Hi everyone,
Here is an article about how humans are changing evolution.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220125-how-humans-are-changing-evolution**********
"If I took all the parts of your car and hooked them randomly to one another, you'd expect it would be bad," says Blackiston. "But it turns out biology has a lot more flexibility than that." Xenobots 2.0 were formed from stem cells extracted from frog embryos and allowed to develop without relying on the algorithm. Independently, the cells began to develop entirely novel body plans. Hair-like motile cilia grew all over their surfaces – a feature usually found in the lungs, but these cilia were more like limbs, flailing rapidly to allow the xenobot to swim through its environment. In this video, a xenobot navigates a pretzel-shaped maze without touching the sides.
Rather than building a tadpole, the stem cells responded to the unique conditions of the laboratory environment to build bodies totally unlike their amphibian origins. They self-assembled spontaneously, leap-frogging (as it were) evolution.
Looking for a way to improve the xenobots' performance further, Blackiston and his team asked the AI to come up with an improved design. The AI blueprint produced Pacman-shaped xenobots with indentations that look like mouths. This third generation had a further surprise: by gathering hundreds of stem-cells in their "mouths" they could mould new xenobots (as shown in the image at the top of this page). They had, in other words, evolved an entirely new way to reproduce, unlike anything seen elsewhere in nature.
Still, the creation of xenobots could be considered a microcosm of something happening far more widely across the globe as organisms respond creatively to the pressures we impose on them. All living things are in a constant negotiation with their environments and it's this interplay that drives evolution.
The peppered moth's changing colour was first observed in 1878, by a butterfly collector who shared his finding with Charles Darwin. The great man seems to have ignored the discovery, although it was later suggested by others as evidence for his ideas on natural selection. The "industrial melanism" of the peppered moth was, however, an example of unnatural selection.
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Clearly organisms respond and change in response to the environment.
Cheers.
Sriram
