A New Database Reveals How Much Humans are Messing With Evolution
upstart writes:
A new database reveals how much humans are messing with evolution:
Charles Darwin thought of evolution as an incremental process, like the patient creep of glaciers or the march of continental plates. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages," he wrote in On the Origin of Species, his famous 1859 treatise on natural selection.
But by the 1970s, scientists were finding evidence that Darwin might be wrong-at least about the timescale. Peppered moths living in industrial areas of Britain were getting darker, better for blending in against the soot-blackened buildings and avoiding predation from the air. House sparrows-introduced to North America from Europe-were changing size and color according to the climate of their new homes. Tufted hairgrass growing around electricity pylons was developing a tolerance for zinc (which is used as a coating for pylons and can be toxic to plants).
[...] Hunting and harvesting are the biggest drivers of this trend: if humans pluck the fattest fish from the ocean each time they cast their nets, it follows that only the smaller ones will survive to pass on their genes. But climate could also play a role because of a basic rule of biology: larger creatures have a bigger surface area-to-volume ratio and therefore find it easier to retain heat. The theory is that you don't need to maintain that larger body size as the temperatures are warming, and so you can be smaller," Gotanda says.
Also at Arstechnica.
Journal Reference:
Andrew P. Hendry, Michael T. Kinnison. PERSPECTIVE: THE PACE OF MODERN LIFE: MEASURING RATES OF CONTEMPORARY MICROEVOLUTION, Evolution (DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.1999.tb04550.x)
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.