Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Are humans changing evolution? Like tuskless elephants…

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Some claim we are causing life forms to evolve in new and unusual ways and attempt to predict a future:

Humans have shaped the bodies of other creatures at least since dogs were domesticated around 30,000 years ago. But the combination of industrialised farming, introduced species, urbanisation, pollution, and climate change are creating unprecedented selective pressures. We have become the world’s greatest evolutionary force.

Evolutionary time – at least for larger, more complex organisms – can be slow. This leaves many animals unable to adapt fast enough to cope with a human-dominated planet, with extinction currently up to 1,000 times greater than the rate at which species might be expected to disappear without human interference.

But rapid change is also possible, via an inbuilt genomic plasticity that allows individual animals to draw on a range of body plans and behaviours best suited to new opportunities and pressures. So-called microevolutions can transpire in the time of just a handful of generations.

David Farrier, “Why we are living in an era of unnatural selection” at BBC Future (January 25, 2022)

Farrier offers some examples, including these:

Today, worker bees in industrial beehives – transported from farm to farm across the United States in convoys of trucks – are one-third larger than their wild cousins, and more docile. In the past 100 years, North American songbirds have modified the shape of their wings to cope with habitats fragmented by deforestation. Under pressure from poaching, Zambian elephants are born without tusks. Since the introduction of cane toads to Australia in 1935, originally to deal with beetle infestations in sugar plantations, the mouths of black snakes have shrunk as succeeding generations learned to avoid toad-sized prey, while the toads themselves have become cannibals, victims of their own success as predators.

David Farrier, “Why we are living in an era of unnatural selection” at BBC Future (January 25, 2022)

In a human-dominated world, things happen faster, for better or worse. Should we still call it “evolution” if we did it?

Comments
@Polistra Regret to inform you that your application was unsuccessful The Committee’s view was that your omission to deal with ‘fossil fuels’ was fatal to your success.Belfast
January 28, 2022
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Ah, but is this natural selection or artificial selection? :-)Fasteddious
January 28, 2022
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Genetics and natural selection operating. Call it evolution but it is not Evolution. Wait till those cute adorable elephant cows cast their sweet eyes on those big guys with the big tusks who just gored the local tuskless dude. Then this evolution with a small “e” will reverse. Darwin’s ideas at work. But again it’s not Evolution. The DNA model will never work. That’s not where the Evolution action is.jerry
January 28, 2022
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Climate change, climate change, climate change, pandemic, biodiversity, mass extinction, mass extinction, Anthropocene, Anthropocene, climate change, climate change, climate change. Now can I have my Federal grant please?polistra
January 27, 2022
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