The wolves are exposed to cancer-causing radiation as they roam the wastelands of the abandoned city - with researchers finding part of their genetic information seems resilient to increased risk of the disease.
40 years seems like a relatively short time for natural evolutionary processes to adapt a mammal to a highly radioactive environment. That’s like 10 to 20 generations of wolf and suddenly they are cancer resistant?
After all the needless loss of life surrounding the Chernobyl reactor explosion, finding viable cancer-resistant genetic mutations would be the ultimate silver lining.
If you have an extremely high infant mortality rate, it won’t take that long.
If the radiation kills off a high enough percentage of individuals without cancer resistance it won’t take long at all.
Theoretically you could do it in only 2-3 generations if you had environmental factors that could give 100% of individuals without resistance cancer.
40 years seems like a relatively short time for natural evolutionary processes to adapt a mammal to a highly radioactive environment. That’s like 10 to 20 generations of wolf and suddenly they are cancer resistant?
After all the needless loss of life surrounding the Chernobyl reactor explosion, finding viable cancer-resistant genetic mutations would be the ultimate silver lining.
If you have an extremely high infant mortality rate, it won’t take that long. If the radiation kills off a high enough percentage of individuals without cancer resistance it won’t take long at all.
Theoretically you could do it in only 2-3 generations if you had environmental factors that could give 100% of individuals without resistance cancer.
High evolutionary pressure + large gene set = fairly rapid adaptation
evolution could happen in jumps. How often that happens is debatable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium