>Both our life spans and our five senses are inadequate to the task of comprehension: The most powerful mechanism of organic change lies well beyond our everyday experience.

This is mostly true, but there are some cool things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_exp...) that have been done. (You might recall that Lenski's team saw E. coli evolve the ability to eat citrate: http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2008/06/02/a_new_step_in_evolut...)