Re:Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t dr...
by tomp on Monday September 07, 2020 @07:25AM
(#24398627)
Evolution should be measured in generations, not years. According to Wikipedia, the peppered moth has 1 generation per year; in humans, it's probably like 1 per 20 years. So 50 years moth-time is still 1000 years human-time. Still quite fast though.
The specific mutation event was traced to around 1819 [2] and by the turn of the century, the white variant was all but gone around industrialized cities (someone even wrote Darwin about it in the 1870s). Starting in the 50s and 60s, the distribution began to reverse once the air started to get cleaner and now we're back to a largely white moth population.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17951