Evolution

A couple of things hit the news regarding evolution that struck me as odd. First: Wired magazine has published a political commentary on "The Evolutionary Brain Glitch that Makes Terrorism Fail." It's an interesting read, but I have to say that I though terrorism failed because it's based on faulty logic to start with--not because the victims engage in faulty logic. The idea behind terrorism is that if I can scare you, you will give me what I want. That works on the playground (usually), but not so much in adult life. It's much easier to bully one kid, than to bully large numbers of adults. If something bad happens to someone I know, my natural reaction is to go after the person that I blame for what happened. I think most people feel the same way. If you kill my sister, you better watch your back. If you kill people indiscriminately, then I can't help but think that the next time, it might be my sister. You didn't know it wasn't my sister. Heck, you didn't even know that it wasn't your sister. You expect me to give you something for that? You think you've created a platform for negotiation? Let me assure you, you have not. If you had threatened me, personally, with bodily harm, that might have gotten you somewhere, but to attack large groups of us, no, that dog just don't hunt. The commentary also makes reference to something known as 'correspondent inference theory,' which holds that people tend to make assumptions about motivation based on results. For example, if we go to war with an oil-producing country like Iraq, and gas prices go up, then clearly, our government's purpose in invading Iraq was to force gas prices to go up. Okay, nobody's quite buying that, but a lot of people believe that the government's purpose was to affect gas prices, it just didn't work out the way they had planned (our government is not known for being good at planning things). Second: The BBC has published an article about an observed evolutionary change in the tropical blue moon butterfly. It seems that a bacteria called Wolbachia that is carried by female butterflies, but is deadly to males. If the mother passes the bacteria to her eggs, then the males die before they even hatch. Six years ago, the males numbered about 1% of the blue moon butterfly population, now they number about 40%. Apparently the butterflies have developed a suppressor gene which controls the parasitical bacteria. Gregory Hurst, a University College researcher stated, "We usually think of natural selection as acting slowly, over hundreds of thousands of years. But the example in this study happened in the blink of an eye, in terms of evolutionary time, and is a remarkable thing to get to observe." Several thing occur to me: If the gene existed before, but only in a small percentage of the population, then once the parasite killed off all of the males that didn't have the gene, only the ones that had the gene would be left to repopulate the species. The gene would have represented no evolutionary advantage until the bacteria became widespread. Perhaps this change did not happen so much 'in the blink of an eye' as first thought.
Also, if evolution can happen that quickly, how long will it take us, as a species, to adjust to the new environmental conditions that result from global warming?