>>11197697Usually it's just shifting of the expression of genes within a population (but that is very basic definition of evolution anyway, coincidentally) It's like dumping a bunch of rabbits in a wintry climate where snow is on the ground 60% of the year; the white ones will express their genes more due to better evasion from predators.
So when you say
>explain how they can adapt thenYou're basically saying explain how they can fulfill the very basic definition of evolution which is design to be correct by default. It's rather circular.
"Adapting" truly "novel" features is very rare and only quasi observed in bacteria a few times that I'm aware of. The issue is we don't truly know if they're adapting with truly novel features or it's just dormant already-existing genes being re-expressed in the particular experiment. The 30 year ecoli experiment is a good example. Some of the authors pointed out that extrapolating from the 1 in trillions of bacteria that showed a new ability to metabolize citrate we would expect that it happens in nature every few SECONDS what took 30 years in a lab. But it's just not very beneficial so it's never expressed further in nature. So the "novel" evolutionary feature shown in that experiment may not really have been novel: the genes were there already but just re-expressed or "turned back on" if you will.
You'd have to analyze the entire e-coli genome and verify the feature was non-existant in any fashion before you could truly say evolution allowed it to adapt to the lab experiment. I'm sure we could do that someday, but not quite yet.
