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When sexual selection can lead to a decline in the capacity for survival

nytimes.com

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Re: When sexual selection can lead to a decline in the capacity for survival

#41

Post by devnull255 »

bad_user wrote: post #2

> But the evolutionary mechanism behind this novelty is not adaptation by natural selection, in which only those who survive pass on their genes, allowing the species to become better adapted to its environment over time. Rather, it is sexual selection by mate choice, in which individuals pass on their genes only if they’re chosen as mates. TFA has a weird definition for natural selection. Evolution has no preference…

Evolution happens because of natural selection. It is the narrative of natural selection and does not always have a happy ending. The subtitle of the article is just plain wrong. Of course natural selection explains "the too sexy birds", it just can't predict how long the evolutionary span will be.

Re: When sexual selection can lead to a decline in the capacity for survival

#42

Post by JacksonGariety »

skywhopper wrote: post #8

I will just echo the other posts here that the author of this article or his sources severely misunderstand natural selection and the special case of sexual selection. The most important thing to understand about evolution is that natural selection can only work with the existing traits of an organism, the current environment in which the organism exists, and what random changes happen. Furthermore, every change in t…

"Clearly the telos of the bird is to fly well, as that of a lyre player is to play the lyre properly!"

It's Aristotelian biology.

Re: When sexual selection can lead to a decline in the capacity for survival

#44

Post by cmahler7 »

shaq_hammer wrote: post #16

The title reminds me of a species we're all familiar with where the females are adopting increasingly high standards for mates based in obsolete evolutionary preferences which have no applicability to fitness in the current environment, and where the skills relevant to survival in the current environment are ironically often seen as unattractive by the females, and males who cultivate these skills often don't have th…

and guys prefer women with large breasts and wide hips, both unnecessary due to baby formula and C-Sections.

Doesn't change the fact that preferring those traits are ingrained in us due to thousands of years of evolution and aren't changing any time soon. Worry about what you have control over you'll be happier

Re: When sexual selection can lead to a decline in the capacity for survival

#45

Post by joe_the_user »

skywhopper wrote: post #8

I will just echo the other posts here that the author of this article or his sources severely misunderstand natural selection and the special case of sexual selection. The most important thing to understand about evolution is that natural selection can only work with the existing traits of an organism, the current environment in which the organism exists, and what random changes happen. Furthermore, every change in t…

Ostriches, emus, and penguins can't fly, though their ancestors were able to. That is not evidence that they are evolutionary dead ends.

Well, I can't say concerning Ostriches etc but a common pattern in recently emerged islands is for birds to reach the island first. There not being any predators, some of the bird species evolve to being flightless. Once rats or other mammals reach these Islands, these species tend to become extinct. So naturally occurring "evolutionary dead-ends" are certainly possible (European sailors releasing rats and rabbits to the many islands they visited accelerated the process but it is still "inevitable" since mammals will to a given Island sooner or later).

Sure, one can define selection and fitness "internally" and thus whatever survives is "fittest" up to a given point. But it seems reasonable to take an external view and judge that certain evolution paths lead to the end of species. There's no reason abolish this kind of analysis just because one has honed the specific, technical meaning of these terms so that they aren't concerned with the question.

Re: When sexual selection can lead to a decline in the capacity for survival

#47

Post by ccallebs »

skywhopper wrote: post #8

I will just echo the other posts here that the author of this article or his sources severely misunderstand natural selection and the special case of sexual selection. The most important thing to understand about evolution is that natural selection can only work with the existing traits of an organism, the current environment in which the organism exists, and what random changes happen. Furthermore, every change in t…

> The most important thing to understand about evolution is that natural selection can only work with the existing traits of an organism, the current environment in which the organism exists, and what random changes happen.

I believe most of the time you're right, the changes are random. However, at least one experiment has shown that species can pass adaptive traits to their offspring (called Lamarckian inheritance) [1]. The experiment is intriguing, in that it seems to hint something more is going on than the Darwinian inheritance model.

[1] http://newsroom.cumc.columbia.edu/blog/2014/07/17/effects-of...

Re: When sexual selection can lead to a decline in the capacity for survival

#48

Post by qb45 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #33
lapsock wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the author of this article or his sources severely misunderstand natural selection and the special case of sexual selection. The author of this article is an Evolutionary Biology researcher at Yale. It would be really weird if he severely misunderstood natural selection.

It's not a Hacker News thread unless there are a bunch of computer programmers telling people with PhD's how ignorant they are about their own field.

The problem in this case is that TFA presented this phenomenon as some black magic unexplainable by science, despite reasonable explanations having been provided half century ago and popularized even among lay audience by books like The Selfish Gene.

But hell if you are wrong about the general trend ;)

edit:

Really what TFA did is it just falsified some extremely naive and humanly-subjective interpretation of the slogan "survival of the fittest", without bothering to mention that this interpretation had already been known to be defective years ago and there are subtler alternatives which don't have this problem.

Re: When sexual selection can lead to a decline in the capacity for survival

#49

Post by nabla9 »

dekhn wrote: post #5
lisper wrote: post #3

The puzzlement over the apparent reproductive disadvantages of wing-singing is simply a reflection of a misunderstanding of how evolution works. Evolution does not select for the reproductive fitness of species, it selects for the reproductive fitness of genes . And it does not select for the absolute fitness of genes, but rather for their fitness relative to competing alleles with respect to a particular environment…

You're describing this viewpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolutio... however I don't think it's really an accepted (in terms of evidence) theory that explains all evolution. I think most biologists think that evolution selects at multiple levels (although likely the underlying processes are much more complex than just that). After all, no real visible phenotype is truly based on a single…

> most biologists think that evolution selects

It's my understanding that gene-centered view is the main view among evolutionary biologists.

Multi-level adaptation seems to have fallen under lack of evidence. Evidence from nature, mathematical theory, and evolutionary simulations seem to back up selfish gene theory. There are still people like David Sloan Wilson who work on it.

Re: When sexual selection can lead to a decline in the capacity for survival

#50

Post by kevinalexbrown »

I remember once from undergrad the saying '"obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics.' Seeing how something could be true is dramatically different from identifying and defending that it is true.

It's dangerously easy to say "oh yea, makes sense, natural selection happens by mating so if mates choose club wings, I get it. Obvious." But Prum's trying to go a step further, and test just how far out of balance and arbitrary the mate selection part can be from the direct do-not-die part of evolutionary fitness.

He proposes that we can differentiate between these two by considering that the club wings aren't actually indicators of higher direct fitness, because they hurt the ability to fly, even among females that have no need for such shenanagins. I'm not sure I totally agree with or grasp that, but at least it's an attempt to further understand and test the idea.

I'm frankly surprised by comments accusing a well established evolutionary biologist of severely misunderstanding natural selection. The author has spent his career, among other things, investigating mechanisms of evolution, and identifying and performing tests to assess their relative importance to a particular species (here's an example: http://prumlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/prum_1997_phylog...).

You might consider whether your objections are addressed in his work not aimed at the lay population, and that your criticism really just amounts to "He wrote this at not exactly the right level of sophistication for me." Maybe that's true, but it's a pretty boring claim.

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