Dictionary

millidarwin en · NOUN

Etymology

From milli- + darwin.

Meanings

1. A unit of evolutionary change equivalent to one thousandth of a darwin.
   • Haldane concluded as Darwin had that the rate of evolution by natural selection in the world around us must be infinitesimally slow, far too slow to watch, that it could only be watched in the long, slow additions of the fossil record. Rates in the living world would have to be measured in millidarwins. In artificial selection, he said, you get rates of thousands of darwins, but that is not something you would see in the wild: "Rates of one darwin would be exceptional in nature." 2014, Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, →ISBN, page 110:

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