Speciation

Dr Martin Schaefer from the University of Freiburg in Germany led the research. He and his team found that blackcaps that migrated to the UK for the winter were in the very earliest stages of forming a new species. He explained that some blackcaps (Sylvia areicapilla) would always have migrated "a little further north" than others and eventually "ended up in Britain in the winter". "But those birds would have had nothing to eat," he said. It was when garden bird feeders became more popular in the UK, that an evolutionary division began to emerge. "As soon as the British provided a lot of bird food, those birds would have had a much higher probability of surviving the winter." And because the UK is closer to their breeding ground, those birds would also have returned earlier to claim the best territory. The researchers, from Germany and Canada, set out to discover if the birds that spent the winter availing themselves of garden bird-feeders were in fact a distinct group. To do this, they studied the blackcaps at a breeding ground in Germany. The team were able to use a chemical "signature" from the birds' claws to identify where they spent the winter, and what food they ate. "Then we took blood samples and analysed those to assess whether ... we had two distinct populations. And that's exactly what we found," said Dr Schaefer. "To a very large extent the birds only mate [with] birds with the same overwintering grounds as them." This initial "reproductive isolation", Dr Schaefer explained, is the very first step in the evolution of a new species. "This tells us that by feeding birds in winter we ... produce an evolutionary split. And we have produced these initial steps in as little as 50 years." The team also observed differences in the birds' beaks, wings and plumage.Blackcaps that migrated along the shorter route to the UK had rounder wings, and longer, narrower beaks. The scientists said these differences were evidence that the birds had adapted to their shorter journey, and to eating seeds and fat from bird-feeders, rather than fruit from shrubs and trees. But, Dr Schaefer pointed out that the evolution of a new bird species "could take 100,000 to a million years". "At this stage this is reversible," he added. "And it's hard to envision a species change, because if there's another economic crisis and people stop feeding the birds, the whole system might just collapse.

Humans have moved into the evolutionary fast lane and are becoming increasingly different, a genetic study suggests. In the past 5,000 years, genetic change has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period, say scientists in the US. This is in contrast with the widely-held belief that recent human evolution has halted. The research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Professor Henry Harpending, an author of the study from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, US, said: "The dogma has been these [differences] are cultural fluctuations, but almost any temperament trait you look at is under strong genetic influences." "Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin," he added. "We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity." This is happening, he said, because "there has not been much flow" between different regions since modern humans left Africa to colonise the rest of the world. And there is no evidence that it is slowing down, he added. "The technology can't detect anything beyond about 2,000 years ago, but we see no sign of [human evolution] slowing down. So I would suspect it is continuing," he told BBC News.

European Descended People - and ALL the Peoples of humanity - have the right to survive.

cosmic evolution