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JA7. Evolution and Sustainability

Statement

Grading: Answers should be concise and well written. Make sure you correctly explain your thought process and provide all the necessary information.

Assignment: In your readings, you learned about evolution and natural selection. Reflect on what you have learned about evolution and sustainability and conduct more research using the Internet, LIRN, and Google Scholar to respond to the following:

Explain how human influences impact sustainability, evolution, and natural selection (reproduction, speciation, and mutation)?

Solution

Human civilization had improved dramatically in a very short period relative to the age of other species that share the same planet with us. These advances in technology, medicine, and other fields have a huge effect on the lifestyle of not just humans, but also on a lot of other organisms and species.

Dramatic changes in hunting, harvesting, fishing agriculture, climate change, pollution, eutrophication, urbanization, habitat fragmentation, biological invasions and emerging/disappearing diseases are all examples of how human influences impact sustainability, evolution, and natural selection (Hendry et al., 2017).

Sustainability usually refers to preserve the environment, ecosystems, and natural resources for future generations, thus, leaving the current environment as close as possible to what it was passed to us from previous generations (ULCA, n.d). Human activities like pollution, overfishing, overhanging, and deforestation damages ecosystems and disturbs reproduction cycles. This will lead to fewer resources or even extinction of some species that we pass to future generations, thus threatening sustainability.

Evolution is a long process that accumulates some sudden changes due to mutations or natural selection (Rye et al, 2017). Complex pollutants that are thrown into the environment are usually mutants that increase the rate of evolution; for example, animals develop resistance to pesticides. Humans also deliberately inject mutations into organisms to increase their productivity or to make them more resistant to diseases. This will increase the rate of evolution and may lead to negative effects on the environment.

Natural Selection is a process in which the nature only preserve individuals who are able to survive and reproduce (Rye et al, 2017). Humans interfere in this process by choosing which species (or individuals) to keep (give them food, medical care, and monitored reproduction), and which to eliminate (by hunting, pesticides, or other means). Thus, the selection is no longer natural, but rather artificial.

To conclude, human influences have a huge impact on sustainability, evolution, and natural selection. and the discussed actions may seem positive on the economic level, but their effects may be negative beyond that. In fact, we had so much advancement in such a short time to evaluate the long-term effects of our actions. But we see the effects of global warming and climate change being obvious in the last decade, thus we should be more careful and give our actions more thought and analysis.

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