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Darwin i l'evolució Pretus, J. Ll. Darwin
avui: dels primers
indicis a la petjada evolutiva de l’home a la Terra Darwin thus far: from his groundbreaking hypothesis to the evolutionary footprint of man on Earth Darwin’s visionary theory of microevolution, likening the enormous diversity of species to a universal selective sampling process of heritable variation, has completely shaped our evolutionary thinking for the last 150 years. During the second half of the 20th century, many influential writers have contributed to the necessary refinements of Darwinian theory. Not only has this broadened our understanding of causality in biology, it has also facilitated precise descriptions of the mechanistic principles at work in microevolution. However, there is still much to be said regarding the intersection of ecology and heredity, which remains an incipient field of research. Here I suggest that Darwinian theory has grown sufficiently ripe to seriously consider the evolutionary footprint that humans are leaving on Earth by examining their accelerating effects on most parameters of microevolution. With spatial scales ranging from the local (selection of antibiotic-resistant germs in hospitals) to the global (selective pressures arising from climate change), we are modifying the contexts of microevolution that Darwin first unveiled. |
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