Climate Change is 10,000 Times Faster Than Evolution

Researchers have claimed that evolution is not being able to keep up pace with climate change.

John Wiens, an ecology and evolutionary biology professor at the University of Arizona, and Ignacio Quintero, said that most of the vertebrates will have to speed up their evolution rate 10,000 times to match the rate of global warming, Discovery News reported.

Microbes Impact the Evolution of Their Host
The thousands of seemingly invisible microbes that you carry around with you may be even more than you realise

He and his team looked at 17 groups of animals, consisting of 540 species, including amphibians, birds, reptile and mammals, to determine their adaptation to climate changes in the past.

They team analysed, based on the genetic data, when the species split into new species and made comparison of that to climate changes in the niches where they lived at those times in geological history.

The researchers found that the species is only capable of handling a global temperature change of about one degree centigrade per million years.

New Theory of Cancer Analyzes Evolutionary Roots of the Condition
Australian scientists have come up with a new theory of cancer that traces the condition’s deep evolutionary roots to the dawn of multicellularity more than a billion years ago.

Evolutionary biologist Robert Holt of the University of Florida, said that the rate of evolution of a specific group of animals in all probability has much to do with how big a genetic tool, or flexibility for development of new traits, a species has to work with.

Holt said that even if some species have the genetic variation, it may not be enough.

Artificial Human Chromosome Set to Revolutionize Medicine: Scientists
Genetically-engineered mice that have artificial human chromosomes in every cell of their bodies were developed by scientists.

He said that the rate of population decline could still be so high that extinction can't be avoided.

He added that it was true of species, which are already small in numbers.

Evolution Helped Humans to Become Better Throwers Than Chimps
Compared to our chimpanzee cousins, human's unique ability to throw better can all be narrowed down to one thing - evolution.

The findings have been published in the journal Ecology Letters.

Source-ANI