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Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

Probably worth mentioning that as evolutions that allow them to compete well in nature die out, ones that allow them to compete well in cities takes their place. Evolution is always a series of tradeoffs.

Maybe we don't have sonic variation, but temporal instead.

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The dying out of birds "in nature" and the adaptations to cities are largely independent as they occur in different populations.

It's about filling open niches. City birds were an open niche for a long time. The ones who adapted to handle that better are thriving in better population numbers than those which can only survive with 13 specific types of trees.

Even still, among the populations of birds not adapting to the city, they are being forcibly adapted in other ways. If the reach is too big, they die.

This is how evolution works, and has always worked. The world shifts, and those who can handle it thrive, while those who can't, suffer. It's the reason mammals are running the planet today when it was lizards just a couple million years ago.

The problem is that evolution works on a much longer timescale than the pace of change to the environment that humans cause.

While I understand the spirit of this comment, if you look at the fossil record you’ll see that’s objectively not true.

Roughly half of the shifts in the last 11 evolutionary periods, over the last 500 million years, were caused by changes that occurred in a-few-hours-to-a-few-thousand-years with 75%-90% species lost.

Evolution did not fail to work then.

I think GP meant "evolution without catastrophic biodiversity bottlenecks". Of course evolution will "work" as long as a single species survives.

You are tautologically saying that massive shifts resulted from massive changes, but that doesn't contradict the statement about evolution--which is about far more than such "shifts" (not an aspect of nature but rather changes large enough for humans to perceive)--operating over long time periods. Every single instance of offspring is a "shift" from its progenitors.

Also talking about evolution failing to work is a category mistake--evolution is an ongoing process that is the inevitable result of imperfectly replicating biological mechanisms and there's no "succeed" or "fail" about it.

Only if our explicit goal is to preserve the exact environment that was in place when humans showed up and gained enough knowledge to decide change wasn't allowed anymore

I know very well how evolution works ... and your comment in no way refutes or even responds to my point about your previous comment about "trade offs". As I pointed out, there are multiple populations of birds, and there's no zero sum game such that what happens to one population determines what happens to another ... that sort of thinking is behind the "if monkeys evolved into humans then why are there still monkeys" confusion of creationists.

In what world is it not a zero-sum game? You don't think that the human population has affected others? You are not aware of what keystone species are, like how wolves are so singularly important, they can literally force geographic changes to a region, which obviously has a massive effect on other species?

I think you might be a bit out of your depth here. You really seem to not know much about evolution.

> I think you might be a bit out of your depth here. You really seem to not know much about evolution.

Wow, such rude projection, coupled with bizarre strawmen and an apparent complete lack of understanding of what "zero-sum" means even after I explained the sense in which I was using it.

It seems to be a thing with them, e.g., "In what world do you think our energy needs plateau? [total misrepresentation of what their correspondent said] I'm always so surprised to see this 1970s hippie attitude making a comeback, especially since it makes less sense today than ever before."

Life uh, finds a way.

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