Real-Time Urban Evolution

Not so long ago, we were picnicking in Father Demo Square in the West Village of the Inner Borough. The square is really a triangle bordered by 6th Ave, Bleecker, and Carmine. It underwent a major redesign a few years ago. We’d picked up a few noshes at Murray’s Cheese Shop and parked ourselves on a bench. It was twilight, and above the din and hullabaloo of the city, we suddenly noticed the ground behind the benches was jumping. With mice.

The city’s rats get most of the celebrity rodent attention, but there are several species of mice here as well. It turns out that scientists looking at white-footed mice in the city have found that these populations of mice are changing, evolving, in their isolated urban habitats. “The amount of differences you see among populations of mice in the same borough is similar to what you’d see across the whole southeastern United States,” notes one of the researchers quoted in Carl Zimmer’s excellent synopses of recent research in the evolution that is going on now, here, in New York City, and surrounds. Bacteria, plants, worms, ants, fish, mammals. This is a must-read article.

The fundamentalists have long used the argument that evolution can’t be seen, only hypothesized. This has been wrong for a very long time now, but ignorance sadly still reigns supreme in many precincts across the land.