Originally Posted by Mike Flynn Thats interesting...
Certainly here in Canada there are raccoons that live in the midst of large forests that have never seen cities ,etc. Are there differences in these raccoon's brains and those that live in the city in terms of brain size?
iirc yes. city dwellers have brains 3x the size of forest dwellers. as regards brains structure, I don't know. I don't know what tests have been done on them either.
On these kinds of time scales, you'd think this would represent micro-evolution, correct? Variability in brain size would be a product of the natural diversity in populations of mammals like these. So larger-brains may have been selected in the micro-evolutionary sense.
basically it is microevolution, but quite a bit of it because of a strong selecting force, and a vast change in environment. the animals that colonise cities the best are the most adaptable, such as foxes, rats raccoons etc.
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