A species’ evolution has long been thought to take thousands of years to produce seemingly minor changes.
It appears that in at least one case, however, evolution is occurring at what seems like jet speed. In the last 150 years, the world’s elephant population has evolved much smaller tusks.
The average size of an African elephant’s tusks has gone down by half in the last century and a half. Indian elephants have undergone a similar tusk size reduction.
Experts believe the rapid evolution of the massive land mammals is due to poaching. Zoologists from Oxford University suggest that ivory poachers, who go for the largest males with the largest tusks, have caused the breeding behaviors of the animals to change rapidly in a short time.
The largest male African elephants have the largest tusks. These tusks are extremely important in elephant behavior, with the largest tusks usually resulting in more successful intimidation of smaller males or winning fights for female elephants. But when the largest animals are killed, it changes the breeding patterns of the animals. In short, without the largest males for competition, the smaller males with their smaller tusks will breed more successfully, and their offspring will have smaller tusks.
I always found it richly ironic that the people who have faith in a deity for which not one shred of evidence exists, have no problem demanding impossible evidence before supporting the science of evolution.
It is well understood by most evolutionary biologists that evolution is happening around us everyday if we simply know where to look.
A Soviet fur farm set out to breed tamer foxes (to make killing them easier I suppose. Don't get me started on that.) After 20 generations the foxes had floppy ears along with more docile dispositions. Just thought that was interesting.
ReplyDeleteSo now they have docile fur coats ?
ReplyDelete( very strange...)
( true irony...when they were breeding them to be docile....and their ears became floppy....did their coats thin too? because somehow that would be karmic payback.....)