Duh! what do you think generations of Mendel-inspired botanists and zoologists have been doing for the last century and a half? These things are more impressive if you deliberately choose which parents will breed (selective breeding of animal traits in farming and pets, for example). The shorter the generation time of the organism, the faster the process. For example, one study (by Sol speigelman, reported in "Oxygen" by Nick Lane) to find the minimal gene complement required by a virus. If the culture medium contains not just basic nutritional materials but also a large number of the working enzymes and proteins that are needed for the virus to grow, then with time the organism will drop the parts of its DNA that encode for the machinery to make those proteins. The offspring reproduce faster and use less energy because they are not "wasting" effort making things they could just grab from the culture medium. from an initial genome of 4500 base pairs, the virus simplified its genome to a mere 220 base pairs ("Spiegelman's monsters"), yet continued to thrive, so long as the proteins are supplied. The phenomenon of antibiotic resistance is a powerful expression of evolution in action. Also in Lynn Margulis' excellent book "environmental evolution", read about Jeon's work showing how an infectious and generally fatal bacteria can, within a few years become a symbiotic organelle of a strain of amoebae.

And you think this is due to random mutation? Seems more like the environment is having an effect on the organism's development. This is what I've been saying. Species are shaped (sculpted?) by their environment over time. Random mutation can not account for such processes. Something else is at work.