When timing is everything
When it comes to the sort of beneficial mutations that drive natural selection, there’s new evidence that, evolutionarily speaking, timing is everything. In paper published in the March issue of Genetics, Christopher Marx, associate professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, says that beneficial mutations may occur more often than first thought, but many never emerge as “winners,” because they don’t fall within the narrow set of circumstances required for them to dominate a population. “Remarkably, it’s just not that hard to improve. But the trick is that it’s not good enough to just be good,” Marx said. “Any particular mutation being a winner is unlikely because it has a number of battles to face to avoid being wiped out. It’s pretty cutthroat.” Interestingly, Marx hadn’t set out to study these intra-population struggles. His original goal was to study how Methylobacterium extorquens, a bacterium known for eating methanol and excreting formaldehyde, developed its unusual behavior....