Fastest Evolution Ever Observed

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.Hypolimnas_male

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

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3 Comments

  • 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. :-)