Great list from Kent Hendricks of 52 things he learned this year, including “mice don’t like cheese”, “most of the pasta made in Italy is from wheat grown in Yuma, Arizona”, and “human fingers can detect objects as small as 13 nanometers”.
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Discussion 2 comments
I would be curious if someone more knowledgable could weigh in on this. Whenever someone suggests that humans are evolving, it’s often rejected (yes, this is on Twitter) because the timeframe for human evolution is too long. But with item 39, birds appear to be evolving due a phenomenon that can’t have begun (and especially not at scale) more than 120 years ago. Would someone who is more of an expert in this be able to explain this distinction?
I am certainly not an expert, so feel free to ignore this comment, but my first thought is of generation time effects. The bird species referenced have a lifespan of only a few years with much shorter lifecycles, allowing the species as a whole to evolve more quickly. (A lesser extreme than, say, bacteria which evolve extremely quickly as a result of very short lifecycles.)
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