ספק סביר #48 – אבולוציה מואצת, הדמיה רפואית וכנס סלולאר נטול סרטן

Regarding evolution: there is nothing special about this story. It is a misconception that evolution takes gazillions of years. Whenever there is a quick change in an environemnt, some evolution happens, and if the change is extreme, it will be fast and furious. For example, in Australia there was a plague of rabbits that resulted in them being intentionally infected with myxomatosis in 1950. This reduced their population from 600 million to less than 100 million, but the remaining rabbits were immune to the disease so now Australian rabbits are all immune!

It makes it easier to understand if you think of natural selection as a change in the frequency of genes in the population. The way it works is that those individuals that happen to ALREADY HAVE the right genes when disaster strikes, will survive. The common misconception is that the change happens in response to an event, but that's simply not the case.

With humans affecting so much environmental change in a very short time, the fish story happens in one form or another in many places all the time.