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The impossible predicament of the death newts

crookedtimber.org

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Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#161

Post by dragonwriter »

the_af wrote: post #145
thaumasiotes wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Snakes with less resistance? Have trouble finding newts they can choke down, and don’t get to steal their poison. That's got to be an extremely weak effect. No snake gets an individual benefit from eating the newts. They get a collective benefit, that predators recognize the species as poisonous, in which all snakes, poisonous and delicious alike, share equally. The problem is large enough that actually-poisonous a…

Interesting. Let me see if I follow: once the snake population has the warning coloration, and predators know not to eat them, then individual snakes being successful at eating poisonous newts is unrelated to the snakes living long enough to pass their genes (i. e. being successful in terms of natural selection). So a snake which has the right colors will be successful, regardless of its diet. I wonder, is there a po…

> I wonder, is there a point where mimicry can fail? Can predators at some point start to eat the mimics?

The same sources of variation which provide the variety for evolution to work on to evolve avoid eating things with this appearance behavior will also provide variation that evolution can work on to evolve back to do eat things with this appearance behavior; the frequency with which eating causes death vs. the degree to which not-eating results in insufficient nutrition will decide which wins.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#162

Post by shellfishgene »

lurquer wrote: post #123
arp242 wrote: post #5

> Meanwhile, evolving resistance also comes at a cost. We don’t know that directly, but we can infer it pretty well. If resistance to tetrodotoxin were cheap and easy, everything would evolve it. [..] We don’t know, but we’re pretty sure there must be something. We know that garter snakes outside of the Pacific Northwest are much less resistant to tetrodotoxin. They’ll drop dead from doses that their Oregon cousins s…

> There is no disadvantage to being able to synthesise vitamin C, and no advantage in dropping the trait. So why did the trait of that mutant primate spread throughout the entire population? There should instead be a mixture of those who can and those who can’t synthesize vitamin C. (Indeed, one should perhaps not so blithely assume that there was sufficient fruit for everyone and so C didn’t matter… for it is precis…

It's more likely that a mutation in the gene/pathway arose multiple times independently, instead of one spreading through the population.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#163

Post by wbl »

bsder wrote: post #118
arp242 wrote: post #5

> Meanwhile, evolving resistance also comes at a cost. We don’t know that directly, but we can infer it pretty well. If resistance to tetrodotoxin were cheap and easy, everything would evolve it. [..] We don’t know, but we’re pretty sure there must be something. We know that garter snakes outside of the Pacific Northwest are much less resistant to tetrodotoxin. They’ll drop dead from doses that their Oregon cousins s…

> An ancestor lost the trait for vitamin C synthesis by chance, and because these primates were living in trees eating lots of fruit with vitamin C, evolution simply didn't notice. There is no disadvantage to being able to synthesise vitamin C, and no advantage in dropping the trait. The fact that guinea pigs, fruit bats, and passerines (almost half of all bird species!) also have a mutated GULO gene suggests that th…

Eh, enzyme mutations leading to inactivity aren't uncommon. It could just be drift when enough vitamin C is available.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#164

Post by zxexz »

pegasus wrote: post #158
mekoka wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may just be trying to disagree with the author for sport. > we carry around only... Not true. We can carry resistance to some ancestral pressure which isn't part of the current environment. > sooner or later... Yes, sooner when it's costly, later when it's less so, through normal evolutionary pressure (entropy and all). The point is, most species at time T do carry traits that aren't that useful to them anymore.…

In the context of TFA, are you sure it's not GP who's arguing for sport? Maybe this clarifies the issue: one way to reword the root (critical) comment is "of course there is a cost, since entropy is always exacting a price". There's constant upkeep necessary for any trait if it is to be preserved. It points out a glaring blind-spot in the article.

(I agree with you)

It’s funny how often this sort of thing comes up. I’ve always felt that “biology” as a field was unique in the way that it is often taught. Bio 101, etc. - most of undergraduate biology - is often taught with this sort of sweeping worship of the process of evolution in a way that leads to it transcending rational thought. Natural selection is very real, and it’s also such a sorry excuse for an evolutionary algorithm :D

It’s been a long time since my first bio classes so I can’t remember the way I was first taught it, but I do remember all more advanced bio literally being told to unlearn what we had already been taught.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#165

Post by zxexz »

mekoka wrote: post #135
xenadu02 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is another case of a huge fallacy humans seem endlessly afflicted with: The Root Cause Fallacy. You are assuming there is but one cause for development and/or loss of resistance. There may not be much pressure to develop resistance to tetrodotoxin for most species. Simultaneously there might be a higher metabolic cost to retaining it for some species but not for others. It is also possible that resistance with l…

> You are assuming... I made no assumptions. As I pointed out to another commenter, you might be in too much of a haste to play at being a contrarian. It might be more useful to pay closer attention to what you're objecting to. Evolutionary game theory demonstrates that evolution is a matter of fitness payoffs. If cost of a trait increases, fitness is reduced. The prevalence of a trait in a fit population is indicati…

Isn’t evolutionary game theory a behavioural model from the 1970s? Not that it’s not interesting; I don’t see the relevance here. Maybe it’s just your condescending tone.

(No offense, I hope you don’t realize how you are coming across, or that if you do this comment will trigger some introspection)

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#166

Post by icameron »

titanomachy wrote: post #19

Newt poisoning of humans must be rare, I’ve lived in this region my whole life and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this!

I think the article is exaggerating quite a lot

> It’s so toxic that the poison from a single newt can easily kill several adult humans. You could literally die from licking this newt, just once.

TBF there is one death reported in Oregon from someone eating an entire newt in 1979, but they aren’t as bad as the article would have you believe. Many of us have handled these newts. There would be a lot more dead people if licking is all it took.

> A 29-year-old man drank approximately 150 mL of whiskey at about 11 AM July 9, 1979. At 6 PM he swallowed a 20-cm newt on a dare. Within ten minutes he complained of tingling of the lips. During the next two hours he began complaining of numbness and weakness and stated that he thought he was going to die. He refused to be transported to a hospital and was left alone for 15 minutes and then experienced cardiopulmonary arrest

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#168

Post by SwtCyber »

k__ wrote: post #105

I recently learned, there is a dangerous plant in many gardens around the US. If you stand under it for more than 10minutes, you're pretty much dead. Turns out, it's the water-lily.

Though now I kinda want a horror short where someone slowly realizes the water-lilies are the real apex predators

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#169

Post by SwtCyber »

water-data-dude wrote: post #13

Oooooh! I saw “I’ll have to teal deer it” and thought it must be some strange idiom. Had to go to Urban Dictionary to find out “teal dear = tl;dr”, and now I feel as dim as a garter snake that’s evolved resistance to large amounts of tetrodotoxin.

That just means you're adapting to survive the modern web

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#170

Post by account42 »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #133
water-data-dude wrote: post #13

Oooooh! I saw “I’ll have to teal deer it” and thought it must be some strange idiom. Had to go to Urban Dictionary to find out “teal dear = tl;dr”, and now I feel as dim as a garter snake that’s evolved resistance to large amounts of tetrodotoxin.

I didn't get it either, but now I'm just sad that it's come to this, where we have to replace 5 characters with 9 just to seem "cool". Sure, it's 2 syllables instead of 4, but then we REALLY should have avoided using www as the prefix for the web. It's not like we talk about surfing "the WWW" - and even saying the 3 letters is WAY longer than saying "World Wide Web". It's great in german - 3 syllables for 3 letters,…

> It's great in german - 3 syllables for 3 letters, but english/french, it's NINE syllables for 3 letters.

Kind of absurd to use multiple syllables for a single letter if you think about it.

> I always thought it should have been web.domain.org.

It should have just been "domain.org" - the web part is already specified in the protocol. And if you are concerned about domains only having a single IP that could have been (and for many protocols has been) solved with SRV records.

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