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Remember When Elephants Had Tusks?
Boing Boing links to an interesting story today. If an antibiotic kills 95% of a germ species, but 5% bear a gene for resistance, indiscriminate use of it will result in a surviving line of entirely resistant germs. But on a slightly larger scale, genetically tusk-free elephants are gaining ground relative to their tusked brethren, says one study, thanks to a nasty antibiotic called poaching. If elephants don't have the decency to go extinct, maybe they'll just hang around to tusklessly remind our grandchildren where billiard balls originally came from, and to invite us to ponder what the last poacher was thinking as he shot the last tusked elephant.
How that poacher is going to get that gun past zoo security...
I seriously doubt they'll go extinct, but tusked elephants may go extinct in the wild.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
I have advocated this before , but one sure way to stiff up the elephant populations and to eliminate illegal poaching is to create elephant farms. ,a new source of food and a strong elephant population. . .
In doing so we create a reputable ivory trade , a great source of work for the local communities
I am not talking about factory farming as i find that disgusting , It should be rather free range
It could also double as a safari trip , ivory could be harvested via profitable hunts (then sold on , including selling of the meat)
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Evolution has no will, no path, no agenda, no nothing. It can't be forced, pressured, coerced, etc.
However by modifying the selective pressures we can have large influences on the directions of evolution. While humans did not create the tuskless phenotype we are contributing to its increase in abundance
Just another crappy blog
are we doing this to any other animals as well?
Dogs? Cats? Cows? Sheep? We've been doing it to pets for millenia, and it has not been harmful (at least not always).
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
On CNN the other day, I heard this referred to as "survival of the fittest," which was one of the dumbest things I had heard in weeks. The anchor implied that because tuskless elephants used to be 5% of the elephant population and now they're 8%, this means that more elephants are being born with the tuskless gene, which could be completely false. If I have 100 elephants, 5 of them tuskless, and I kill 37 of the tusked elephants, 8% of the elephants are now tuskless - Darwin it ain't.
THIS was one of the dummest thing I've read in weeks.
If you kill elephants, and some survive because of a genetic trait: It's survival of the fittest.
In this case, the fittest being the ones less likely to be shot due to a genetic predisposition to refrain from growing big shiny tusk with high resale value.
You can't take the sky from me...
Selective pressure is how we breed various domestic animals. It's simply shorthand for saying, "desirable ones get to breed, and the rest are terminated and/or eaten". Natural examples would be long-term desertification (animals and plants that have genes causing them to be more efficient with water live long enough to breed), or salination (if you have genes which allow you to sequester, transport, or otherwise control salt, then you'll survive long enough to breed and pass on those genes).
Several years ago, as the SU was breaking up, it was reported that a breeder in their fur industry had been selecting for docile foxes. Over a period of about 40 years, he had not only achieved the desired trait, but in the process the animals snouts had shortened, their ears flopped, and their tails had acquired a curve. These other traits, which had been linked, but not actively selected for, are those which help distinguish domestic dogs from wild dogs.
Starting in the 1920s the Heck brothers in Germany had tried the reverse with trying to undomesticate european cattle, in an attempt to bring back the Auroch. The result, the Heck Cattle, do have some resemblence to the Auroch, but this is probably coincidental, as the modern european stock they started from descends from the middle-east, and did not (apparently) interbreed much with the Auroch. They still got a wild-looking bovine with many of the appropriate traits.
So, you can apply positive pressure (anything that looks like an Auroch gets to breed) or negative (anything that looks like a grand piano plus a few rack of billiard balls gets shot), but in the end it is simply that the expressed and perpetuated genome in the population is dependent upon those circumstances related to its being successfully transmitted. It's still evolution, but for once anthropomorphizing the source of the selective pressure is correct; someone made a decision about what kind of environment those animals would live in, but they made no conscious decision on how to respond. Nobody gets up one morning and says, "i'm going to evolve out of this elephantine lifestyle today".
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken