This is pretty cool! One thing to think about (and its raised in the last two paragraphs of the article) is how this might change in a dynamic environment, and

This is pretty cool! One thing to think about (and its raised in the last two paragraphs of the article) is how this might change in a dynamic environment, and with the addition of other simultaneously evolving agents. I think its pretty clear that given some static environment, there will be some maxima of fitness - everything is limited by physics and thermodynamics at some point. Aside from the question of 'how close can we get to this maxima', another question is, if we have a bunch of different sets of mutations that together generate an organism that is at or near the current environmental maxima, what happens as the environment changes? By the way, here's a preprint of the paper in question: http://sergeykryazhimskiy.webs.com/1519.full.pdf http://sergeykryazhimskiy.webs.com/1519.full.pdf The e. coli studies cited can be found: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3461117/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3461117/ and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2430337/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2430337/