Religion forces evolution?

The answer is yes at least to some fish in Southern Mexico at least according to a study published recently in Biology Letters. Apparently a religion that predated Columbus' discovery of North America used to more or less create a poison to the fish while praying for a good year rain wise. Well this apparently has created some fish that have become immune to the poison. An article about the paper in ScienceDaily also had this to say:

"The cool thing is that this ceremony has gone on a long time and that the fish responded to it evolutionarily," Tobler says. "Lots of species couldn't live with these changes. It highlights how nature is affected by human activity."

Rosenthal contends that the idea of imposing evolutionary divergence on a species at an extremely localized spatial scale is not a new concept. In fact, he says, it's been happening since the beginning of humankind and that the idea of the "noble savage" is passé.

"We tend to have this wonderful Pocahontas idea that before Europeans came in, everything was pristine and in harmony with nature and that all of the changes in our environment have been post-industrialization," he explains. "No. People have been changing the environment forever."

Whether we want to admit it or not we are part of this planet and we can effect it in many different ways. This is something we must all understand because too often we look at ourselves as better than other animals when we are in fact just another animal. This gets forgotten about especially when it comes to climate change.

Paper Reference
M. Tobler, Z. W. Culumber, M. Plath, K. O. Winemiller, G. G. Rosenthal. An indigenous religious ritual selects for resistance to a toxicant in a livebearing fish. Biology Letters, 2010; DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2010.0663