organisms millions of years in the future, if we survive current and future challenges at all.

Everyone gangsta till the bacteria starts eating glass

@Kalvin Cochran god bless you I hope you have a blessed and prosperous life Amen fellow Brotha.

@G thanks mate

@Kalvin Cochran nah people just speculating and thinking 🤔. They are basically saying what If, such as if the bacteria started eating the glass and whatever it surrounds and became this super bug. Lol 😆

Did I miss something??! When did they say that the bacteria began to eat glass/silicone?? Or is this reference to something else

😂

Great video! I'm surprised he isn't predicting punctuated equilibrium. That's what I predict. Over time there'll be steadily increasing progress, but periodically there will be a great leap forward- like that line that evolved to metabolize citrate. Are you sure this is actually the longest running evolution experiment? Do you know about the Grants and their students studying Darwin's finches in the Gallapagos? They wrote a book about it The Beak of the Finch. Great book. If you've never read it, I highly recommend it.

Punctuated equiibriun haa been debunked.

Would love to see the nucleic acid sequences of various generation.

they are published... not all of them since there are literally millions of individuals... but as far as I know lots of them have been sequenced and uploaded to genbank. These bacteria have a fairly small genome.

This is one of the greatest most fascinating things I've ever seen. Thank you for this wonderful knowledge.

I really want this to keep going for a really long time until eventually (this probably wouldn’t happen) they evolve to eat each other and it turns into something completely different