I thought evolution's components were sexual selection (who fucks) and natural selection (who dies). Random variation can change genes, yeah, but evolution is driven through the dis/advantages of the resulting phenotype (do they succeed at finding a mate, do they raise as man offspring to sexual maturity and do they survive long enough to do the aforementioned).

This is selective breeding / artificial selection, not natural selection.

If it were some other predator, we'd say it's natural selection. Because it's humans killing the ones with certain traits we say it's artificial? But humans are not doing it to promote a certain trait, in fact the evolutionary effect of the poaching is actually the opposite of what people want.

No, it's not. People are not choosing pairs of elephants to breed.

It may be unintentional, but it is still artificial.

Define "artificial".

Oof, that's a tall order, isn't it? I'm no professional philosopher, and not somebody who works all day making dictionary definitions, but the general sense of natural / artificial here is "not by humans" versus "by humans", although that's not very precise and you'll get into trouble if you read too much into much into it. There are loads of ways in which you'd need to refine this definition in order to account for various exceptions (due to convention) or the ways in which the sense is incompletely explained (e.g. it would be "natural" for me to drink water, but "artificial" to manufacture sunglasses).

Words like "natural" and "artificial" don't admit tidy definitions, and you know that, which is why you demanded that I define it for you, presumably so you could poke holes in whatever definition I provided.

> which is why you demanded that I define it for you, presumably so you could poke holes in whatever definition I provided

Not really. Your original use of the word implied the definition you were using, and my comment was merely to point out that it's the wrong definition (in my opinion, obviously).

In this context it makes more sense to include the intention, because the evolution itself in this case is not something we artificially induced.

The elephants, for example, might have evolved to have green tusks instead, which would have made them not attractive to poachers. They could have grown wings that would made them more difficult to be hunted. The point is, poaching might be artificial, but the elephants responded to a threat (coming from humans or not) with a completely random and natural process.

> Not really. Your original use of the word implied the definition you were using, and my comment was merely to point out that it's the wrong definition (in my opinion, obviously).

That's precisely what I said... you asked me to provide the definition in order to poke holes in it. Rather than go through this back-and-forth nonsense with implications, why not just say it up front?

Anyway, seems like you think I was saying that the evolution was artificial. Evolution is heritable variation and the forces that choose among those variations. Natural selection, artificial selection, and genetic drift are possible forces that choose the variation, but in this case, the variations themselves are still random mutations.

You're saying poachers intentionally breed tuskless elephants so they don't have to hunt anymore?

... Evolution has three main components

Sure, and two of them are identical from every practical and theoretical perspective.

There are more main components than that. Sometimes forces like drift are stronger than adaptive selection.

A man with a gun doesn't sound like "natural selection".

Why not? I often see people draw this distinction between humanity and nature, as if we weren't part of nature, and there is something deeply misanthropic about it. Of course we are part of nature. We may be screwing over the habitat of other animals -- like rabbits in Australia or pythons in the everglades -- but we are certainly part of nature and this is a textbook case of natural selection at work.

That is exactly what the distinction "natural / artificial" means... it's not some kind of judgment. In this sense of the word, artificial just means "by humans".

"artificial selection" means people selectively breeding for traits they find desirable [0] [1]. e.g. "I want a short-legged dog, so I'm going to keep breeding the shortest-legged dog from each generation together." That's not what's happening here. The poachers aren't trying to create tuskless elephants.

You can't peel off the "natural" in "natural selection" in this case and say "because this is done by humans, it's artificial selection," when artificial selection already has a distinct meaning.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding [1]: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/artificial-s...

That is also an incoherent distinction. If humans ferment milk to make cheese, then this is "artificial" food? No, I think people use "natural" and "artificial" to mean "traditional practice" versus "modern practice", but humans do all of it.

Yes, it turns out that the English language is full of incoherent distinctions. Words mean radically different things in different contexts, have definitions that are not really self-consistent, and tons of exceptions that we have to memorize. And yet, we must make sense of it to navigate.

If I were a philosopher, or if I wrote dictionary entries, I might decide to spend the time to come up with a rather clever definition for "artificial". Feel free to come up with a definition yourself, if that's your fancy.

I think the underlying bugaboo is "untested", particularly when referring to something considered "fragile".

People trust traditional techniques of preparing food because they have proven successful at their intended goals. When you start messing with people's food, they become suspicious as to whether you know the full repercussions of what you are doing.

So the injection of a novel element is considered "artificial" - despoiling the "natural" -- e.g. time-tested technique, and possibly disturbing something fragile -- e.g. human health.

Similarly, people are quite reactionary when it comes to open spaces and nature because they see a system that appears to be in balance and has survived the test of time. They oppose altering the current state of affairs because they are sure some unintended side effect will screw things up.

On the one hand, it's laudable to have these goals, but if they used the standard language of conservatism, traditionalism, etc, they would be branded as reactionaries, so the spirit of the age is to invent new words like "artificial" and "natural" that are less loaded with politics, even though it is all just conservatism at its roots.

Humans are animals and predators like any other in this situation.

Why downvote parent? A human is a "natural" predator just with different methods of attack/more intelligence than "animals". Why is a human predator (an "apex predator" if you will) any less "natural" than a T-Rex? Or any other animal that forced evolutionary change?

Because of civilization. While the word "artificial" is certainly overloaded, this is basically what we've designated the word to mean. That's not to say a human couldn't be a "natural" predator, if you assumed an isolated tribe, but that's certainly not what's happening here. If we call this natural, there is no longer any meaning you can ascribe to artificial.