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.

Comments

Re:This one is bound to cause controversy

[molo]

Why not just harvest the ivory when the elephant develops maturely sized tusks, instead of killing the animal?

-molo

Do you know what "survival" means?

[Scrameustache]

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.