Re:Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due t...
by ehsankia on Wednesday October 27, 2021 @03:01PM
(#29017583)
Not only is it more advantageous, it actually was force selected for (IIRC, poached elephants are often left for dead). So this is closer to selective breeding/artificial selection more so than natural selection.
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Re:Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due t...
by jbattle on Wednesday October 27, 2021 @03:40PM
(#29018100)
What's the difference in this case? Doesn't seem too different from how camouflaged eggs would have developed (maybe just faster because the selection mechanism is so strong).
When I think of selective breeding I think of humans picking out which animals (cows/dogs/wheat/etc) get to reproduce.
Re:Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due t...
by IggleSniggle on Wednesday October 27, 2021 @07:46PM
(#29020556)
Right, selective breeding is just a subset of natural selection. Not sure why folks seem to want to exclude humans from nature, like we’re not part of the exact same system.
Re:Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due t...
by robotresearcher on Thursday October 28, 2021 @12:58AM
(#29022539)
You’ve got it backwards. ‘Natural selection’ was coined to point out that selective forces exist in the wild other than humans deliberately breeding selected animals, which was well known in Darwin’s time. There’s ‘selection’ by humans and ‘natural selection’ which is by effects other than human selection. The effects of human hunting are a boundary case, where the selection pressure is not intended, but is a ‘natural’ consequence.
Re:Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due t...
by sellyme on Wednesday October 27, 2021 @11:04PM
(#29021908)
> Not sure why folks seem to want to exclude humans from nature
Probably because the concept of "nature" no longer serves any purpose if you don't, as it doesn't exclude anything.
It's often a pointless distinction to make (see also: anything that labels itself as "organic"), but it's a convenient shorthand to describe a category of interactions that people often want to talk about.
Re:Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due t...
by IggleSniggle on Thursday October 28, 2021 @10:08AM
(#29026292)
Perhaps, then, "nature" is a somewhat dated concept that is no longer especially useful to have in such broad circulation, given that it encourages folks to exclude humanity from analysis and understanding of the "natural" system?