I assume it was an elephant coincidentally born without tusks, which then survived being poached thanks to the adaptation that was then passed on to subsequent offspring.
An impeccably timed advantageous mutation for an endangered species. We rely far too often on the word “coincidence” to describe what is clearly an unknown gene expression phenomenon, which gives me chills and seems to borderline the supernatural.
At what point to people throw in the towel and say, yup, God’s real? Or do we just keep saying these unexplainable things are coincidences since it somehow jives better with our worldview?
I never understood why people think that spirituality and science are mutually exclusive. In 2014, even the pope himself came out and said the Big Bang and evolution are real [0]. Maybe it’s part of the whole “works in mysterious ways” tidbit, if you believe that kind of stuff? Let’s try having an open mind.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/pope-francis-evolution-bi...
No. An existing but uncommon mutation. Previously disadvantageous.
> At what point to people throw in the towel and say, yup, God’s real?
Well . . . Occam's razor says "not now, bub."
When He stops acting in mysterious and cruel ways. He could, and this is just an example, have changed the poachers' socio-economic conditions so they wouldn't kill elephants anymore. Or he could have greatly devalued the price of ivory 100 years ago. But no, God's miracle is something that evolution can explain without a hitch. There's really no evidence of a deity at work here.
Did you ever consider the possibility that God's plan is to kill the elephants, and that them loosing their tusks is actually the Devil's work?
Penalties for poaching are generally paid with lead.
Also, I thought most African elephants in managed wildlife areas have their tusks cut by wildlife officials to deter poaching and save animal lives. If this were the case, perhaps attraction in mating also no longer includes tusks as a desirable characteristic since few/no individuals possess it any longer.
Unlike a goose that keeps laying eggs, tusks don't grow back. They are actually teeth.
And even if poachers did remove tusks humanely. Having no tusks or having infected tusk wounds would be a big disadvantage.
All I am saying is nature will find a way.
Or micro plastics.
Like that click-baity headline from the Telegraph, it has a better chance to get clicks phrasing it that way, instead of "Elephats without tusks are more likely to survive violent poachers", imho.
However, I don't get how this is anything clickbaity here over your title, please explain!
Its almost Godwins-law-like now that every article mentioning evolution will have this nitpicking.. Is it pedantic monday already again?
What is the actor here that responds? It is the process of evolution, in the same way you could say the climate reacts to a change in solar activity. So the process of evolution reacts to a change in the ecological system - more poachers than before - by changing the elephants to no longer having tusks. And the mechanism that achieves this change is that the elephants with the genetic variation making them tusk-less have a higher chance of passing on the genes because they are less likely to be killed by poachers.
It's not poachers that cause elephants to evolve not to have tusks.
It's that some elephant got a rare mutation, and those mutated elephants aren't as targeted by poachers, thus are able to survive more easily.
Plenty of popsci journos write as if nature is intelligent and driven by some purpose.
There have only been a few generations gone by since then, but you would imagine the same factors that made the gene for tusks more successful in the first place, would start to again predominate, but it will probably take many generations for it to come back to where it was. That part, the recovery, could be called an evolutionary response.
Change in the body - more torn hymen than before - by changing the humans to no longer having hymen.
Right?
It's quite obvious that article is claiming that the process of artificial selection that involves leaving tuskless elephants alive is resulting in generations with more elephants that are tuskless. That is what the article says two paragraphs in.
But perhaps it is not that obvious to others. Will someone who found parent comment enlightening please share?
Left side: Evolution took their tusks away.
Middle: Acktually it's selection pressure acting on the population combined with random mutations that...
Right side: Evolution took their tusks away.
More charitably, pedantry is a stage of learning. Practicing until the concepts get reinforced enough that you can substitute the rule of thumb again.
It's the same pattern as the hero's journey. Start at home (the naive view), do righteous battle with the concepts, return home (to the naive view) but changed.
I was into all this stuff when I was 13, reading Dawkins and Hitchens. Blind watchmaker, selfish gene. What's interesting is that the fuel for that kind of learning is part intellectual exercise, part making sense of the world, and part superiority (other people are wrong and I'm right). And now we're doing the same thing one level up.
Now with a challenge: try writing a more accurate headline, in as many characters or less.
But that wouldn’t be as catchy and as misleading/misunderstood as the original. Anyone reading that one will assume that elephants are purposefully being born without tusk, but it’s just a ratio consequence of tusked elephants dying early.
Not only maybe a bit.. every evolutionary response is surviving and passing on something beneficial for survival/reproduction, which includes new born with it then.. come on!
It's literally pressure from environment influencing evolution.
Or an evolutionary response.
I predict that readers of this will find this to be even more pedantic than the point you made. My reasoning is that while this terminology may not matter that much to those in the know, there's harm done to the public when science is communicated in a way that implies more than is actually there.
Same different: imaginary numbers. Not less number than others. There are plenty good ideas with a poor name: zero-knowledge encryption, and so on.
My understanding of evolution is the ability to adapt and adjust to the ever-changing environment over multiple generations, and if we treat ivory poaching as an environmental danger, it makes sense for tuskless elephants to pass their genes on.
aka being born without turks
You haven't passed on any genes until you have fertil offspring. Being born is of course necessary, but far from sufficient.
`Elephants without tusks in ‘evolutionary response’ to poachers`
But your counter argument is just setting up for more of that "mysterious ways" babble that the clergy have been using for centuries to keep the plebs coming to church. And pay their tithes.
So, if you ask me: what does it take to accept that a particular deity is real: at least do an open, clear, undeniable miracle, not weakly undo something you've set up yourself and have let fester for too long.
As to potentially giving your position away due to gunfire, the savannah is a big place and relatively flat. You can be hours away from the next human being. You can see them coming from miles away. And it makes it difficult to tell where sounds are coming from. So while you may hear the shot, you're not going to be able to tell exactly which direction it came from.
Also, you only need to be far enough away to not be caught.
AK-47s and their ammunition are abundant in many parts of the world. I don't think the same is true for dart guns for large sedative darts.
EDIT: I don't know what weapons poachers are using, so AK-47 is just the first thing that came to mind. They maybe use higher calibre weapons?
But your point is valid. Ammunition is easier to acquire and/or make yourself.
I for sure do. It’s extremely wrong. It implies the very incorrect idea that there is a purpose to evolution.
Did evolution reacted by removing tusks?
PS if you start to tell me how a hymen could be untorn even in the case of a complete vaginal intercourse I would slap you over TCP/IP.
You can heave a cannonball at an elephant with a potato gun, but it won't do much. .45-70 Government isn't a Big 5 cartridge despite being almost 12 mm across because of its antique origins and low chamber pressures.
A tiny FMJ high velocity round like a 5.7 wouldn't do much despite having the penetrating power of being essentially a supersonic "needle".
.338 Lapua requires a 5400+ J load to legally hunt B5 in parts of Africa. Otherwise, a 12.7x108 or .50 BMG would do the trick. Anti-matériel rifles are a lot easier to acquire than useless, antique elephant guns. Barrett.net
KE = 0.5 x m x v^2.
Yes. That's how evolution works. Your genes are randomized during life/mating.
Due to selection pressure one variation is favored over the other. That's evolution.
So in evolutionary response to poachers elephants evolve no tusks.
Evolution is not a process by which beneficial genes are created, it's one where they are filtered for.
Across thousands of baby elephants there are a likely hundreds of unique genetic differences. Most are worthless, some are detrimental, and some of beneficial. Evolution is just the process by which the beneficial ones thrive.
(Noone thinks that "getting born" involves intelligence choosing, the point you are repeating applies sometimes, but here out of context imo.)
For a better example, take humans: If you have a child and they grow up to be infertile, you have still passed on your genes. If they choose not to have children - even if fertile - you've still passed on your genes. Your particular mix of genes just won't live on in subsequent generations. Grandchildren aren't a requirement for you to simply pass on genes.
That is, if the choice of language confuses people: You have only been given those genes. You haven't given any genes to anyone else who can give those genes further, which is what matters in an evolutionary perspective.
Cause and effect are very complex concepts, probably not even well understood ones, but I would rather avoid descending into the philosophy of cause and effect, so I will just pick a potentially naive idea of cause and effect. Assume a counterfactual world without poachers, would the elephants evolve to be tusk-less? No, so the poachers cause elephants to become tusk-less.
It's that some elephant got a rare mutation, and those mutated elephants aren't as targeted by poachers, thus are able to survive more easily.
That is the mechanism at play under the hood, but it does not mean that the abstraction of poachers causing tusk-less elephants or even more abstractly that evolution causes tusk-less elephants under those circumstances are not also valid descriptions.
Plenty of popsci journos write as if nature is intelligent and driven by some purpose.
Which - to a certain extend - is fine. Countries go to war, wars cause destruction, companies go bankrupt, rivers flow to the ocean, holidays make people happy, programs produce outputs, moving the mouse with the left button down selects text, ... none of this is really true in a certain sense. But that is fine, all our words are abstractions and we understand what they really mean, they do not have to be understood literally and the meaning can be context-dependent.
If a species lacks the preexisting genetic diversity here, it dies.
This sounds like an argument made by creationists to deny evolution. The genes were always there and we are just seeing a change in expression.
When people of science have silly public debates like this, science loses. Stop being pedantic!
Of course they would! I can't see how you can disprove that. In both that world and ours there are or have been tusk-less elephants, elephants with two heads, elephants that live 150 years.
Evolution is pseudo-random. The whole of nature gives context and some variants thrive better within this context. It is illogical to take life out of its natural context and think whether it would have evolved differently.
Your question should be rephrased as "would elephants without tusk thrive and outcompete regular elephants in a poacher-less world?" Maybe yes, maybe no, but my point is that evolution occurs every time a new elephant is conceived, and maybe the resulting animal lives longer.
The word »evolve« in that sentence means exactly what you say, »thrive and outcompete regular elephants«, or at least that is the way I wanted it to be understood. What is your definition of that word in that context that makes the sentence mean something different?
Mutation occurs. Evolution is when the population changes, not individuals.
In this time frame it is unlikely elephants would have evolved without tusks in a world without poachers, because in that scenario tusks are an advantage.
Living longer is secondary to evolution. Producing more offspring, which can produce offspring itself is what matters.
If an animal becomes old and endangers the herd it is harm for selection. If it can't produce offspring anymore, but protects the youngers it can be useful for survival rate.
We only see the result of it. The observation that evolution helps find a better local maximum is literally survivorship bias.
Biological evolution is due to reproductive selection. Evolution is primarily related to reproduction: survival only matters if it affects reproduction (after all, nothing survives in the long term).
Evolution is not really defined as random change: evolution occurs due to selection pressures that amplify the genetic population of the most successful reproducers.
Genetic mutation and recombination is somewhat random, but not purely random (certain mutations are more or less likely, and the pool of successful recombinations is very biased).
It is a frustrating topic, because in biology evolution has a very particular meaning, yet biological evolution is usually misunderstood. The misunderstanding is due to the popular incorrect metaphors and alternative meanings for the word.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
Disclaimer: I am not a biologist. I’m trying to be as clear as I can, while making sweeping simplifications (e.g. ignoring kin selection etcetera!) I welcome any mistakes being corrected by lurking biologists.
You might want to read “The intentional stance” by the famous philosopher Daniel Dennett. This is a pretty useful analytic approach for many problems (e.g. we commonly say things like “the thermostat tries to keep the temperature within three degrees of its set point”).
I agree it is distressing that many people interpret such metaphors literally.
This has become the midwit anthem, as pg put it, whenever we use causal language to describe evolutionary pressure.
You're correct. This happens often, too often.
[1] At least by default, they can of course clarify that they actually think the universe has desires.
As a community, HN tends to be a place where such discussion is encouraged and relished.
“Pedantry” here (I’m not convinced it’s pedantry) does not make “science lose”.
If anything, I appreciate the tendency to discuss the more intricate aspects of things. In a world that trends ever more towards oversimplification and binary thought, it’s encouraging to find folks willing to debate the details.
And details often matter.
If some killerbots started killing everyone above 4 feet tall, would you see the sudden prevalence and thriving of people with dwarfism to be an argument for creationism?