The Evolution Explosion
Subtitle: How Humans Cause Rapid Evolutionary Change
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Norton
Published: May 2001
Language: eng
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780393020113
First sentence: We waited for the helicopter to find us, listening to it search above for a break in the clouds, thrumming uselessly up there above the fog layer, nearly close enough to touch but not close enough to see.
Description: "Evolution is not just the slow process that ruled the rise and fall of the dinosaurs over hundreds of millions of years. It happens quickly too, so quickly and so frequently that it changes how all of us live our lives.

Drugs that suddenly fail because diseases evolve, insects that overcome the most powerful pesticides, HIV we can treat only for months before it evolves resistance to the newest drugs - all of these changes happen right before our eyes, driven by the intensity of human medicine, industry, and agriculture.".

"This fast evolution is evolution with teeth, and it impacts our society, our technology, and, very importantly, our wallets. Evolution adds approximately $30 billion a year to U.S. medical bills and makes some diseases economically incurable except in the richest countries. In addition, U.S. farmers pay an extra $2 billion annually to combat insects that have evolved to tolerate pesticides so powerful that a teaspoon would kill a person."--BOOK JACKET.