Lecture: Voyaging in Time With Charles Darwin

What if you could watch evolution happen right before your eyes? For over 35 years, Richard Lenski’s lab has been doing exactly that—running the world's longest-running evolution experiment with bacteria. They've witnessed more than 75,000 generations of E. coli adapting to a simple laboratory environment, which is a bit like watching millions of years of human evolution compressed into just a few decades.

It gets better: bacteria can be frozen and revived years later. It’s like having a time machine: Lenski’s team can literally bring ancient ancestors back to life and compare them with their distant descendants—even pitting them against each other in head-to-head competitions. And the Lenski lab can sequence entire genomes of these bacteria, revealing the mutations that fuel evolutionary change.

This experiment has answered fascinating questions: Does evolution repeat itself when you replay the tape of life? How do organisms balance perfecting what they already do well versus evolving entirely new abilities? And what would Darwin himself have made of what Lenski and his team have discovered?

Join us for a journey through time—both to learn about Charles Darwin and to discover what he never got to see: evolution in action, right before our eyes.