At 11:04 PM 8/27/98 EDT, MBlanchrd at aol.com wrote:
>An interesting sidenote to this very definitely non birdy thread....we are
>seeing evolution in action. As Jack Horner, the paleontologist of Egg Mountain
>fame puts it, evolution is the result of environmental stress.
>
>The exploding population of humans on this planet is putting enormous stress
>on the rest of the creatures that live with us. The ones that cannot adapt to
>our pollution, our despoiling the air, the water, the soil..the ones that
>cannot adapt to our proximity and wholesale destruction of forest, swamp,
>steppe and ocean..are the ones that are going extinct. Witness the grizzly
>bear, an animal that needs vast expanses of wilderness. And yet black bears
>can live in our very backyards. Witness the wolf, who needs large herbivores
>......

Just wanted to point at that just because a particular species is adaptable
does not necessarily mean that it is evolving. Habitat generalists, such as
Black Bears and Coyotes, are presumably such due to forces of natural
selection in the past and may be more adaptable to human altered landscapes.
Species that are habitat specialists are at greater risk, especially if they
favor declining habitat types such as native shrub-steppe or old growth
forest. They are unadaptable due to their evolutionary past. This is my
understanding of how evolution works but am open to discussion!

Thanks, Charles.


^__^ ========================
(0 0) Charles E. Swift
| \/ | charless at umich.edu
\ / Moscow, Idaho
\/ I'm for the birds!
========================