Science & technology | Evolution in action

The Mozambique civil war created tuskless elephants

The genetics of how this happened have just been unravelled

Tusks or no tusks, don’t mess with me

EVOLUTION ENSURES that animals are well-adapted to their circumstances. Sometimes, as with predators and prey, those circumstances include the behaviour of other creatures. And, as a paper just published in Science describes, that includes the behaviour of human beings, which can force drastic changes on a species in an evolutionary eyeblink.

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Spoils of war”

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