The human impact on earth has been well-documented: There's climate change, environmental destruction and pollution. Today an American scientist says that humans are driving another, more subtle change that may have consequences that are just as damaging: Evolution in other species is speeding up, and we're to blame.
Coincidentally, a few days ago an English scientist recommended that increasing the rate of human evolution by genetic engineering is the only way for us to stay ahead of artificial intelligence. Whichever way you look at it, the speed of evolution is under human control. The implications for the future are not trivial.
The American first. Humans are now the dominant driving force behind evolution, because of the massive impact of technology. This is most clearly seen in the speed of the evolution of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. No sooner are new antibiotics deployed than a new strain of resistant disease turns up. It's the same with insecticides and pest species. But, says Stephen Palumbi, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University's department of organismic and evolutionary biology, the danger goes further than that.