About Experimental Evolution

Experimental evolution is concerned with testing hypotheses and theories of evolution by use of controlled experiments. It usually makes use of organisms with rapid generation times and small physical size, often microbes, to observe phenomena that in large multicellular organisms occur too slowly Experimental evolution is evolutionary biology in its most empirical sense, as it involves the study of real time changes in populations, instead of inferring evolutionary processes from comparisons between contemporaneous populations. It is thus a powerful tool to establish a direct causal link between evolutionary processes and adaptation patterns.