Tell Me Where You've Been and I'll Tell You How You'll Evolve

The reproducibility of adaptive evolution is a long-standing debate in evolutionary biology. Kempher et al. (M. L. Kempher, X. Tao, R. Song, B. Wu, et al., mBio 11:e00569-20, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1128/mBio.00569-20) used experimental evolution to investigate the effect of previous evolutionary trajectories on the ability of microbial populations to adapt to high temperatures. Despite the divergence caused by adaptation to previous environments, all populations reproducibly converged on similar final levels of fitness. Nevertheless, the genetic basis of adaptation depended on past selection experiments, reinforcing the idea that previous adaptation can dictate the trajectories of later evolutionary processes.