Natural Selection in a Lab?

Fascinating science in this article. A Michigan State biologist has been growing E. Coli in the lab since 1989 following over 40,000 generations studying natural selection. In a parallel read in the most recent New Yorker an article about cave paintings suggested that "since recorded history began, around 3200 BC with the invention of writing in the Middle East, there have been some two hundred human generations (if one reckons a new one every twenty five years.) Future discoveries may alter the math, but, as it now stands, forty-five hundred generations separate the earliest Homo Sapiens form the earliest cave artists, and between the artists and us another fifteen hundred generations have descended the birth canal, learned to walk upright, mastered speech and the use of tools, reached puberty, reproduced, and died" Just a reference, in the lab in about 20 years we have 40,000 generations and in 5,200 years we have 200 human generations...just an interesting time scale in the world of natural selection...