alt Hacker News> animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime
? Which animals? Evolution requires orders of magnitude longer time spans. I doubt we're perceptibly different (in any genetic sense) than Homo sapiens from 200,000 years ago. I'm not sure the change from that point is perceptible.
> Jesus Freaks
That people accept that language on HN would seem to tell us a lot about the population here.
Replies
> ? Which animals? Evolution requires orders of magnitude longer time spans
Acktually (push glasses) selective breeding is a form of evolution and it takes only a few generations to see perceptible changes.
> I doubt we're perceptibly different
If you're around various ethnic groups long enough, you'll start recognizing which group a person you are unacquainted with belongs to. And I don't mean the obvious differences.
Sort of like "My Fair Lady" where the linguist could tell where a person came from by the way they spoke.
"perceptibly" perhaps not so much? blue eyes are definitely newer.
pale skin perhaps only after agriculture replaced meat eating for D3 production.
despite what Sliders intimated, Europeans are more Cro-mag than 'thals ;)
There's a whole industry of cat breeders going from wild cat servals to domesticated house cat, giving them an F number for how many generations they've been bred away from wild cat.
There are many well documented cases of rapid evolution: a population of African elephants became 50% tuskless at birth in a single generation, urban fox anatomy diverged from rural, frogs in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone turned black, the Peppered Moth turned black in the industrial revolution.