And it’s actually anti-Darwinian to even refer to “speeding up evolution.” There is no destination here. Things do not necessarily get better, more interesting, more beautiful, and so on. They just change, and they are already changing in ways that don’t seem desirable.
Of course “desirability” itself is subjective as well, in theory. In practice I suspect almost every human would prefer a world that is more biodiverse over one that is less biodiverse, all things being equal. Still a human value, but of course those are all we have when we need to make decisions.
Without that you’re just spitballing.
The plants that the bats rely on in Arizona is already on the protected species list and, coincidentally, in the area discussed in TFA.
I really try to refrain from making comments like this, but this has to be one of the most simplistic, self-deluded arguments I've seen listed on this site:
"Please provide proof of the impact of this plant on the earth 1 Million years from now. What nobody has shown that? Aha I must be right!"
If your rubric for decision making is that no action matters unless you can beforehand determine its impact 1 million years from now, then it's really not valuable for you to comment on anything or participate in any discussion at all.
Whether it’s valuable for you to comment on anything or participate in any discussion at all is something I’ll do you the curtesy of leaving you to decide.
I know nothing about this particular weed and its effects, but I don’t need to in order to know your claims are incorrect.
If you want instead to make the claim “this particular species isn’t invasive and/or doesn’t yield undesirable effects on its environment” then go ahead and do that, but it’s a very different one.
Frankly not sure what you get out of modeling it that way and labeling "preserved mutations per century" as "speeding up," but feel free to do so.
One issue with the map-territory violation here is that it's very easy to assume the gradient descent is optimizing for something we care about and find desirable. You are smuggling in the idea that later in the gradient descent is "better" than earlier in the gradient descent. There is nothing in reality that necessitates this. It is totally possible for human contributions to this process (model it as gradient descent if you want, model it as "speeding up" if you want) to optimize things that are in fact very very bad for everything that humans care about.