I understand that a lot of fruits, vegetables, pets etc that we have today are a result of human selection.
Recently I read an article where a plant has evolved to hide (camouflage ) from humans. Are there other plants or animals that have evolved to “hide” from humans ? Or be less desirable to humans ?
Hmmm. Many, many plants and animals have evolved defenses against predation, in the form of visual camouflage, repellent smell/taste, and so on.
But I’m not aware of examples other than the one you posted where human predation specifically has been the driving factor in evolutionary change.
(Well, unless you count extinction as an “evolutionary change”, I guess, since there are many instances of humans predating a particular species to extinction.)
I’ve heard that something like this is the origin of rye as a food crop: It evolved to be more like wheat, so as to avoid being pulled as a weed.
Well, elephants have a gene that results in being born without tusks, which is normally rarely seen in nature, but has become much more common in areas such as Mozambique, where poaching became widespread during the civil war. cite
Ooh, good examples. Here’s a description of the rye evolutionary strategy
The rye example is maybe not so much an instance of an organism evolving to “hide from” or “be less desirable to” humans, as the OP asks, but rather to be nurtured by humans; a sort of voluntary domestication process, so to speak.
You’d think dandelions would have evolved to grow flat to avoid lawnmowers. Googling on this gets a mixed result. Some people say they have, some that they haven’t.
I’m skeptical that this would be the case. Absent mowing, it’s obviously a reproductive advantage for flowers to be prominent and brightly colored. And what proportion of their habitat is mowed? I think it’s pretty small. In order for a sub-species or separate species to evolve with an adaptation specific to the mowed habitat, there must be reduced gene flow between mowed and unmowed habitats. That’s unlikely if mowed areas are not contiguous, but small areas interspersed within larger unmowed areas. If this change evolved, I think it would most likely be in very large mowed areas with relatively little wild habitat nearby. Do such areas exist?
But of course in a lot of their habitat they are eaten by grazing animals, similar effect.
AIUI, dandelions produce both long-stemmed and short-stemmed flowers depending on the growing conditions. I’ve heard legends that after you mow the lawn the dandelion plants then “know” to grow short-stemmed blossoms to avoid being cut, but it’s probably merely that the short-stemmed blossoms are the ones you see flowering.
Yes, they’re called cities and suburbs.
But, given the way dandelion seeds travel, they get regularly replenished from the wild - particularly if the human areas use weed killer.
On a more basic level, STD’s and other bacteria have been evolving a resistance to antibiotics. One article I read attributed the problems with gonorrhea penicillin resistance to especially the Vietnam war. Soldiers who contracted the disease on R&R would rather scrounge black market pills than report their problem to the infirmary. They would take whatever does they could find until the symptoms went away - but symptoms tended to disappear after a while anyway; and the wrong dose or too short a regimen would select for the more resistant strains. The required dose apparently went up by several hundred times. Human-driven evolution.
There’s the story about how one variety moths in English cities went from light-coloured to dark to blend into surroundings when England began using coal in cities widely as a fuel and everything was coated with soot. With the cleanup since the 1950’s the moths started becoming lighter again. But they are hiding from natural predators this way, not man. Man was just altering the environment.
you probably wouldn’t see much of this effect in larger animals, because evolution takes far too long to work. I do wonder with some size restrictions on fish or animals being hunted, whether we are slowly breeding for tinier populations.
Fisheries-induced evolution, selection on fish to breed at smaller sizes due to harvest of larger individuals, is a well-known phenomenon.
Trophy hunting of large mammals might be expected to have an impact in selecting for individuals with smaller horns or antlers, but the evidence for this is fairly limited.
Cities and suburbs have plenty of vacant lots, rights-of-way, and other waste land where dandelions can grow without being mowed. Given that the seeds are wind-dispersed, effective selection on populations is going to be essentially impossible.
I remember that story, and I even remember where I saw it: Remember those Time/Life Science books from the 1960’s? The story (with pictures of course) appeared in one of those books.
Here you go. With pix:
Unfortunately the breeding cycle length and the ability of humans to see clearly probably means that deer are unlikely to evolve straight antlers and white pelt with large black spots… In areas where alcohol is sold in volume, even that protective coloration many not work.
From an article in the NYT on the plant cited in the OP:
The finding suggests that the plant is the latest example in a growing list of species that humans appear to have inadvertently influenced into evolving new traits.
I doubt lawnmowers are responsible, but note that dandelions are impressively good at coping with grass-cutting. The mower cuts the flowers (nicely dispersing any seeds that have formed) but does close to zero damage to the low-lying, nearly flat leaves and the roots of the plant itself. Under favorable conditions, new flowers will be springing up the next morning.
I thought this thread was going to be about eugenics.
I need to do that as well. It would really help at work.