August 5, 2010 • 18 mins
Charles Darwin's revolutionary study of evolution isn't even two hundred years old yet. In terms of evolutionary processes, this is a miniscule amount of time. Yet is is possible to observe evolution within our lifetimes? Tune in and find out.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Wow, hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is also and I don't know, the science editor
how stuff works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb,
science writer at how stuff works dot com. Uh, tell
(00:23):
me something else. And have you ever stared in the
mirror and tried to watch yourself aging? Um? Not really
because aging is kind of hard to detect, and you know,
apart from rooting around and seeing if there are any
gray hairs or whatever. Yeah, I know there's that one.
Um no because it sounds kind of boring, you know, Um,
(00:43):
But but no, But I mean there's there's like a
YouTube video that the guy who like took a picture
of himself like regular increments and then like put them
all together in like a like a slide show, you know,
and like like that's an example where you could you
could actually watch yourself age a little. But but but
not by just looking into the mirror, right right, It's
hard to detect, but we know what's going on. I
remember going to an exhibit at the Moment in New
(01:06):
York City a while back, and I got this book
and it was a photography exhibit and the photographer took
pictures every year of these four sisters, and so flipping
through the book, um, you could see these women aging,
you know, just as you've flipped. And it was so
cool and it was so interesting. I really, I really
dug that. But yeah, aging is definitely hard to to
(01:28):
notice unless you've had a couple of gray hairs poking
out over Now, how do you know people were actually aging?
How do you you know you're actually aging? Let's see
the proof of it. I don't see aging right now? Right,
you look like you're getting a little older doing this podcast.
It wasn't that makes it sound like your hair sprouting
out of those earphones. Yeah, well that just means I
(01:50):
need a haircut. But but the point I'm trying to
make here is that another area that is very difficult
to observe, and one of the criticisms often thrown at
it is how do you know there's evolution? Like like
we can see it. Yeah, we're let's see some evolution.
I don't. I don't believe in evolution. Puts some on
the table, dish out some evolution. Let's yeah, get put
(02:11):
in a bag. You can't do it, you know, because
it's uh, because evolution occurs at increments over a very
long period of time from generation to generation, right, And
if you consider that Darwin's origin is species hasn't even
been in print a mere hundred fifty one years, which is,
you know, kind of a trap in the bucket. Yeah,
that's nothing on on an evolutionary scale, right, So consider
(02:33):
you know, how short of a time period we've been looking.
And that's not to discount the fossil record, because of
course the fossil record does in fact provide us a
good understanding of what's gone on in the past for organisms. Yeah,
but one of the things with with looking back at
fossils as you have like definite frozen moments in time,
you know, in these different forms. But but it's it's
(02:54):
much harder to see the movement, to see like the
change from one form to the next, you know. Yeah,
So we thought we'd cover a couple of evolution in
action studies today. Yeah. Yeah, these are examples of evolution
in action and they're they're just great examples to really,
you know, make evolution come alive to a certain extent,
and they're occurring today. Yeah, So let's talk about the lizards.
(03:17):
I feel like we always talk about lizards. Yeah, well
lizards are great, pretty great, and uh yeah, we have
a couple of studies. The first one is really cool.
This was a two thousand nine Pin State study and
it dealt with these little fence lizards, you know, kind
of like these little dudes you see running around, you know, everywhere. Yeah,
and they're suffering from an invasion from the south fire
(03:40):
ants guys. Yeah. And and they're they're in an area
where they've just over the several decades have suddenly had
to deal with fire ants and they've never had to
deal with them before. Um, and so this is this
is a hallmark of evolution. You know, you have a
species and suddenly the game has changed. You know, we
have new food, we have new enemies, we have conflict. Yeah,
because the the food thing is key, because it's not
(04:02):
what you think the fire ants can eat the lizards.
I was surprised by that. I mean you would think,
obviously the lizards are going to come out on top here,
but they're not, at least not the ones that are
newly exposed to the fire ants. So let's get into
the details of the study. Yeah, so what what they
decided to do was was to look at these like,
not all the lizards are have encountered fire ants, yet
(04:24):
some have been dealing with them for as long as
like sixty eight years. Yeah. So they had four different groups, right,
and they were looking at four different groups of lizards
that had been exposed to fire ants in different increments.
One group had never encountered fire ants, and then like
one had encountered them for like twenty three years, another
encountered them for somewhere they were like forty something years,
and then the fire extrain. There's the group that had
(04:44):
been dealing with them for sixty eight years. They were
sixty eight long years of fire ants veterans of the
Great Lizard fire ant War right there. So the researchers
were trying to figure out, with time as a factor,
how yeah, how they've adapted to this this new stimuli,
you know, and which ones are going to be better
situated to deal with it. And apparently like the main
(05:05):
defense against fire ants is too is to basically move
your butt because because in the in the group that
it like never encountered them before, like they will just
sit there apparently, and the fire ants will crawl over
them and the lizards defense is like, oh, I'm just
gonna be real still still and shut my eyes. Yeah.
And they took it. Yeah, and then they just get
them Yeah. Whereas the ones that are used to it,
(05:27):
they'll know, hey, I need to move and or they
flick them off. They flick them off or the leap away,
you know, et cetera. Um, they have learned to deal
with it. So they the researchers observed this behavior whether
the lizards could you know, take it or get the
heck out of there, But they also were interested in
looking at the hind leg lengths of all the lizards.
Would they find Roberts Well, they found that lizards living
(05:49):
near fire ants are they're developing behaviors to increase their
survival and and evolving longer hind legs in response to
the attacks from the fire ants. Okay, and so that
was that was their exposure. It was the exposure the
length of exposure that correlated. Yeah, And I should also
mention that I believe one of the details in the
study was that they didn't like kill a whole lot
of lizards in this like I think they were. They
(06:10):
were like saving the lizards before they could be stung
to death. That's nice. Yeah, but so as cool as
the study is, it's not quite speciation now. It's more
like these are the movements though that that can lead
to it. But yeah, this is not These lizards aren't
becoming a new breed of lizard, a new species of lizard. Um.
But let's talk about where speciation may be occurring, in
(06:32):
fact in White Sands, New Mexico. Yeah, this is another
lizard study. This is a two thousand ten University of
Idaho study. And I actually talked to one of the
people tied up in the research for this for this
a story for Discovery News January UM. And this one
deals with these brown lizards. Traditionally brown lizards. Uh that
(06:54):
they but they live in an area called White Sands,
New Mexico. And why do you think it's called White Sands,
New Mexico because there's white sand everywhere. Sounds kind they're
a brown lizard though, Yeah, And what is a lizard
and what is a lizard? One of the lizards traditional
defense mechanisms camouflage, camouflage, so the the but they, of course,
these lizards have changed over time over the course of
(07:17):
say two to five thousand years, right, since they arrived
there a couple of thousand years ago. Yeah, so so
they were they were exploring how they've they've changed pigment
during this time. They've they've become these like white lizards
and white sands. Yeah and uh. Anyway, they made the
argument that that this is really one of the they're
hit they've hit several of the road stops on the
(07:38):
way to speciation. Um and uh. And you know, they've
they've changed their color, that's a big one. But also
they've started, uh having a preference for light colored lizards
when it comes to breeding. Really. Yeah, so it's like there,
you know, it's sort of like imagine you know, it's
like a line, you know, and one line is diverging
slowly from the other. So you know, have you know,
(08:01):
another ten thousand years, you know, you might have the white,
the whitelizard, and the brown lizard of separate species entirely.
So that's pretty cool, but not as cool as the
equal I. Yeah, this this is a fantastic study and
you guys may have heard it. It goes back to
what we were talking about with the generations. You know,
it's like human generations. Um, it's hard, it's hard to
(08:21):
really you know, we can't really watch it spread from
generation generation. There haven't been that many generations since origin
of species, you know, et cetera. But if you can
find a species that has really small generations, a short
life cycle, short lived, it's like pushing the fast forward
button right right, And a lot of times that the
choice organisms might be drosophilia, your fruit flies, or or
(08:45):
planel bacteria. And in this case in back in it
was equally a single equally bacterium that in Michigan State
University biologists used and he started twelve laboratory populations with it. Yeah,
this is Professor Richard Lynsky. Twenty years time. Lensky had
generations on his hands. So if we were studying humans,
(09:07):
this would be a phenomenal amount of time. Yeah, we'd
be talking something in the neighborhood of like three million
years of human evolution. So Lensky observed the bacteria as
they grew larger and faster in response to the lab diets.
Then what happened, Well, you hit around the thirty one
five generations, something special happens. Suddenly they're able to this
(09:30):
one population of them are able to consume citrate, which
is as nutrient that they've they've been surrounded by the
whole time as as part of their medium. Yeah, their medium. Um,
it's kind of like like imagine if you were like,
it's like that they're gonna bring up the cats. That
was one of my more way too complicated metaphor. Probert
(09:51):
has to find a way to work in cats into
every podcast. It was just kind of like the buffet
bar was there and they were eating most of it,
and then one day suddenly they were able to eat
the seafood portion of the buffet. Good. Good for them.
But in this case it was the sit rate. So
suddenly you had situate plus E. Coli. Yeah, so you
(10:12):
went up with the population of mutated sitrate consuming bacteria
and as you can imagine, that was a pretty handy
ability to have, and so the population of that bacteria skyrocketed.
And now they call these sitrate plus equally. So here's
also something very interesting about this experiment. You know, somebody's
going to dismiss it as a one time thing, oh,
(10:32):
as a fluke or whatever it as well, Lensky had
a solution for this. So the whole time he and
his team had been freezing samples every five hundred generations,
so he was able to do a rewind and he
was actually able to go back and replace some of
the experiment and see if they could catch it again.
I mean, this is so cool. Yeah. Yeah, And and
apparently they were like when they went back and they
(10:54):
like replayed it, they were they found it like something
was occurring in this in this one population at like
the at the twenty thousand or so generation, like some
small changes that were leading up to this ability to
metabolize sits. Right. Yeah, and they're still working to figure
out exactly what. Okay, so that's the question. Yeah, you know,
what is the mechanism way? I mean, if they could
(11:16):
pinpoint it just a little bit more, that would be great. Yeah,
I just get down to the we have the fine
changes that are occurring. It reminds me a lot. I
think there was like a Twilight Zone where like like
the humans were observing the evolution of like a micro
biological so it wasn't it was more than micro biological.
It's like a tiny little civilization and like they watched
them grow, you know, developed like spaceships and stuff. And
(11:39):
I think the Simpsons, so on a more sobering note, um,
the ability of bacteria to evolve, or any organism to
evolve has pretty important implications, as you guys know. Um,
you know, especially when you're talking about our fifty plus
year war against harmful bacteria, when you're talking about things
like extensively drug res stant tuberculosis UM, and then there
(12:03):
are other So that's that's definitely yeah, in the in
the same way that these citrate plus a cool I
were suddenly able to deal with something in their environment
that they hadn't you been around for too terribly long.
You know, we're having having some very harmful microbes out
there that are you know, figuring how to out how
to deal with the situations that we're throwing at them.
(12:23):
I will tell you as a parent, it's sometimes terrifying
to give your kid antibiotics. You know, I wonder, you know,
is my kid going to evolve resistance to this? You know,
I it's it's just a little terrifying. And and then
there's a there's a whole side with insects and pesticides
as well, you know, where insects developing a resistance to
certain pesticides over time. We you know, we throw out
(12:44):
these solutions and we don't really realize that that nature
is pretty good at evolving. It's pretty much all it does,
you know, So given enough time, you know, it's it's
remarkable what people think, you know, especially micro organisms will
be able to do. Like I was reading something of
the day researching stuff about plastics, and there are some
(13:05):
some predictions that like you know, you know, like tens
and thousands of years, like you know, you'll you'll eventually
have microbes that can can really break down plastics in
a way that we can't. We don't see today because
it's some new material. But give him enough time, they'll
figure it out. Yeah. In the meantime, maybe just bring
your bags off to use plastic. Yeah, yeah, that's always
(13:26):
always a good idea. So, speaking of plastic bags, we've
got a plastic bag here full of reader mail. Let
me grab when happen. They didn't really readers, some of
them are readers, but listeners primarily listeners, I guess. Um. Yeah,
so we got one here from Alicia. Oh. Alicia, she
(13:46):
was the one who wrote into for to share her
favorite bit of cosmos. Yeah. Yeah, she's one of She's
a fan of some of our more cosmic entries in
the podcast series. Here and she says, Hey, Alison and Robert,
this is a little something that I remembered after listening
to your podcasts about the birth of stars and planets.
Though this one this is more relevant to the death
(14:07):
of stars. I just wanted to share my favorite factoid
ever from cosmology. It was on casts the quote plasma
soup unquote that resulted from the Big Bang consisted of
only very small particles like protons, electrons, et cetera. But
there weren't any heavier elements that would have higher atomic numbers.
But from what I can tell from my simplistic understanding
(14:28):
of physics, when stars began to coalesce, the force of
gravity pulling on the outside of the stars would cause
immense amounts of pressure on the particles in the middle,
causing the nuclear fusion reactions and creating heavier and heavy elements. Thus,
large stars will be able to create heavier, large, heavier
elements closer to their centers. Then, if the star dies
and becomes a supernova, it sends its particles scattering far
(14:49):
and wide throughout the galaxy to later clampman become part
of other stars, planets, and what have you. While I'm
normally not a romantic. This literally means that we are
all made of star dust. So yeah, that's that's awesome.
You know, we're all we're all star stuff. So that's
that's kind of meat. It kind of you know, builds
the soul like community of the universe. You know, we
are the universe and the universe is us. Yeah, thanks
(15:12):
Felicia and uh oh, and then we have another one
here from uh oh thoughts from Alison ladder Milk. At first,
that would really be cheap. You're writing in your own
fan now sending anything listener will This one's from Natalie. Oh, Natalie,
we even about right. Oh yeah, this's a long one.
There we go. Not as long as someone and if
you just read some of the highlighted carts, okay, um,
(15:34):
she says, first of all, I just want to say
I'm a big fan of the show. I'm addicted to
listening to the podcast just before bed or in the
quiet moments of my free time. So we should really
keep the yelling down. You might be trying to get
to sleep. Um, that's I'll keep paying money. Your topics
are always very engaging and informative. Whenever I listen, I
(15:54):
feel like I'm getting a brush up on concepts I
missed while zoning out in high school science classes. Which
is great, that's totty much as part of the whole
mission Here, she says, I just finished listening to your podcast,
A World Changing Science Experiments, Part two and was very
interested in section on Pavlov and his experiments with dogs,
but had to send any meddle. Let you know I side. Now,
(16:14):
let you know a side of path Law that is
generally unknown to most. I just graduated in May two
ten from CVE Denver with a bachelor's degree in psychology,
and during my history of psychology class, we discussed path
Law's work in great detail. I was surprised and disturbed
to find that Pavlov used children orphans in fact, in
the same manner as dogs and his experiments. I had
never heard. Yeah, and once he discovered that he could
(16:37):
condition any unconditioned response, he wanted to see if humans
humans would react in the same way. She goes on
to say, much of my surprise, my professor showed a
video of path Law working with both his children and
his dogs, or both his dogs and these children. Despite
this discovery, I'm still a fan of Pavlov's as his
work was pivotal and understanding learning and behavior in humans
and other animals. Again, I love the show and that's
(16:59):
great because that's I mean, that's always my experience with
finding out more about science and science experiments is that
it's always a little bit amazing and a little bit creepy,
depends on which side you look at it, you know. Yeah,
So share your amazing stories or creepy stories with us,
whether you're on Facebook, we're at a stuff from the
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(17:20):
us an email and science stuff it has stuff first
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and check out those sites and you'll be able to
see what we're up to. All right, thanks for listening,
Guys for more on this and thousands of other topics
because it how stuff works dot Com. Want more how
(17:42):
stuff works, check out our blogs on the house stuff
works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Wow, hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is also and I don't know, the science editor
how stuff works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb,
science writer at how stuff works dot com. Uh, tell
(00:23):
me something else. And have you ever stared in the
mirror and tried to watch yourself aging? Um? Not really
because aging is kind of hard to detect, and you know,
apart from rooting around and seeing if there are any
gray hairs or whatever. Yeah, I know there's that one.
Um no because it sounds kind of boring, you know, Um,
(00:43):
But but no, But I mean there's there's like a
YouTube video that the guy who like took a picture
of himself like regular increments and then like put them
all together in like a like a slide show, you know,
and like like that's an example where you could you
could actually watch yourself age a little. But but but
not by just looking into the mirror, right right, It's
hard to detect, but we know what's going on. I
remember going to an exhibit at the Moment in New
(01:06):
York City a while back, and I got this book
and it was a photography exhibit and the photographer took
pictures every year of these four sisters, and so flipping
through the book, um, you could see these women aging,
you know, just as you've flipped. And it was so
cool and it was so interesting. I really, I really
dug that. But yeah, aging is definitely hard to to
(01:28):
notice unless you've had a couple of gray hairs poking
out over Now, how do you know people were actually aging?
How do you you know you're actually aging? Let's see
the proof of it. I don't see aging right now? Right,
you look like you're getting a little older doing this podcast.
It wasn't that makes it sound like your hair sprouting
out of those earphones. Yeah, well that just means I
(01:50):
need a haircut. But but the point I'm trying to
make here is that another area that is very difficult
to observe, and one of the criticisms often thrown at
it is how do you know there's evolution? Like like
we can see it. Yeah, we're let's see some evolution.
I don't. I don't believe in evolution. Puts some on
the table, dish out some evolution. Let's yeah, get put
(02:11):
in a bag. You can't do it, you know, because
it's uh, because evolution occurs at increments over a very
long period of time from generation to generation, right, And
if you consider that Darwin's origin is species hasn't even
been in print a mere hundred fifty one years, which is,
you know, kind of a trap in the bucket. Yeah,
that's nothing on on an evolutionary scale, right, So consider
(02:33):
you know, how short of a time period we've been looking.
And that's not to discount the fossil record, because of
course the fossil record does in fact provide us a
good understanding of what's gone on in the past for organisms. Yeah,
but one of the things with with looking back at
fossils as you have like definite frozen moments in time,
you know, in these different forms. But but it's it's
(02:54):
much harder to see the movement, to see like the
change from one form to the next, you know. Yeah,
So we thought we'd cover a couple of evolution in
action studies today. Yeah. Yeah, these are examples of evolution
in action and they're they're just great examples to really,
you know, make evolution come alive to a certain extent,
and they're occurring today. Yeah, So let's talk about the lizards.
(03:17):
I feel like we always talk about lizards. Yeah, well
lizards are great, pretty great, and uh yeah, we have
a couple of studies. The first one is really cool.
This was a two thousand nine Pin State study and
it dealt with these little fence lizards, you know, kind
of like these little dudes you see running around, you know, everywhere. Yeah,
and they're suffering from an invasion from the south fire
(03:40):
ants guys. Yeah. And and they're they're in an area
where they've just over the several decades have suddenly had
to deal with fire ants and they've never had to
deal with them before. Um, and so this is this
is a hallmark of evolution. You know, you have a
species and suddenly the game has changed. You know, we
have new food, we have new enemies, we have conflict. Yeah,
because the the food thing is key, because it's not
(04:02):
what you think the fire ants can eat the lizards.
I was surprised by that. I mean you would think,
obviously the lizards are going to come out on top here,
but they're not, at least not the ones that are
newly exposed to the fire ants. So let's get into
the details of the study. Yeah, so what what they
decided to do was was to look at these like,
not all the lizards are have encountered fire ants, yet
(04:24):
some have been dealing with them for as long as
like sixty eight years. Yeah. So they had four different groups, right,
and they were looking at four different groups of lizards
that had been exposed to fire ants in different increments.
One group had never encountered fire ants, and then like
one had encountered them for like twenty three years, another
encountered them for somewhere they were like forty something years,
and then the fire extrain. There's the group that had
(04:44):
been dealing with them for sixty eight years. They were
sixty eight long years of fire ants veterans of the
Great Lizard fire ant War right there. So the researchers
were trying to figure out, with time as a factor,
how yeah, how they've adapted to this this new stimuli,
you know, and which ones are going to be better
situated to deal with it. And apparently like the main
(05:05):
defense against fire ants is too is to basically move
your butt because because in the in the group that
it like never encountered them before, like they will just
sit there apparently, and the fire ants will crawl over
them and the lizards defense is like, oh, I'm just
gonna be real still still and shut my eyes. Yeah.
And they took it. Yeah, and then they just get
them Yeah. Whereas the ones that are used to it,
(05:27):
they'll know, hey, I need to move and or they
flick them off. They flick them off or the leap away,
you know, et cetera. Um, they have learned to deal
with it. So they the researchers observed this behavior whether
the lizards could you know, take it or get the
heck out of there, But they also were interested in
looking at the hind leg lengths of all the lizards.
Would they find Roberts Well, they found that lizards living
(05:49):
near fire ants are they're developing behaviors to increase their
survival and and evolving longer hind legs in response to
the attacks from the fire ants. Okay, and so that
was that was their exposure. It was the exposure the
length of exposure that correlated. Yeah, And I should also
mention that I believe one of the details in the
study was that they didn't like kill a whole lot
of lizards in this like I think they were. They
(06:10):
were like saving the lizards before they could be stung
to death. That's nice. Yeah, but so as cool as
the study is, it's not quite speciation now. It's more
like these are the movements though that that can lead
to it. But yeah, this is not These lizards aren't
becoming a new breed of lizard, a new species of lizard. Um.
But let's talk about where speciation may be occurring, in
(06:32):
fact in White Sands, New Mexico. Yeah, this is another
lizard study. This is a two thousand ten University of
Idaho study. And I actually talked to one of the
people tied up in the research for this for this
a story for Discovery News January UM. And this one
deals with these brown lizards. Traditionally brown lizards. Uh that
(06:54):
they but they live in an area called White Sands,
New Mexico. And why do you think it's called White Sands,
New Mexico because there's white sand everywhere. Sounds kind they're
a brown lizard though, Yeah, And what is a lizard
and what is a lizard? One of the lizards traditional
defense mechanisms camouflage, camouflage, so the the but they, of course,
these lizards have changed over time over the course of
(07:17):
say two to five thousand years, right, since they arrived
there a couple of thousand years ago. Yeah, so so
they were they were exploring how they've they've changed pigment
during this time. They've they've become these like white lizards
and white sands. Yeah and uh. Anyway, they made the
argument that that this is really one of the they're
hit they've hit several of the road stops on the
(07:38):
way to speciation. Um and uh. And you know, they've
they've changed their color, that's a big one. But also
they've started, uh having a preference for light colored lizards
when it comes to breeding. Really. Yeah, so it's like there,
you know, it's sort of like imagine you know, it's
like a line, you know, and one line is diverging
slowly from the other. So you know, have you know,
(08:01):
another ten thousand years, you know, you might have the white,
the whitelizard, and the brown lizard of separate species entirely.
So that's pretty cool, but not as cool as the
equal I. Yeah, this this is a fantastic study and
you guys may have heard it. It goes back to
what we were talking about with the generations. You know,
it's like human generations. Um, it's hard, it's hard to
(08:21):
really you know, we can't really watch it spread from
generation generation. There haven't been that many generations since origin
of species, you know, et cetera. But if you can
find a species that has really small generations, a short
life cycle, short lived, it's like pushing the fast forward
button right right, And a lot of times that the
choice organisms might be drosophilia, your fruit flies, or or
(08:45):
planel bacteria. And in this case in back in it
was equally a single equally bacterium that in Michigan State
University biologists used and he started twelve laboratory populations with it. Yeah,
this is Professor Richard Lynsky. Twenty years time. Lensky had
generations on his hands. So if we were studying humans,
(09:07):
this would be a phenomenal amount of time. Yeah, we'd
be talking something in the neighborhood of like three million
years of human evolution. So Lensky observed the bacteria as
they grew larger and faster in response to the lab diets.
Then what happened, Well, you hit around the thirty one
five generations, something special happens. Suddenly they're able to this
(09:30):
one population of them are able to consume citrate, which
is as nutrient that they've they've been surrounded by the
whole time as as part of their medium. Yeah, their medium. Um,
it's kind of like like imagine if you were like,
it's like that they're gonna bring up the cats. That
was one of my more way too complicated metaphor. Probert
(09:51):
has to find a way to work in cats into
every podcast. It was just kind of like the buffet
bar was there and they were eating most of it,
and then one day suddenly they were able to eat
the seafood portion of the buffet. Good. Good for them.
But in this case it was the sit rate. So
suddenly you had situate plus E. Coli. Yeah, so you
(10:12):
went up with the population of mutated sitrate consuming bacteria
and as you can imagine, that was a pretty handy
ability to have, and so the population of that bacteria skyrocketed.
And now they call these sitrate plus equally. So here's
also something very interesting about this experiment. You know, somebody's
going to dismiss it as a one time thing, oh,
(10:32):
as a fluke or whatever it as well, Lensky had
a solution for this. So the whole time he and
his team had been freezing samples every five hundred generations,
so he was able to do a rewind and he
was actually able to go back and replace some of
the experiment and see if they could catch it again.
I mean, this is so cool. Yeah. Yeah, And and
apparently they were like when they went back and they
(10:54):
like replayed it, they were they found it like something
was occurring in this in this one population at like
the at the twenty thousand or so generation, like some
small changes that were leading up to this ability to
metabolize sits. Right. Yeah, and they're still working to figure
out exactly what. Okay, so that's the question. Yeah, you know,
what is the mechanism way? I mean, if they could
(11:16):
pinpoint it just a little bit more, that would be great. Yeah,
I just get down to the we have the fine
changes that are occurring. It reminds me a lot. I
think there was like a Twilight Zone where like like
the humans were observing the evolution of like a micro
biological so it wasn't it was more than micro biological.
It's like a tiny little civilization and like they watched
them grow, you know, developed like spaceships and stuff. And
(11:39):
I think the Simpsons, so on a more sobering note, um,
the ability of bacteria to evolve, or any organism to
evolve has pretty important implications, as you guys know. Um,
you know, especially when you're talking about our fifty plus
year war against harmful bacteria, when you're talking about things
like extensively drug res stant tuberculosis UM, and then there
(12:03):
are other So that's that's definitely yeah, in the in
the same way that these citrate plus a cool I
were suddenly able to deal with something in their environment
that they hadn't you been around for too terribly long.
You know, we're having having some very harmful microbes out
there that are you know, figuring how to out how
to deal with the situations that we're throwing at them.
(12:23):
I will tell you as a parent, it's sometimes terrifying
to give your kid antibiotics. You know, I wonder, you know,
is my kid going to evolve resistance to this? You know,
I it's it's just a little terrifying. And and then
there's a there's a whole side with insects and pesticides
as well, you know, where insects developing a resistance to
certain pesticides over time. We you know, we throw out
(12:44):
these solutions and we don't really realize that that nature
is pretty good at evolving. It's pretty much all it does,
you know, So given enough time, you know, it's it's
remarkable what people think, you know, especially micro organisms will
be able to do. Like I was reading something of
the day researching stuff about plastics, and there are some
(13:05):
some predictions that like you know, you know, like tens
and thousands of years, like you know, you'll you'll eventually
have microbes that can can really break down plastics in
a way that we can't. We don't see today because
it's some new material. But give him enough time, they'll
figure it out. Yeah. In the meantime, maybe just bring
your bags off to use plastic. Yeah, yeah, that's always
(13:26):
always a good idea. So, speaking of plastic bags, we've
got a plastic bag here full of reader mail. Let
me grab when happen. They didn't really readers, some of
them are readers, but listeners primarily listeners, I guess. Um. Yeah,
so we got one here from Alicia. Oh. Alicia, she
(13:46):
was the one who wrote into for to share her
favorite bit of cosmos. Yeah. Yeah, she's one of She's
a fan of some of our more cosmic entries in
the podcast series. Here and she says, Hey, Alison and Robert,
this is a little something that I remembered after listening
to your podcasts about the birth of stars and planets.
Though this one this is more relevant to the death
(14:07):
of stars. I just wanted to share my favorite factoid
ever from cosmology. It was on casts the quote plasma
soup unquote that resulted from the Big Bang consisted of
only very small particles like protons, electrons, et cetera. But
there weren't any heavier elements that would have higher atomic numbers.
But from what I can tell from my simplistic understanding
(14:28):
of physics, when stars began to coalesce, the force of
gravity pulling on the outside of the stars would cause
immense amounts of pressure on the particles in the middle,
causing the nuclear fusion reactions and creating heavier and heavy elements. Thus,
large stars will be able to create heavier, large, heavier
elements closer to their centers. Then, if the star dies
and becomes a supernova, it sends its particles scattering far
(14:49):
and wide throughout the galaxy to later clampman become part
of other stars, planets, and what have you. While I'm
normally not a romantic. This literally means that we are
all made of star dust. So yeah, that's that's awesome.
You know, we're all we're all star stuff. So that's
that's kind of meat. It kind of you know, builds
the soul like community of the universe. You know, we
are the universe and the universe is us. Yeah, thanks
(15:12):
Felicia and uh oh, and then we have another one
here from uh oh thoughts from Alison ladder Milk. At first,
that would really be cheap. You're writing in your own
fan now sending anything listener will This one's from Natalie. Oh, Natalie,
we even about right. Oh yeah, this's a long one.
There we go. Not as long as someone and if
you just read some of the highlighted carts, okay, um,
(15:34):
she says, first of all, I just want to say
I'm a big fan of the show. I'm addicted to
listening to the podcast just before bed or in the
quiet moments of my free time. So we should really
keep the yelling down. You might be trying to get
to sleep. Um, that's I'll keep paying money. Your topics
are always very engaging and informative. Whenever I listen, I
(15:54):
feel like I'm getting a brush up on concepts I
missed while zoning out in high school science classes. Which
is great, that's totty much as part of the whole
mission Here, she says, I just finished listening to your podcast,
A World Changing Science Experiments, Part two and was very
interested in section on Pavlov and his experiments with dogs,
but had to send any meddle. Let you know I side. Now,
(16:14):
let you know a side of path Law that is
generally unknown to most. I just graduated in May two
ten from CVE Denver with a bachelor's degree in psychology,
and during my history of psychology class, we discussed path
Law's work in great detail. I was surprised and disturbed
to find that Pavlov used children orphans in fact, in
the same manner as dogs and his experiments. I had
never heard. Yeah, and once he discovered that he could
(16:37):
condition any unconditioned response, he wanted to see if humans
humans would react in the same way. She goes on
to say, much of my surprise, my professor showed a
video of path Law working with both his children and
his dogs, or both his dogs and these children. Despite
this discovery, I'm still a fan of Pavlov's as his
work was pivotal and understanding learning and behavior in humans
and other animals. Again, I love the show and that's
(16:59):
great because that's I mean, that's always my experience with
finding out more about science and science experiments is that
it's always a little bit amazing and a little bit creepy,
depends on which side you look at it, you know. Yeah,
So share your amazing stories or creepy stories with us,
whether you're on Facebook, we're at a stuff from the
science Lab, or Twitter we're on lab stuff, or send
(17:20):
us an email and science stuff it has stuff first
dot com. Yeah, let us know what you're up to
and check out those sites and you'll be able to
see what we're up to. All right, thanks for listening,
Guys for more on this and thousands of other topics
because it how stuff works dot Com. Want more how
(17:42):
stuff works, check out our blogs on the house stuff
works dot com home page
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