'Evolution happens much quicker than Darwin thought' | Hacker News Reader

'Evolution happens much quicker than Darwin thought'

theguardian.com

45 pointsBrajeshwar17 comments

The idea that evolution isn't a gradual process of improvement but rather more like a dynamic system, is fairly widely accepted and essentially originates with Stephan Jay Gould.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium

These people did 40 years of fieldwork to prove the point. ‘Beak of the finch’ by Jonathan Wiener is a very readable story about their work.

I'm not sure that's fair summary. It doesn't seem like they ruled out gradual evolution? Perhaps I'm misremembering Gould.

From the Wikipedia article:

> Much confusion has arisen over what proponents of punctuated equilibrium actually argued, what mechanisms they advocated, how fast the punctuations were, what taxonomic scale their theory applied to, how revolutionary their claims were intended to be, and how punctuated equilibrium related to other ideas like saltationism, quantum evolution, and mass extinction.

But it in any case, I don't think they were talking about the 40-year scale. The fossil record doesn't allow paleontologists to see things at so fine-grained a scale.

It's interesting to look all the modern dog breeds and think: "There are very few actual newly mutated genes here, we just encouraged different re-mixes or even un-mixing of an enormous variety that was already latent."

(And then, for a few dog breeds: "I'm so sorry, we have much to answer for.")

There was a Russian experiment (still running after decades) to breed domesticated foxes starting from wild animals. The friendliest pups in a litter were selected for future breeding. Within just a few generations, the animals were tamer and even started to look like dog puppies.

Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

Fascinating read, thank you

Contrary to some of the comments here, I found the article quite interesting. It, along with a paper it links to, describes a very cool study of rapid speciation (over a few generations) observed in the wild. Nice to see the guardian actually link to a paper!

Speaking as a Finch (large F) I am delighted by this study of the finch (small f)

this is just gene characteristics surviving and being passed down.. evolution is a change of species no?..

> evolution is a change of species no?

No.

Evolution is "gene characteristics surviving and being passed down"

But mutation isn't part of that definition. Evolution isn't happening if there's no mutation. Otherwise the ability to interbreed would never go away no matter how much evolution happens.

Evolution can happen without mutation. Evolution can happen within species. Species is a pool of genes, and changing environment can change the selection of those genes. Things like sexual selection or distance can make separate species.

Think about dogs or other domesticated animals. They have the same genes as wild ones but they have been selected. Mutation happens, like the cat orange coat, but many are original genes. The domesticated foxes someone mentioned are interesting cause of how fast the breeding and how features similar to dog appeared.

"Punctuated equilibrium."

I remember seeing this posted a few days ago. When I hover over '8 hours ago', it shows '2024-07-22T15:59:19'. That's not 8 hours ago. Why is a post from 4 days ago showing as a recent post? Is it a title change issue?

Regardless. What's the point of the article. We have known for decades that evolution 'can' happen much quicker than darwin thought. From large animals to bacteria. Not only that we know that 'lamarckian' epigentics exists.

There is a feature where sometimes old submissions are resurrected and/or merged with newer ones, and it leads to incorrect timestamp anchor text.

> What's the point of the article

It’s an interview with Rosemary Grant, occasioned by her new memoir.

As Terr_ said, HN has a feature that allows mods to give a post a second chance to get comments and upvotes.

The motivation is explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

If you don't know about it, it can cause some head-scratching, as you wonder whether the prior post was just in your imagination:)

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