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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)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 14 2022, @05:24AM (1 child)
!!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday February 14 2022, @06:04AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 14 2022, @05:29AM (1 child)
Can they account for rapid devolution, and early onset? Asking for a friend.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 14 2022, @05:58AM
It's what happens when very old people reproduce. I blame aristarchus.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 14 2022, @05:52AM
it's named after a penis! ONE EYED WILLIE!
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Monday February 14 2022, @06:10AM (2 children)
It doesn't follow. It entirely depends on the life cycle of the fish and when it is harvested in that life cycle. If it's big and fat and past it's breeding window it doesn't matter at all if it is fished out of the sea or not. We have fishing regulations to account for this. An instance of reasonable regulations that protect us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by deimtee on Monday February 14 2022, @06:31AM (1 child)
It's not so much about being fat, no-one throws back the skinny fish. It's about the length.
Look at the North Sea cod for a good example. They had a minimum size limit on what they were allowed to keep in order to protect juveniles. The cod are now breeding at a size well below that limit, and some of them live their entire life cycle without getting above the size that was considered "juvenile".
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 14 2022, @08:20AM
Many jurisdictions are changing their size rules because of this. For many species of fish with discernible life cycles, your bag limit is higher for mature fish if they are below a certain limit. This is a direct attempt to try and use the evolutionary pressure to increase their size to increase the total harvest.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 14 2022, @09:10AM
Just look at dogs...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/dogs-eyebrows-humans-communication [nationalgeographic.com]
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/01/23/170103080/in-order-to-live-with-people-canines-evolved-to-love-starchy-foods [npr.org]
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox [wikipedia.org]
(note also the many dog like physical characteristics in the tame foxes)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mr_mischief on Monday February 14 2022, @03:27PM
This just in: multiple generations happen in far less time in species with shorter lifespans, and some changes happen much faster in terms of number of generations in response to environmental factors than do others. Film at biology lessons given to grade schoolers in the 1980s.
This is about camouflage changing in insects or bacteria becoming immune to the waste products of a certain fungus. It's not about cyanobacteria growing thumbs and inventing the printing press. There are differences in scale between local adjustments within a species and the evolution of all life from a common ancestor. Quoting Darwin saying it took ages for the changes to add up in this context is a sneaky little straw man, but still a straw man. The man was aware of domestication of animals.