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Data estimates the control exerted by long-term stabilizing feedbacks on the Earth's climate. 

Recent work has highlighted the possibility of ‘rate-induced tipping’, in which a system undergoes an abrupt transition when a perturbation exceeds a critical rate of change. Here, we argue that this is widely applicable to evolutionary systems: collapse, or extinction, may occur when external changes occur too fast for evolutionary adaptation to keep up. To bridge existing theoretical frameworks, we develop a minimal evolutionary–ecological model showing that rate-induced extinction and the established notion of ‘evolutionary rescue’ are fundamentally two sides of the same coin: the failure of one implies the other, and vice versa. We compare the minimal model’s behaviour with that of a more complex model in which the large-scale dynamics emerge from the interactions of many individual agents; in both cases, there is a well-defined threshold rate to induce extinction, and a consistent scaling law for that rate as a function of timescale. Due to the fundamental nature of the underlying mechanism, we suggest that a vast range of evolutionary systems should in principle be susceptible to rate-induced collapse. This would include ecosystems on all scales as well as human societies; further research is warranted.