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Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

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Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#171

Post by jawarner »

mfer wrote: post #169
csours wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution is an umbrella term, but in the most general form, evolution means a change in genetics in a population over time. So yes, the genetic 'option' was there before, but it is advantageous now.

Is this actually evolution? I ask because it’s not a change in the genetic structure of elephants. It’s an existing trait becoming more wide spread.

Yes, this is evolution, and that's generally how evolution works. There is some diversity in a population, and natural selection promotes some traits over others.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#172

Post by comrh »

mfer wrote: post #169
csours wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution is an umbrella term, but in the most general form, evolution means a change in genetics in a population over time. So yes, the genetic 'option' was there before, but it is advantageous now.

Is this actually evolution? I ask because it’s not a change in the genetic structure of elephants. It’s an existing trait becoming more wide spread.

That's natural selection

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#173

Post by if_by_whisky »

mfer wrote: post #169
csours wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution is an umbrella term, but in the most general form, evolution means a change in genetics in a population over time. So yes, the genetic 'option' was there before, but it is advantageous now.

Is this actually evolution? I ask because it’s not a change in the genetic structure of elephants. It’s an existing trait becoming more wide spread.

it's selection, more precisely

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#174

Post by [deleted] »

mfer wrote: post #169
csours wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution is an umbrella term, but in the most general form, evolution means a change in genetics in a population over time. So yes, the genetic 'option' was there before, but it is advantageous now.

Is this actually evolution? I ask because it’s not a change in the genetic structure of elephants. It’s an existing trait becoming more wide spread.

[deleted]

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#175

Post by hanniabu »

mfer wrote: post #169
csours wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution is an umbrella term, but in the most general form, evolution means a change in genetics in a population over time. So yes, the genetic 'option' was there before, but it is advantageous now.

Is this actually evolution? I ask because it’s not a change in the genetic structure of elephants. It’s an existing trait becoming more wide spread.

That's how it always is. It starts from somewhere and then somewhere along the line that fringe trait becomes desirable and then more widespread.

Like others said, it's evolution + natural selection. In this case the evolution part came long ago and now natural selection is making it more prevalent.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#176

Post by hanniabu »

rustyminnow wrote: post #77
VeninVidiaVicii wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is why genetic diversity is a good thing.

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.

Why do they die? Because they can't protect themselves? Or does the trait come with other less desirable side effects for males?

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#177

Post by rich_sasha »

PradeetPatel wrote: post #156

At the risk of being downvoted to oblivion, is there such thing as ethicially sourced ivory? If not, I imagine the only reasonable thing to do would be to educate and raise awareness on the catastrophic impact poaching has on the elephant species as a whole.

I remember reading about the very thing, sold by one of the wildlife reserves, coming only from naturally deceased animals.

There's also other species that have comparable bones. Supposedly, the melting permafrost is drowning the ivory market with mammoth ivory (which somehow is a cheap counterfeit, not an awesome curiosity): https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mammoth-tusk-hunters-russia-...

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#179

Post by rsj_hn »

klodolph wrote: post #166
rsj_hn wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is also an incoherent distinction. If humans ferment milk to make cheese, then this is "artificial" food? No, I think people use "natural" and "artificial" to mean "traditional practice" versus "modern practice", but humans do all of it.

Yes, it turns out that the English language is full of incoherent distinctions. Words mean radically different things in different contexts, have definitions that are not really self-consistent, and tons of exceptions that we have to memorize. And yet, we must make sense of it to navigate. If I were a philosopher, or if I wrote dictionary entries, I might decide to spend the time to come up with a rather clever defin…

I think the underlying bugaboo is "untested", particularly when referring to something considered "fragile".

People trust traditional techniques of preparing food because they have proven successful at their intended goals. When you start messing with people's food, they become suspicious as to whether you know the full repercussions of what you are doing.

So the injection of a novel element is considered "artificial" - despoiling the "natural" -- e.g. time-tested technique, and possibly disturbing something fragile -- e.g. human health.

Similarly, people are quite reactionary when it comes to open spaces and nature because they see a system that appears to be in balance and has survived the test of time. They oppose altering the current state of affairs because they are sure some unintended side effect will screw things up.

On the one hand, it's laudable to have these goals, but if they used the standard language of conservatism, traditionalism, etc, they would be branded as reactionaries, so the spirit of the age is to invent new words like "artificial" and "natural" that are less loaded with politics, even though it is all just conservatism at its roots.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#180

Post by lvass »

bialpio wrote: post #128
csours wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution is an umbrella term, but in the most general form, evolution means a change in genetics in a population over time. So yes, the genetic 'option' was there before, but it is advantageous now.

Except it's only advantageous to female elephants, according to the article: "They identified two likely genes AMELX and MEP1a, which are passed from mothers to the offspring on the X chromosome. But if a disrupted gene is passed in a male elephant, the elephant dies; the female elephant would instead evolve to be born without tusks. " What would be the effect of this on male elephant population when taken to the lim…

Warning: guesswork. If only females survive with this disruption, it can only be inherited from a mother, so only 1 X chromosome of a female can have it. If somehow only those females survive, there's a pool of 50% of X chromosomes of females with the mutation. The following generation would be born with half of the female population with the mutation (25% of female X chromosomes), and half of the male population dead. The following one, without artificial selection, would have a fourth of mutated females and dead males. So this mutation tends to just disappear without selective pressure.

So while a tuskless female may generate 2:1 females to males, that's (hopefully, depending on poaching) far from a stable birth ratio for the population, though active poaching may cause the female to male ratio for living specimens can be further skewed much higher than 2:1.

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