Thursday, July 8, 2021

Natural Selection after The End of Nature

From Elizabeth Kolbert's "Under a White Sky" about how humans are exerting strong selective pressure on natural selection in ways that Darwin ("If feeble man cand do so much by his powers of artificial selection" as he did with creating a wide range of Fancy Pigeons, there was "no limit to the amount of change that could be effected by 'nature's power of selection') couldn't imagine.

"Feeble man" is changing the climate, and this is exerting strong selective pressure.  So are myriad other forms of "global change": deforestation, habitat fragmentation, introduced predators, introduced pathogens, light pollution, air pollution, water pollution, herbicides, insecticides, and rodenticides.  What do you call natural selection after The End of Nature?

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