An international team of researchers has documented a remarkable example of natural selection in a tropical butterfly species that fought back – genetically speaking – against a highly invasive, male-killing bacteria.
Within 10 generations that spanned less than a year, the proportion of males of the Hypolimnas bolina butterfly on the South Pacific island of Savaii jumped from a meager 1 percent of the population to about 39 percent.
I thought this is again ample scientific evidence of evolution at work, as against creationism. But where faith rules over reason, it will always rule over it (see point #3).
Finally, ending the post on a positive note, did you know that more than 5000 letters written by Charles Darwin, including ideas exchanged with many influential figures of his time, are fully searchable and readable online at the Darwin Correspondence Project?
Photo Credit: UC Berkeley
Related posts:
3 Comments to “Fastest Evolution Ever Observed”
Leave a Reply
-
-
An Unquiet Mind by Mahendra Palsule is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
“Finally, ending the post on a positive note, did you know that more than 5000 letters written by Charles Darwin, including ideas exchanged with many influential figures of his time, are fully searchable and readable online at the Darwin Correspondence Project?”
Mahendra,
As long as an Unquiet Mind is readable and searchable online, who the eff cares??
I am sure the creationists will now argue that since scientists claim that evolution takes a long period of time (millions of years), the 10 year old evolution cycle is actually proof that god intervened
Ramana: come on – to repeat your phrase, be Objective!
Ashok: yes, that is one of their claims, though it seems laughable. As expected, not all the creationists arguments for this news is consistent. Some are claiming this is simply adaptation/mutation, and does not involve any new genetic information. Some are terming this as “micro-evolution”, which doesn’t require God’s intervention. And so on. It’s quite a Flood (with an uppercase ‘F’ in reference to Noah) of arguments.