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When I studied biology at my medical school we used to learn things about a century old: the famous Darwin's voyage on "Beagle" to the Galapagos Islands, the classical triad of his Theory of Evolution, etc.

At the same time we were told that there is no any evidence found in nature for many of these statemetns of his evolutional theory. For example people studied wildlife around Chernobyl and found that no new species emerged due to much higher mutation rate due to radiation. On the contrary, there were no significant differences between the species living under elevated radiation level and those living in "normal" conditions.

Do these facts somehow influece our understanding of the theory of evolution? Are there any breaking finding happended in the last 20 years that prove or disprove it?

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Similar to…, and probably a better match for that site. – Vebjorn Ljosa Jan 5 '12 at 14:16
Wow, you were told complete BS. :-( – Konrad Rudolph Jan 5 '12 at 23:17
I think that BS is a mild word for that sort of total deceit (ie. LIES). – Larian LeQuella Jan 6 '12 at 0:35
These sound like the sort of things you'd learn at Oral Roberts University (being a total caricature of what the theory of evolution actually says...). – JasonR Jan 6 '12 at 12:57
I think the question as it stands currently is too broad. The "fact" about animals around Chernobyl is also pretty much a giant straw-man, radiation certainly increases the mutation rate for exposed animals, but you still wouldn't expect that to cause new species to develop in those extremely short timespans. Evolution takes a lot of time, it doesn't happen over night. – Mad Scientist Jan 6 '12 at 17:48
up vote 15 down vote accepted

My friend Brightblades is right in one thing. It seems your teacher was working off a caricature of what the theory of evolution actually says. First of all, you should read Sklivvz's excellent answer at this question. Now to address the elephant in the room, the accident at Chernobyl only happened in 1986. That was only 26 years ago. In that timeframe, noticeable effects in an animal population really would not be at all noticeable. Furthermore, the paper cited by Marta Cz-C actually shows that there have been some changes (in fungi though, not animals).


Read the rest of the paper for more information on how there have been some other slight changes to fungi at Chernobyl as well as other locations throughout the world.

Now I am going to repeat a bunch of stuff from one of my web pages that talks about evolution. This web page is set up mostly to deal with creationist arguments, however, the caricature is so severe as to warrant this. As I said earlier, evolution is a population phenomenon.




You will not have any animals giving birth to any radically different animals as a result of radiation. Most changed sue to radiation will not provide any particular advantage to an animal anyway. Also, a change may also be dependent on a previous change and require many generations to fully manifest. All this was demonstrated by the long term evolution experiment led by Richard Lenski at Michigan State University.

So in essence, your teacher was just plain wrong. As for the findings of the past 20 years, we are always learning more and more. For instance, there has been an explosive capability in DNA analysis and sequencing, which has only provided more support for the theory of evolution. A mechanism that Charles Darwin could not have had any idea about in his day and age, yet it perfectly supports his conclusions. Again, read the answer provided at Skeptics.

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Thanks for the props Larian. :) – JasonR Jan 11 '12 at 13:12
+1 Great answer, but a minor technical note on the barriers part of your speciation example. These are not necessary, and sympatric speciation is a pretty active field of research right now. So the answer might mislead people into thinking that a physical barrier is necessary for speciation when it is not. – Artem Kaznatcheev Jun 17 '12 at 1:50

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