To what extent should we be concerned about the evolving pace of the mice in urban settings?
First off, this topic is mildly interesting. Mice that are evolving right before our eyes in order to better survive in their new environment, interesting. This however, should not be surprising to us. Mice reproduce extremely quickly, faster than humans, therefore this allows genes to be changed quickly.
Overall though, I feel that we should not worry about how fast such a small creature is evolving. These are mice, they have hundreds of babies in their short lifetime, therefore indicting the fact that most of their babies won't make it to adult hood. What we should worry about is fast evolving patterns in a larger, more menacing organism. Just going out on a ledge here, imagine the movie "Planet of the Apes." Yeah, that would be something we should worry about.
Simply put, this is nature taking its course. We should not worry.
P.S. Best of luck Ms. Crom
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Woo Min
6/4/2013 10:58:36 am
So basically the article is saying that the mice in urban areas have evolved and developed so that they fit more into the nearby area. This got me thinking. Can humans actually be helping the critters and animals on Earth through it's rapid development? Sure the mice could have developed a gene that resists certain pathogens and pollutants. But it would only be after thousands, or rather millions of year later since they won't contact them if it weren't for humans. But than I came to think that the pollutants and the diseases caused by the wastes of humans are pretty severe for a mice to evolve and adapt to it. That led to the second question. To what extent can evolution be a indication of human development? If the human development has caused such a evolution to mice, what are the chances that other animals and insects won't evolve? Than can't we use it to estimate the extent of human pollution?
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Hong Jae Kim
6/4/2013 11:15:00 am
How animals can benefit people in urban area
Since our society developed dramatically animal also have to adapt to their environment. One of the animal adapted very well to urban area is mice. The reason why these mice adapted is because of dirty environment. So what benefit people get is they give awarness to people to develop the environment.
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