Under Pressure, Does Evolution Evolve?

From the article:"However, the process wasn’t completely random. Rosenberg’s findings suggested that bacteria were capable of increasing their mutation rates, which might in turn produce strains capable of surviving new conditions."Increasing the random mutation rate still produces random mutations. I see this mistake made by the press and scientists alike. The randomness of mutations has to do with their relation to fitness, not time, genomic loci, or rate.As an analogy, you can increase the number of lottery drawings, but the results are still random. Poor people can buy more tickets than rich people, but the results are still random. One area of the country can buy more tickets than other areas, but the results are still random.

There is no doubt that some areas of a genome will experience higher mutation rates than others. However, whether a mutation occurs or not is not determined by the needs of the organism.The classic example of the SOS mutation response was seen with E. coli and lac+ revertants. In this experiments, starvation caused a higher rate of mutations that resulted in the ability to metabolize lactose when lactose was present. However, it was soon found that these mutations would occur at the same rate whether lactose was present or not. It was the starvation that caused the increased the genome wide mutation rate, not the presence of lactose.

On average, yes. This could be confirmed by the ratio of synonymous and non-synonymous mutations. The rate of divergence due to neutral synonymous mutations should give you the rate of mutation. This would allow you to measure selection based on the rate of accumulation of non-synonymous mutations, the famous Ka/Ks ratio.