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Comment by kingkawn | Hacker News Reader

The time scales are not unimaginable at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

By selecting for behavior rather than physical byproduct, they have induced evolution at a rate not thought possible in vertebrates.

Not to mention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_influenza

Edit: I think the parent comment was about the difficulty imagining the process of evolution which we assume takes billions of years because we cannot observe its impact directly in ourselves except to interpret the results. Yet, it is both observable and inducible in things around us. Not so hard to imagine.

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I believe the parent comment was referring to the difficulty of imagining billions of years.

Right. My point is that the evidence is there but there's a difficulty in developing or accepting an intuition for evolution given the huge timescales involved in unicellular-to-human evolution, even though it's well-supported by inductive and deductive evidence.

I would add that if you think it's not so hard to imagine, maybe share your imaginations with others. Simply asserting it's easy to imagine hasn't worked out well for science in terms of communicating its findings to the public. There are still lots of people who find that imagining hard - it's a psychological barrier to accepting evolution for many people.

Look at how much a human being changes over the course of one lifetime through learning and experience. Evolution is similar process, except instead of storing individual memory in biochemistry you are storing species memory in the genome.

Evolution certainly works much slower in a near-equilibrium scenario.

There is no evolutionary equilibrium. The below linked study of e.coli demonstrated that even during periods where morphology is somewhat fixed that the genomic evolution rate does not slow down.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7268/full/nature0...

Their generation time is shorter, but the principle is the same.

That's why I said near-equilibrium, precisely because I read about the E. Coli experiment on http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/11/15/245168252/bacteri... and I trusted the editor where it says "The pace of improvement is slowing down, but shows no sign of stopping". Perhaps I shouldn't had to say "evolution", but "improvement" instead, which is much more accurate.

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