Trifles
Charles Darwin wrote that the most “trifling difference” often determines the evolutionary path taken by a species on its ways to either surviving or extinction. Almost immediately his words were summarily dismissed as pure conjecture in light of the epochal time frame represented and the enormous transformations in species according to the fossil record. Imagery using a very common item to most people, but an essential item to the scientists at the center of this text, is forwarded as an argument favoring Darwin’s original assertion:
“some of Daphne Major’s longest-suffering human inhabitants have come to consider tweezers “`he most indispensable item of Daphne equipment.’ A complete tweezers kit includes a slant tip, a square tip, and a pointed tip. Often you can use any one of them to do the job of another, but that makes clumsy work and takes a long time. `And what a small difference in shape and size there is between the different kinds!’ says Rosemary.”
The darwin
The darwin is the universal unit of measuring the rate at which a species undergoes evolutionary change. This is a pretty difficult thing for the average person to fully grasp when conveyed in the language of mathematics. The addition of language which facilitates forming a visual image in the mind serves to make understanding how this unit of measurement is applied much more accessible:
“Since we want a universal unit, and not one that depends on the size of the creature, let us use the percentage change. The beak of a duck-billed dinosaur might lengthen by a few meters in a million years, and a bird’s beak by a few millimeters in a million years…and yet both could represent a change of 10 percent. A percentage change will mean the same thing in myriad living and once-living forms, from the beaks of birds to the teeth of hyenas, from the skulls and cannon bones of horses to the inner whorls of ammonites.”
Natural Selection Observed
The fundamental foundational premise of Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the governing agent of evolution is that it cannot be observed because the process moves as such a slow rate. This aspect of the theory is no longer universally accepted, in part because natural selection can be observed in the alteration of a species of moth in England which has been traced to the differentiation of single gene with the catalyst being human interference in the natural course of development:
“Soot was blackening the trees around Manchester, and around every other dark mill town in England...this soot made a mortal difference to moths that landed on the trees. Kettlewell filmed hedge sparrows, spotted flycatchers, yellowhammers, robins, thrushes, and nuthatches eating moths. On the pale bark of rural birches and beeches the birds were quicker to spot the black moths. But on blackened bark around cities, the birds were quicker to pick off the white moths…Before the industrial revolution the black form was under strong negative selection pressure and the mutation stayed rare, except in forests with mostly black-barked trees. Factories reversed the selection pressure because the rare moths looked like the soot themselves.”
Human Moths
The story of the rapid-pace evolutionary alterations of moths resulting from the influx of soot into the atmosphere that would not otherwise be exist without the unprecedented interaction of human beings is not related merely as an interesting anecdote or even just to illustrate the misconceptions about the pace of evolution, It is a siren ringing loudly as a warning to humans about the potential impact on the stability of our species:
“Carbon dioxide is really no more esoteric than soot. It is a product of the same process of combustion, and it comes out of the same smokestacks. But the gas is invisible, and its influence is global rather than local...this global effect makes it far more important than soot: the rise of this gas will prove to be the single most important physical change to take place on our planet in a long time…temperatures in the next hundred years may be higher than they have been in the last several million years, and the change may come as much as ten times as fast as it did in those millions of years”
