Cracked Article on Recent Mutations

[RichardMNixon]

Some interesting stuff in here. http://www.cracked.com/article_19213_7-animals-that-are-evolving-right-before-our-eyes.html

Elephants losing their tusks to avoid poachers
Fish immune to toxic waste
Lizards moving towards live birth
Peppered moths are reversing their industrial revolution color change
etc.

 

[scalyblue]

Since it's cracked, take the article with a small grain of salt, take the links from the article to the actual stories a bit more seriously ^.^

 

[Squawk]

How would lack of tusks be selected for? Elephant generations take 33 years (so says the first web page I found on the issue). Poach for 300 years and you still only clobber 3 generations. Evolution in 3 generations? Thats some serious selection pressure.

 

[Aught3]

Do you mean 9?

 

[RichardMNixon]

How would lack of tusks be selected for? Elephant generations take 33 years (so says the first web page I found on the issue). Poach for 300 years and you still only clobber 3 generations. Evolution in 3 generations? Thats some serious selection pressure.

As scalyblue said, it's probably important to check the primary sources if you want the real facts, but I thought this was an interesting survey of recent findings. With elephants specifically, population bottlenecks do typically result in very fast evolution don't they? I'm not a biologist but it does seem feasible considering it's really "artificial" selection.

 

[Squawk]

I actually meant 100, not 300, typo.

Unless someone has already figured out the gene's that code for tusk length and found that it really is genetic and not development or environment based, then found that a very high percentage of poached elephants have tusk lengths that are in excess of, say, 70% of average (I'm plucking figures out of the air a bit but go with me), and that the number of poached elephants is statistically significant (say more than 10-15% of the population), then it cannot be affecting evolution in a way that we can detect.