Behavior May Influence Evolution

eldavojohn writes "Pending your beliefs about evolution, National Geographic is running an interesting article on the influences of behavior on evolution. The study supports the controversial idea that an animal's behavior in response to environmental change can spur evolutionary adaptations. By adding a predator to an island where a species of lizards lived with no predators, they witnessed a quick shift in the average length of legs on the lizards. Long legs meant to escape were useless against the new larger predators while short legs became the dominant feature since they increased climbing ability (to trees the predators could not reach). For the finer details on the research, visit the Losos Lab Research Page."

Comments

Adaptations?

[kwishot]

This isn't evolutionary adaptation - it's much more simple than that. If you start killing all of the lizards with long legs, the ones with short legs are going to mate and have offspring with short legs. There is nothing new or "adapted." Also, if the short-legged ones get away and the long-legged ones don't, isn't that going to inherently affect how many have long legs and how many have short, by proportion?

Controversial?

[Angostura]

From the article description, I thought this experiment was going to provide evidence for Lamarkism or something. In fact, this seems an interesting, but not too-surprising finding.

Introduce a change to the environment that causes a behavioural change - is it so surprising that some members of the population are better suited to the behaviour than others?

Apropos nothing, it's pretty sad to see such a story headed with the words "Pending your beliefs about evolution" on a site such as Slashdot. Evolution is an observable fact. Evolution through natural selection is a massively successful and well supported theory.