Darwin comes to town: how cities are creating new species
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I live in Singapore (one of the places he talks about in the book) and I can see anecdotal examples of the kind of things he talks about in the book, like urban birds being less anxious around humans compared to forest birds.
Basically sparrows are so used to humans that they don't have any problem landing on a table while people are still there, while trying to see if they get something out of us.
Some of them even adopt dog like behaviors, jumping left and right or making small noises, as if begging for some food.
I was thinking, "What in the world does this bird want? I don't have any food, and why would a bird want coffee?"
I figured out the answer. He made a bold grab for the sugar packet. It was too heavy to fly off with, so he just dragged it away from me, opened it, and ate it while I continued to drink my coffee.
It sounds like they started changing pretty quickly with the new climate and no predators.
If the population keeps increasing, apparently at some point it'll be classified as a new type of hippo.
Black-and-white worldviews are, by definition, not nuanced, but evolution, but its slow (by human standards) nature, is extremely nuanced, to the point of beeing unnoticeable.
"to the point of beeing unnoticeable"
It's not unnoticeable; read the fricking article.
As mentioned, a more radical event should happen to convince these people (so radical as to be impossible).
>“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’ ”
As I noted, for a Creationist nothing will ever be proof of speciation. But apparently telling such simple truths gets downvoted.
> As mentioned, a more radical event should happen to convince these people (so radical as to be impossible).
No, no event, not matter how radical, would convince them because they are ideologically committed to rejecting evolution, which they see as contrary to their entire belief system.
Please explain to me how humans are immune to natural selection and then go claim your nobel prize for revolutionizing human understanding of genetics.
Why should he do that? He never claimed that -- it's a strawman of your own making.
That has never happened. You seem to be committing a naturalist fallacy.
> The shape of a bird’s wing is not something that evolution can mess with with impunity. It is very closely wedded to a bird’s way of life. Long pointed wings are better for fast flying in a straight line, while short rounded wings are good for making rapid turns or for quickly taking off.
> The conclusion was inescapable: only cliff swallows with wings short enough to take off vertically from the tarmac to escape an oncoming car had managed to get away and spread their short-wing genes in the gene pool. The tardier long-winged ones ended up as ex-swallows on the hard shoulder, their long-wing genes excluded from the pool. And, as the surviving swallows became ever better adapted at evading approaching vehicles, the number of casualties plummeted.
> When researchers consulted the bird collections of eight natural history museums in North America and took measurements on the shape of the wings of 312 starlings, they discovered something interesting. The starlings’ wings had gradually become more rounded over time, because the secondary flight feathers (at the bird’s “lower arm”, closest to the body) had become elongated by some 4%.
> It is precisely this quick-response benefit of more rounded wings that may be one of the reasons that the settler starlings evolved. In those 120 years since Schieffelin had released the starlings’ founding fathers in Central Park, the human population in western North America (the part of the continent that the starling expanded into) grew almost fifty-fold. What had been tiny settlements when the starling arrived blossomed into metropolises in a matter of decades. And with urbanisation came new dangers for urban birds: cats and cars. It is quite likely that this is what caused the American starlings to evolve a wing shape that helped them get out of the way of a pouncing cat or a speeding motorcar hurtling towards them.
The answers are out there if you actually look for them, you know.