Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

Post by IggleSniggle » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 2:08 PM UTC

sellyme wrote: post #261

IggleSniggle wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, selective breeding is just a subset of natural selection. Not sure why folks seem to want to exclude humans from nature, like we’re not part of the exact same system.

> Not sure why folks seem to want to exclude humans from nature Probably because the concept of "nature" no longer serves any purpose if you don't, as it doesn't exclude anything. It's often a pointless distinction to make (see also: anything that labels itself as "organic"), but it's a convenient shorthand to describe a category of interactions that people often want to talk about.

Post by klodolph » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 2:15 PM UTC

selcuka wrote: post #272

klodolph wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof, that's a tall order, isn't it? I'm no professional philosopher, and not somebody who works all day making dictionary definitions, but the general sense of natural / artificial here is "not by humans" versus "by humans", although that's not very precise and you'll get into trouble if you read too much into much into it. There are loads of ways in which you'd need to refine this definition in order to account for…

> which is why you demanded that I define it for you, presumably so you could poke holes in whatever definition I provided Not really. Your original use of the word implied the definition you were using, and my comment was merely to point out that it's the wrong definition (in my opinion, obviously). In this context it makes more sense to include the intention, because the evolution itself in this case is not somethi…

Post by mleonhard » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 11:34 PM UTC

Post by q1w2 » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 8:25 PM UTC

manquer wrote: post #231

q1w2 wrote: post #208

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This is a fantastic question - as this is indeed done for other African animals, like crocodiles. The biggest issue is that elephants cannot be profitably raised in captivity - they require too much food, too much space, and take too long to produce tusks. ...and if you allow them to roam in reserves, then poachers shoot them. I do wonder if it might work in another part of the world that could offer better security…

You cannot grow them as a business model, however if you already have a preserve and elephants on them wouldn't a) be safer to remove the tusks from the elephants to make them less of a target and b) sell the removed tusks to fund your preserve ?

Post by engineer_22 » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 6:02 AM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #224

engineer_22 wrote: post #165

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But we don't commonly run around saying Arabians and Morgans are different because of evolution. Neither do we say that chihuahua's and labradors have evolved into their present form. In my humble opinion "evolution" refers to speciation, which takes very many generations.

The distinction between one species and another is pretty arbitrary in many cases. Exact species boundaries, or even the concept of "species" itself, are something humans determine, by convention. Evolution is something that happens regardless. > Evolution is defined as the change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms through successive generations… When particular genetic sequences change in a populat…