Two must-have trendy theories pitted against each other in “Can Evolution Outrace Climate Change?” at FiveThirtyEight Science:
“Evolution saved populations of yeast from deadly concentrations of salt. The conditions under which this type of “evolutionary rescue” succeeds are narrow, but that hasn’t stopped scientists from modeling and collecting data to see just when and how it works. If we think of evolution as survival of the fittest, in a tough environment what matters is how quickly a population can get fit in order to survive.
“Natural selection is a hugely powerful process. But even Darwin thought — and a lot of the thinking since Darwin has been — that it’s excruciatingly slow,” Shaw said. But in the past 50 years, studies of evolution have shown that adaptation can happen much faster than anyone imagined. The question now, Shaw said, is “how fast can these changes happen?”
Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.
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