flâneur

The evolutionary mystery of the German cockroach

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Around ten years ago I was involved in a fascinating collaboration to examine evolution within the environments built by humans. Humans create a huge variety of environments within the structures they build. Evolutionary biologists are working to understand how organisms colonize and adapt to these novel environments: from houses and garages to the insides of HVAC systems and water heaters. These built environments have exploded in numbers and diversity during the last few thousand years, and that makes them natural laboratories for studying rapid evolution. I became interested in the evolution of these species coadapted to human structures because of my work on recent human evolution. Many human populations have been adapting to some very extreme environments over the last few thousand years. From the high Andes Mountains to the hot Kalahari Desert, and from the high Arctic to the floating villages of southeast Asia, people have been adapting to extremes. Inventing new cultural practi

Around ten years ago I was involved in a fascinating collaboration to examine evolution within the environments built by humans. Humans create a huge variety of environments within the structures they build. Evolutionary biologists are working to understand how organisms colonize and adapt to these novel environments: from houses and garages to the insides of HVAC systems and water heaters. These built environments have exploded in numbers and diversity during the last few thousand years, and that makes them natural laboratories for studying rapid evolution. I became interested in the…

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