> Relentless ivory hunting over decades has caused elephants to evolve in a way we never imagined them to. This is only true if "we" have very little imagination.
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Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching
131–140 of 320 posts
Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching
#132Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm in the context of the article, I'm not so sure it's a good thing. Later on they mention that if this genetic trait gets passed on to males, they die. So along with hunting, males are doubly at risk. It may be advantageous for the survival of an individual to be born without tusks, but it doesn't sound too good for the survival of the species.
The trait may or may not be advantageous. Diversity is. In this case the selective pressure is poaching, but selective pressures are constant. Diversity is a bank of genetics that the population can draw from to adapt and survive. Traits that are rare, are often rare because of shortcomings. But if environmental changes make that tradeoff worthwhile, it can be made. Meanwhile, evolution doesn't stop. Once the trait/g…
This is all true. You make very good points.
My parent said:
> And this is why genetic diversity is a good thing.
I guess what I meant was: genetic diversity is a good thing. But this particular case is not a great example for illustrating why.
Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching
#134While sad as a whole, the responsiveness of evolution is beautiful in this case. It also demonstrates that human efforts to stop poaching have not been successful (otherwise this evolution wouldn’t happen), but luckily, nature responds.
It's also interesting that a single mutation can cause this lack of tusks. That reinforces another concept for me - the ability to adapt is also important and has been selected for. Meaning simple genes to define structure are preferable to complex sets of them.
On a related note, if "ability to evolve" is a characteristic that can be selected for that would explain why all complex life uses sexual reproduction. Mixing genes offers such advantages that most everything that can't do it is still basically bacteria.
Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching
#135While sad as a whole, the responsiveness of evolution is beautiful in this case. It also demonstrates that human efforts to stop poaching have not been successful (otherwise this evolution wouldn’t happen), but luckily, nature responds.
It's too bad there is not a gene for making the tusk highly radioactive or shoot out like rockets at the poachers. I guess that's asking a lot of evolution - it's already done a lot for us.
Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Superstition. Elephants and tigers are not hunted for inherent qualities of their bodies, but for the belief that consumption of their parts in various ways helps health/virility/...
Has Viagra not reached China yet?
Sure, but if they bleach it white and sell it as powder under some "Ivory" branding that will just increase poaching.
Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching
#137This reminds me of this study that polled academics and students about the evolutive process that happens. The results are quite decieving. https://journals.openedition.org/ress/2698
For those who don't want to read a long French article: the conclusion (as I understood it) is that most people imagine teleological, or goal-driven (the authors describe it as "finalist") reasons for this very change in tusks. That is, even when the subjects consider that poaching may be the cause in the change in tusk allele frequency, they say it's because the elephants "want" not to have tusks, or that evolution is "deliberately" evolving away from tusks in order to protect the elephants.
This is in contrast to the actual explanation, which is simply that if you kill the elephants with the tusks alleles and prevent them from breeding, you'll have fewer of those alleles in the subsequent generations.
I'd say this result is not so "deceiving," as someone who has prepared evolution curriculum in the past, the teleological explanation is extremely seductive, even for educated people.
Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching
#138In the Science article they wrote, “Poaching resulted in strong selection that favored tusklessness amid a rapid population decline.” And, “Whole-genome scans implicated two candidate genes with known roles in mammalian tooth development (AMELX and MEP1a), including the formation of enamel, dentin, cementum, and the periodontium.” So, there was a change in the genes, but how do they connect this fact with poaching? I…
Random mutations happen all the time. If there’s selection pressure that favors a given mutation, it will proliferate.
Just throwing it out there; i know it's scientifically accepted that genetic mutations are simply random and the ones that just so happen to be helpful are propagated by natural selection, but i sometimes wonder that 'random' is a word akin to 'magic' that describes a process we do not quite understand. Specifically in the context of evolution, i wonder if genetic mutations aren't as random as we believe it to be, but that life is more 'intelligent' than we give it credit for, and mutations are, if not always at least sometimes, an intentional response to changes in their environment. I'd be very interested to see more research in the way that genetic mutations may be influenced by external stimuli.
Not an idea i deeply hold as a truth, but fun to think about, and science doesn't expand by believing we've got it all figured out.
Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
A man with a gun doesn't sound like "natural selection".
Humans are animals and predators like any other in this situation.
Why downvote parent? A human is a "natural" predator just with different methods of attack/more intelligence than "animals". Why is a human predator (an "apex predator" if you will) any less "natural" than a T-Rex? Or any other animal that forced evolutionary change?
Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Evolution has two main components. The random variation was already there. The natural selection is doing its part now.
A man with a gun doesn't sound like "natural selection".
Why not? I often see people draw this distinction between humanity and nature, as if we weren't part of nature, and there is something deeply misanthropic about it. Of course we are part of nature. We may be screwing over the habitat of other animals -- like rabbits in Australia or pythons in the everglades -- but we are certainly part of nature and this is a textbook case of natural selection at work.