Joined: Sun Sep 03, 2006 6:42 am
Posts: 2045
Location: Surprise, AZ USA
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Holy Shrinking Sheep! Global Warming More Powerful Than Natural Selection, Say Researchers Just when you thought evolution couldn't get attacked by anyone else, a zoologist writing in Science and his colleagues are contending that changing winter conditions due to global warming are causing Scotland's wild Soay sheep to get smaller despite the evolutionary benefits of having a large body. Yep, climate change can trump natural selection, it turns out.
So much for adapting to the environment. Too bad Darwin didn't know about CO2.
"Sheep are getting smaller. Well, at least the wild Soay sheep living on a remote Scottish island are. But according to classic evolutionary theory, they should have been getting bigger, because larger sheep tend to be more likely to survive and reproduce than smaller ones, and offspring tend to resemble their parents," said study author Tim Coulson, professor of population biology at Imperial College London who teaches courses in ecology, evolution and conservation.
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