It’s like time travel.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 day ago
It is happening.
Shit just happens very slowly.
Deceptichum@quokk.au 1 day ago
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 day ago
“What do you mean time travel isn’t real? We are traveling through time literally all the time! We just can only go forward… Slowly.”
TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Says you! I’m moving forward at a blistering 60 seconds per minute.
Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
And modern medicine also slows it down further.
MotoAsh@piefed.social 1 day ago
Nah that actually accelerates the genetic diversity. All the morons that would’ve died off or medical issues that would’ve been a death sentence now have a chance to go on and further… everything.
shalafi@lemmy.world 1 day ago
We’ve been figuring out that evolution can move fast, given pressure. I often point to African male elephants shortening or losing their tusks due to humans poaching the super tuskers.
I’ve heard several arguments that boil down to, “That’s not evolution.” But it is! The environment ramped up a selection pressure, the animals adjusted. Same as Atlantic fish (trout I think?) attaining maturity faster and smaller. We’ve been keeping the big ones for decades.
Take the “humans did that” out of the equation and imagine another factor, evolution still happened quickly.
tl;dr: Animals can evolve quite quickly, but such events are hard to observe they were rare and weird outside of human influence.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 day ago
I feel like that’s more evidence that humans have some control over evolution not just among ourselves, but other animals also. The elephants with smaller tusks are just able to keep breeding since they aren’t being poached.
acockworkorange@mander.xyz 20 hours ago
I spent the last ten minutes trying to fund an article I read years ago. It was about a tiny freshwater fish that, in the period of something like 50 years, doubled its armor scales coverage and density in response to a new predator. It was amazing, looking at the pictures over time. Basically evolution in real time.