Unnatural Selection

How Humans Continuously Play God with Nature How does it feel to be God? Most ask this question and never receive an answer, but the truth is we experience that feeling everyday without knowledge. Due to global actions the world has successfully derailed evolution and molded it by influencing the factors that in turn influence adaptation in the animal kingdom. Humans have forced evolution in the natural world due to manmade circumstances such as deforestation and climate change. “In biology, evolution is the change in the characteristics of a species over several generations and relies on the process of natural selection.” (yourgenome.org) Evolution usually takes hundreds of millions of years to accomplish, and usually does this to protect

This is when human impacts influence how animals adapt, and which animals get left behind in the mess of things. Unnatural selection can be caused by traditions, like ones held in Mexico where the Zoque people grind up poisonous plants and put them into rivers, killing some of the fish. But, now some of the fish have adapted to the poison and have become resistant to it. (Page) One very well-known case of unnatural selection is entirely man-induced: drug resistant diseases. Certain bacteria has rapidly adapted faster than we can find a treatment for it, and the only reason it has done this is because we have forced it

Destroying an ecosystem can have detrimental effects on the organisms that live in it. Many animals have been brought to the brink of extinction, or have just completely disappeared because their habitat is being taken away from them. An example of how deforestation affects adaptation is the channel-billed toucan. Deforestation has caused their numbers to dwindle, which in turn affects their ecosystem. These toucans have a particular diet, because of their unusually large beaks they can eat the larger fruits that smaller birds can’t. Whenever they eat these fruits, the end up spreading the seeds where ever they decide to eat their meal. Since their decline, the fruits they eat have become smaller, specifically adapting to fit into the smaller birds mouths so that their seeds cans still be spread. (Walsh) Some might say, “So what if a few species go extinct, it's the natural cycle of things. In fact, this adaptation could provide us with new species.” That might be true if it were only a few species that have gone extinct, but in reality it is approximated that 10,000-100,000 species die off each year. (wwf.panda.org) And to tackle the second statement, yes, species are adapting and changing to form new ones, but are we entirely sure that it is a good thing? As state in the previous paragraph, new species can have unforeseen effects on the progress humans have