A popular assumption goes that because life on Earth survived past climate changes, the same will hold true for human-caused global warming.

Yet growing evidence contradicts this. Keeping up with the expected velocity of climate change, recent research shows, would require rates of evolution “largely unprecedented based on observed rates among vertebrate species,” according to Ignacio Quintero ofYale University andJohn Wiensof the University of Arizona.

Quintero and Wiens estimated these rates...