Fitness of evolving bacterial populations is contingent on deep and shallow history but only shallow history creates predictable patterns.

Long-term evolution experiments have tested the importance of genetic and environmental factors in influencing evolutionary outcomes. Differences in phylogenetic history, recent adaptation to distinct environments and chance events, all influence the fitness of a population. However, the interplay of these factors on a population's evolutionary potential remains relatively unexplored. We tracked the outcome of 2000 generations of evolution of four natural isolates of Escherichia coli bacteria that were engineered to also create differences in shallow history by adding previously identified mutations selected in a separate long-term experiment. Replicate populations started from each progenitor evolved in four environments. We found that deep and shallow phylogenetic histories both contributed significantly to differences in evolved fitness, though by different amounts in different selection environments. With one exception, chance effects were not significant. Whereas the effect of deep history did not follow any detectable pattern, effects of shallow history followed a pattern of diminishing returns whereby fitter ancestors had smaller fitness increases. These results are consistent with adaptive evolution being contingent on the interaction of several evolutionary forces but demonstrate that the nature of these interactions is not fixed and may not be predictable even when the role of chance is small.