Edit: I meant specifically humans.
During the bubonic plague there was a gene mutation that made people less likely to die from the plague, but unfortunately it causes more autoimmune problems:
Yes. One example of evolution happening even as a result of cultural differences: In Europe and Africa, people have learnt to brew alcoholic drinks to make their water safe from bacterial contamination.
People who couldn’t stomach alcohol were more at risk of getting sick from contaminated water, so there was an evolutionary push towards alcohol tolerance.
People in Asia have boiled the water to make tea instead, for the same reason. They didn’t have this evolutionary pressure, which is the reason Asians on average have a lower alcohol tolerance even today.
Do you mean in humans or animals?
If you mean plants I’d say it would be pretty hard to tell what wasn’t the result of some form of selective breeding at this point.
That’s an important distinction to make, since microbes evolve so fast that we have a hard time keeping up with their antibiotic resistances. Plants and animals change all the time, but it is a lot slower due to slower reproduction cycle. Humans, elephants and whales change too, but it just takes a while for us to notice it.
Not necessarily. We have found some preserved remains of smaller animals, and we also have some current animals to compare to. For the simplest example, we can compare dog breeds to wolf breeds to find out that dogs have had an increased amount of pancreatic Amylase genes since domestication (which is also one of the factors behind them getting more cases of diabetes).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4329415/
The problem for humans tho, is that there’s no longer any intermediate species around to compare to, and our best preserved individuals are from the last 5000 years or so. For the record, a few years back a cryopreserved domesticated dog was found in siberia and it’s 4 times older.
Watermelons used to be only 50mm in diameter and tasted very bitter. You had to hit them with a hammer to crack em open. Circa 3000 BC
It is, if you count humans as part of nature, which they are in respect to natural selection.
Flowers and blossoms are selected by their attractiveness to bees and other insects. Apples were selected by their attractiveness to bears (yes, bears where the first to domesticate apples). And watermelons were selected by their attractiveness to humans.
Only GMOs don’t fall into the category of natural selection.
I agree that humans are part of the ecosystem in principle.
But if you count humans as part of nature, the word “nature” pretty much loses all meaning.
Cause then drones, microplastics, nuclear power stations and computers are also part of nature.
