Pandas dataframe select rows where a list-column contains any of a list of strings

IIUC Re-create your df then using isin with any should be faster than apply

df[pd.DataFrame(df.species.tolist()).isin(selection).any(1).values]
Out[64]: 
  molecule            species
0        a              [dog]
2        c         [cat, dog]
3        d  [cat, horse, pig]