3 ms·

Nope, evolution doesn’t happen that quickly.

crooked-v 8y ago
Short generations and very strong selection pressure can result in dramatic changes in a single human lifetime. See, for example, domesticated Russian foxes, which are the result of a project that started in only 1959 and are already dramatically different from their wild cousins in social behavior and even some points of appearance.
- gizmo686 8y ago
  You don't even need evolution at all. We know that an animals behaviour is a combination of their genes and their environmnet. It is reasonable to propose that growing up in an urban environment would cause an animal to be smarter than it would have been if that same animal grew up in a more traditional natural environment.
  - ridgeguy 8y ago
    I would say "better adapted to an urban environment than a rural environment". That distinction may be different from smarter or more intelligent. I think it's complicated.
    - gizmo686 8y ago
      The hypothesis that they will grow to be better adapted to an urban environment is far more likely to be true (regardless of if we are talking about the effect of evolution or nor). However, the article is talking about a specific claim that they would also be more intelligent. This is a far harder hypothesis to predict the truth of (and to test). But, to the extent that "intelligent" is well defined it is still a reasonable hypothesis to have. In fact, I think that, by far, the least likely scenario is that they are equally as intelligent as their rural counterparts, as that would mean that environment has no effect on their intelligence. While this is probably true of some animals, It would be very surprising to me if it held for the more cognitive ones. The question then becomes how big of an effect is it, and in what direction. Of course, when we drill into what "intellegence" means, we will probably find that it is a multi-dimensional notion, and refine the discussion to more/less intelligent in certain dimensions. EDIT: it is also conceivable that an animal that grew up in environment A, then moved to environmnet B could be better suited for environment B than the one that had lived in B for its whole life.
- textor 8y ago
  Another factor is initial variance. Russian foxes experiment uses some hundreds of animals, perhaps. Suppose we operate on the scale of millions of specimens, a significant portion of the entire species. There could be a many-sigma difference between the average and the smartest living crow in the world (not sure how to estimate this), but the former one would probably struggle to survive in the city while the latter would thrive. Urbanization, then, can be thought of as a bottleneck that promptly eradicates the left part of the extant distribution, changing the population average even in a single generation.

Short generations and very strong selection pressure can result in dramatic changes in a single human lifetime. See, for example, domesticated Russian foxes, which are the result of a project that started in only 1959 and are already dramatically different from their wild cousins in social behavior and even some points of appearance.

gizmo686 8y ago
You don't even need evolution at all. We know that an animals behaviour is a combination of their genes and their environmnet. It is reasonable to propose that growing up in an urban environment would cause an animal to be smarter than it would have been if that same animal grew up in a more traditional natural environment.
- ridgeguy 8y ago
  I would say "better adapted to an urban environment than a rural environment". That distinction may be different from smarter or more intelligent. I think it's complicated.
  - gizmo686 8y ago
    The hypothesis that they will grow to be better adapted to an urban environment is far more likely to be true (regardless of if we are talking about the effect of evolution or nor). However, the article is talking about a specific claim that they would also be more intelligent. This is a far harder hypothesis to predict the truth of (and to test). But, to the extent that "intelligent" is well defined it is still a reasonable hypothesis to have. In fact, I think that, by far, the least likely scenario is that they are equally as intelligent as their rural counterparts, as that would mean that environment has no effect on their intelligence. While this is probably true of some animals, It would be very surprising to me if it held for the more cognitive ones. The question then becomes how big of an effect is it, and in what direction. Of course, when we drill into what "intellegence" means, we will probably find that it is a multi-dimensional notion, and refine the discussion to more/less intelligent in certain dimensions. EDIT: it is also conceivable that an animal that grew up in environment A, then moved to environmnet B could be better suited for environment B than the one that had lived in B for its whole life.
textor 8y ago
Another factor is initial variance. Russian foxes experiment uses some hundreds of animals, perhaps. Suppose we operate on the scale of millions of specimens, a significant portion of the entire species. There could be a many-sigma difference between the average and the smartest living crow in the world (not sure how to estimate this), but the former one would probably struggle to survive in the city while the latter would thrive. Urbanization, then, can be thought of as a bottleneck that promptly eradicates the left part of the extant distribution, changing the population average even in a single generation.