The Following Questions Refer to Figure 27.1

Multiple Choice

The following questions refer to Figure 27.1.
In this eight-year experiment, 12 populations of E. coli, each begun from a single cell, were grown in low-glucose conditions for 20,000 generations. Each culture was introduced to fresh growth medium every 24 hours. Occasionally, samples were removed from the populations, and their fitness in low-glucose conditions was tested against that of members sampled from the ancestral (common ancestor) E. coli population.

Figure 27.1
-If new genetic variation in the experimental populations arose solely by spontaneous mutations, then the most effective process for subsequently increasing the prevalence of the beneficial mutations in the population over the course of generations is

A) transduction.
B) binary fission.
C) conjugation.
D) transformation.
E) meiosis.