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How young meerkats learn to eat scorpions
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Pity it’s not a new Marvell poem, but hey-ho.
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Those wacky Galapagos finches.
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Nabokov the entomologist
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poet has insight into human condition shock
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now with monk seals
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Amusing Crouchiana
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more Crouchiana
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2 replies on “Links”
Wouldn’t Karl Popper be pleased with the Galapagos finches? Natural selection behaving falsifiably after all. (Actually, is it really so revolutionary as all that? I vaguely recall some moths turning from all white to all black in a few generations in a British town that got a coal plant: the white trees on which the white moths had been well-concealed suddenly turned black, so the moths had to, too.)
Natural selection has always been falsifiable – for example, a rabbit skeleton in a pre-Cambrian rock. Or a pegasus, maybe. The difficulty is directly testing it experimentally.
You’re right, though, there have been various examples of observable change over a period of a few years. The Peppered Moth example is one of them, but I’ve seen a few others. The Galapagos finches seem to be a good example of a particular effect in action rather than a revolutionary vindication of natural selection itself. As far as I understand it :)