I remember seeing this posted a few days ago. When I hover over '8 hours ago', it shows '2024-07-22T15:59:19'. That's not 8 hours ago. Why is a post from 4 days ago showing as a recent post? Is it a title change issue?
Regardless. What's the point of the article. We have known for decades that evolution 'can' happen much quicker than darwin thought. From large animals to bacteria. Not only that we know that 'lamarckian' epigentics exists.
It's interesting to look all the modern dog breeds and think: "There are very few actual newly mutated genes here, we just encouraged different re-mixes or even un-mixing of an enormous variety that was already latent."
(And then, for a few dog breeds: "I'm so sorry, we have much to answer for.")
There was a Russian experiment (still running after decades) to breed domesticated foxes starting from wild animals. The friendliest pups in a litter were selected for future breeding. Within just a few generations, the animals were tamer and even started to look like dog puppies.
The idea that evolution isn't a gradual process of improvement but rather more like a dynamic system, is fairly widely accepted and essentially originates with Stephan Jay Gould.
I'm not sure that's fair summary. It doesn't seem like they ruled out gradual evolution? Perhaps I'm misremembering Gould.
From the Wikipedia article:
> Much confusion has arisen over what proponents of punctuated equilibrium actually argued, what mechanisms they advocated, how fast the punctuations were, what taxonomic scale their theory applied to, how revolutionary their claims were intended to be, and how punctuated equilibrium related to other ideas like saltationism, quantum evolution, and mass extinction.
But it in any case, I don't think they were talking about the 40-year scale. The fossil record doesn't allow paleontologists to see things at so fine-grained a scale.
Contrary to some of the comments here, I found the article quite interesting. It, along with a paper it links to, describes a very cool study of rapid speciation (over a few generations) observed in the wild. Nice to see the guardian actually link to a paper!
But mutation isn't part of that definition. Evolution isn't happening if there's no mutation. Otherwise the ability to interbreed would never go away no matter how much evolution happens.
Evolution can happen without mutation. Evolution can happen within species. Species is a pool of genes, and changing environment can change the selection of those genes. Things like sexual selection or distance can make separate species.
Think about dogs or other domesticated animals. They have the same genes as wild ones but they have been selected. Mutation happens, like the cat orange coat, but many are original genes. The domesticated foxes someone mentioned are interesting cause of how fast the breeding and how features similar to dog appeared.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 52.9 ms ] threadRegardless. What's the point of the article. We have known for decades that evolution 'can' happen much quicker than darwin thought. From large animals to bacteria. Not only that we know that 'lamarckian' epigentics exists.
It’s an interview with Rosemary Grant, occasioned by her new memoir.
The motivation is explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
If you don't know about it, it can cause some head-scratching, as you wonder whether the prior post was just in your imagination:)
(And then, for a few dog breeds: "I'm so sorry, we have much to answer for.")
Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium
From the Wikipedia article:
> Much confusion has arisen over what proponents of punctuated equilibrium actually argued, what mechanisms they advocated, how fast the punctuations were, what taxonomic scale their theory applied to, how revolutionary their claims were intended to be, and how punctuated equilibrium related to other ideas like saltationism, quantum evolution, and mass extinction.
But it in any case, I don't think they were talking about the 40-year scale. The fossil record doesn't allow paleontologists to see things at so fine-grained a scale.
No.
Evolution is "gene characteristics surviving and being passed down"
Think about dogs or other domesticated animals. They have the same genes as wild ones but they have been selected. Mutation happens, like the cat orange coat, but many are original genes. The domesticated foxes someone mentioned are interesting cause of how fast the breeding and how features similar to dog appeared.