Questions Prompted by an Interview With Dr. Anthony Barnosky

These questions were posed to us after reading an interview with Dr. Anthony Barnosky and a third party. Following are our original responses:

1. Do you believe that climate change induced by humans can lead to speciation?

Climate changes induced by humans does not lead speciation, but more likely to extinction. This is due to the fact that the pressures humans put on the climate cause the climate to change so fast that animals are not capable of speciation at that rate. Evolution is always one step behind the environment, so if the environment, i.e. the climate, is rapidly changing “biodiversity will not have time to regenerate” (Barnosky 2006). Some scientists worry that rate of evolution could be overtaken by human induced climate change to such an extreme that extinction will significantly overshadow biodiversity in future generations (Barnosky 2007).

2. The environment represents selection pressures. How then, based on this interview and your interview with Don Harman, can global climate change affect (or effect) organismal evolution?

Global climate change can significantly affect organismal evolution as a selection pressure on a population. As climate change alters the natural habitat of a population, that population must adapt, move, or face extinction. Faced with these choices, a population may become isolated making them highly vulnerable to selective pressures (Barnosky 2006). These selection pressures cause morphological changes in that population through a lack of gene flow, bottleneck effect, founder effect, and other mechanisms.

3. Which do you think is a better predictor of the future consequences of climate change, fossils or grid-computing algorithms? Why?

Fossil records give us insight as to what the climate was like in the past. Barnosky states that fossil records “delimit the bounds of what is normal and compare what is happening today with what is normal in the absence of humans” (Barnosky 2006). On the other hand, grid-computing algorithms predict past and future climates based on a short history in the presence humans. We think it is important to combine both of these applications in order to better predict future consequences of climate change.

4. Do you agree with the statement by Dr. Barnosky that “humans have changed evolution”? Why or why not?

No. Humans have not changed evolution. They have changed the pressures that organismal populations face though means of habitat destruction, pollution, hunting and poaching, etc. Evolution is defined as the change in allele frequencies over time, and humans have not changed that. They have merely increased the selective pressures on populations. This may appear as though humans have changed evolution, but really humans have reduced the amount of time populations have to adapt to their environment.

5. Research and explain why the “Red Queen” and “Court Jester” hypotheses are known as such.

These opposing evolutionary views are taken from Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen’s Race in Through the Looking Glass. The “Red Queen” hypothesis says that the biotic interactions are the most important drivers of evolution. On the other hand, the “Court Jester” hypothesis says that physical environment perturbations (i.e. climate change) are the most important driver of evolution.