Edit: I meant specifically humans.
Do you mean in humans or animals?
If you mean plants I’d say it would be pretty hard to tell what wasn’t the result of some form of selective breeding at this point.
That’s an important distinction to make, since microbes evolve so fast that we have a hard time keeping up with their antibiotic resistances. Plants and animals change all the time, but it is a lot slower due to slower reproduction cycle. Humans, elephants and whales change too, but it just takes a while for us to notice it.
Not necessarily. We have found some preserved remains of smaller animals, and we also have some current animals to compare to. For the simplest example, we can compare dog breeds to wolf breeds to find out that dogs have had an increased amount of pancreatic Amylase genes since domestication (which is also one of the factors behind them getting more cases of diabetes).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4329415/
The problem for humans tho, is that there’s no longer any intermediate species around to compare to, and our best preserved individuals are from the last 5000 years or so. For the record, a few years back a cryopreserved domesticated dog was found in siberia and it’s 4 times older.
Evolution can happen very quickly for species that go through their lifecycle quickly. Diseases and microorganisms evolve very quickly for example.
Looking at agriculture specifically, domesticated animals and crops would have evolved in a particular way that’s good for food production.
If humans specifically, there are dietary changes (ex. for digestion).
Were you looking for a specific type of animal?
Yes there has been enough time for changes to occur, but because we humans are so widespread and mix at a ridiculous rate, you are unlikely to see many obvious changes for a long time. People from a population with a certain amount of traits will mix up with people with different traits, and because the environmental pressures are not homogeneous or stressful enough, there isn’t a dominant trend in evolution you could see today.
Unless- and I’m not sure about these because I never checked if myth or fact- it is true that humans were shorter a few centuries ago? And what about the much debated IQ increase each generation?
Watermelons used to be only 50mm in diameter and tasted very bitter. You had to hit them with a hammer to crack em open. Circa 3000 BC
It is, if you count humans as part of nature, which they are in respect to natural selection.
Flowers and blossoms are selected by their attractiveness to bees and other insects. Apples were selected by their attractiveness to bears (yes, bears where the first to domesticate apples). And watermelons were selected by their attractiveness to humans.
Only GMOs don’t fall into the category of natural selection.
During the bubonic plague there was a gene mutation that made people less likely to die from the plague, but unfortunately it causes more autoimmune problems:
