Fast enough?

There's little question that coming decades will bring dramatic environmental changes.  While we can only guess at the severity and rapidity of those changes, there is real concern about the power of evolutionary change keep pace with a deteriorating environment.  There have been attempts to model such changes, but Graham Bell and and Andrew Gonzalez report, in the June 10 edition of Science, the results of experimentation to help answer that question.

The McGill University researchers exposed 2000 yeast cultures to changing environmental stresses (in the form of salt) and found that, in many cases, evolutionary change was sufficient to allow the yeast to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.  The ability of populations to evolve was enhanced by previous exposure to the stress and by the ability to acquire beneficial mutations from neighboring populations by dispersal.

Quite likely that studies such as this one will become increasingly interesting in a culture where we seem determine to destroy our environment as rapidly as possible.