Maybe, like Al Gore, you believe we are our own worst enemies in
battling climate change. You too might think politicians
manufacture denial-rhetoric to appease special interest groups,
that industries are stubborn and cowardly in their resistance to
the facts, and that the media sees science as a playground for
concocting deception and falsehood. If so, here’s some
comforting news: Even as humans dither and deal and ignore the
hard truth, evolution — nobody’s fool — is already hard at work
preparing for a warmer, climatologically wilder world. According
to a team of researchers at McGill University in Montreal,
adaptation to climate change can happen on the fly, with some
organisms able to make key evolutionary changes over the course
of surprisingly few generations, keeping themselves and their
gene-line thriving in a world that seems to be coming to pieces.
To conduct their study, the scientists worked with a go-to
species often used in genetics labs: baker’s yeast. What the
organism lacks in complexity it