Bacterial Evolution and the Bak-Sneppen Model

Recently, Lenski et al.^1-3 have carried out several experiments on bacterial evolution. Their findings support the theory of punctuated equilibrium in biological evolution. They have further quantified the relative contributions of adaptation, chance and history to bacterial evolution. In this paper, we show that a modified M-trait Bak-Sneppen model can explain many of the experimental results in a qualitative manner.