Resistance In Biology

Today, there seems to be problems with dealing with pests. Unfortunately, people have unintentionally helped these pests evolve by applying artificial selection in the form of pesticides. The widespread use of pesticides has led to the evolution of pesticide resistance in insects(book). Through natural selection, they have inherited traits that make them more likely to survive and reproduce than those that do not have those traits. For example, each time chemicals are sprayed on a lawn to get rid of weeds and or bugs, they build up a tolerance. At first, only a few of the pest population are able to survive exposure to the pesticide. The pests who survive, will reproduce, which will then make a generation that is able survive more …show more content…
Another example is bed bugs. Bed bugs have evolved resistance to the most commonly used chemicals. The poison used to kill them work by attacking the nervous system. The more the pesticide is used, it can create unwanted changes in the gene pool that leads a form of artificial selection called pesticide resistance. This is considered a mutation and these mutations emerge randomly and are favored when a population of organisms winds up in an environment in which the mutations happen to be helpful. In that situation, if some) of the insects carry the resistance mutations, those insects will be better able to survive and reproduce and will wind up passing the mutation on to their offspring. As this goes on through generations, the population can evolve so that every bedbug carries the resistance mutations, an outcome which is great for the bugs but frustrating for people trying to get rid of them. Hundreds if not thousands of species have gone through small changes within a population. This is also known as microevolution. There are some bedbugs that have evolved resistance genes that are most active in their outer shell, fighting off pesticides. Biologists have figured out what mutations are responsible for