ReviewInterface focus2015
Replaying the tape of life in the twenty-first century.
Review in Interface focus, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed.
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Game changing mutation.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Convergent evolution in angiosperms adapted to cold climates.Plant communications · 2025Review
- Divergence time and environmental similarity predict the strength of morphological convergence in stick and leaf insects.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Shared Selection and Genetic Architecture Drive Strikingly Repeatable Evolution in Long-Term Experimental Hybrid Populations.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- The origin of mutational epistasis.European biophysics journal : EBJ · 2024Article
- Transcriptional convergence after repeated duplication of an amino acid transporter gene leads to the independent emergence of the black husk/pericarp trait in barley and rice.Plant biotechnology journal · 2024Article
- Trade-offs, trade-ups, and high mutational parallelism underlie microbial adaptation during extreme cycles of feast and famine.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- Mutational hotspots lead to robust but suboptimal adaptive outcomes in certain environments.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2023Article
- Evolutionary repeatability of emergent properties of ecological communities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Genetic assimilation of ancestral plasticity during parallel adaptation to zinc contamination in Silene uniflora.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Repeated evolution of similar phenotypes: Integrating comparative methods with developmental pathways.Genetics and molecular biology · 2023Article
- Climatic similarity and genomic background shape the extent of parallel adaptation in Timema stick insects.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Genetic basis of speciation and adaptation: from loci to causative mutations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Hybrid evolution repeats itself across environmental contexts in Texas sunflowers (Helianthus).Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Forecasting of phenotypic and genetic outcomes of experimental evolution in Pseudomonas protegens.PLoS genetics · 2021Article
- Contingency and chance erase necessity in the experimental evolution of ancestral proteins.eLife · 2021Article
- Fractal genomics of SOD1 evolution.Immunogenetics · 2020Article
- Phenotypes to remember: Evolutionary developmental memory capacity and robustness.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Convergent evolution of conserved mitochondrial pathways underlies repeated adaptation to extreme environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Should the tape of life be replayed, would it produce similar living beings? A classical answer has long been 'no', but accumulating data are now challenging this view. Repeatability in experimental evolution, in phenotypic evolution of diverse species and in the genes underlying phenotypic evolution indicates that despite unpredictability at the level of basic evolutionary processes (such as apparition of mutations), a certain kind of predictability can emerge at higher levels over long time periods. For instance, a survey of the alleles described in the literature that cause non-deleterious phenotypic differences among animals, plants and yeasts indicates that similar phenotypes have often evolved in distinct taxa through independent mutations in the same genes. Does this mean that the range of possibilities for evolution is limited? Does this mean that we can predict the outcomes of a replayed tape of life? Imagining other possible paths for evolution runs into four important issues: (i) resolving the influence of contingency, (ii) imagining living organisms that are different from the ones we know, (iii) finding the relevant concepts for predicting evolution, and (iv) estimating the probability of occurrence for complex evolutionary events that occurred only once during the evolution of life on earth.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.