I don’t have the novel handy and the details are hazy, so I can’t say if the excuse given in-novel is plausible or not. Something about the way their bloodstreams were arranged so that all the waste from their cells was concentrated into a toxic stew.
Yes, exactly like eating grass. In the real world animals can’t digest grass, yet some microbes can. So animals have evolved symbiotic relationships with those organisms, enabling animals to eat grass. And that symbiosis has evolved totally independently more than 10 times. And that is for a shitty, nutrient deficient food source like cellulose.
Yet somehow on this alien world not a single organism has formed a symbiotic relationship to enable it to exploit a high density, nutrient rich food source like meat? How could that possibly manage to be avoided?
That doesn’t address the biochemistry at all.
For example, the system can only work if literally every organism is toxic to literally every other organism. A single deviation and you have instant predators. So if there are 200 trillion individual animals on the planet, you need at least 100 trillion distinct forms of the toxin to ensure that predation isn’t a viable option. If the toxin can be detected chemically you need literally 200 trillion forms. How is that biochemically possible?
How can offspring be biochemically distinct from their parents? They must be, to avoid predation on their own young as we see in so many species on Earth, but how do they manage to to be so, and yet able to be nurtured by the mother’s own bloodstream?
Presumably every organism is able to enzymatically digest its own toxin. Why hasn’t any organism evolved the ability to enzymatically digest the toxins of related organisms? Plenty of organisms prey on their own siblings, so doing so would provide a huge evolutionary advantage.
If every organism has this potent toxin that kills or disables literally every other animal on the planet, then why isn’t it used offensively? We have plenty of poisonous herbivores on Earth, and poison hasn’t evolved all that often. On a planet where highly effective toxins are ubiquitous why, biochemically, isn’t venom also ubiquitous? Why don’t all animals fight for mates using their venom? And, of course, if they do why doesn’t this provide the imperative for evolving immunity to the toxin?
This just goes on an on. If an ecosystem shares any commonality at all with Earth it’s impossible for such a system to evolve in the first place, much less for nothing to evolve a way around it for 3 billion years.
Three additional points:
If predation and scavenging by animals doesn’t work, what is preventing the plants from becoming predators? If a plant kills an animal, the animal will decay and release nutrients into the soil in the plant’s root zone. A few plants adopt this strategy on Earth, but it’s rare because if a beech kills a deer chances are scavengers will take the carcasse away, making it of little value to the beech. But in their hypothetical world and tree that can kill any animal has massive advantage, especially in nutrient poor environments. Carnivorous plants and fungi should be the norm. And of course once carnivorous plants are the apex predators they will rapidly evolve to fill the carnvore niche.
Why haven’t either plants evolved a toxin, or animals outcompeted the plants? On this planet it is apparently possible to have a universal toxin, which is impossible on Earth. Plants, because they can;t run away, stand to gain far more from toxins than animals do, which is why most plants on Earth are toxic and most animals are not. SO why haven;t plants evolved toxins?
Why do plants even exist on this planet? If animals can’t be eaten they don’t need to run away. So why haven’t animals outcompeted plants in the plant niche? Plenty of animals have symbiotic relationships with photosynthetic algae, a few have even managed to incorporate chloroplasts as part of their reproductive legacy. So animals can photosynthesise. They can stand still without fearing predation. They can easily kill other animals and obtain nutrients from the soil and so outcompete plants. Exactly what advantage do plants have on this planet that even allows them to exist? Here on Earth plants exist because they are hard to digest. On this planet animals are harder to digest than plants. So why are there any plants? And of course once animals start occupying the plant niche they must outcompete the plants, simply because they can never be eaten. So since there are no longer any plants and animals can’t eat the new animal-plants without dying, there are very rapidly no animals. All we have left are stationary, photosynthetic animals that are totally inedible. Nothing moves on the entire planet. Far from a planet of gentle giants, it would become a jungle occupied by animals that occupy the plant niche and look exactly like plants…
Evolution occurs without predation just fine actually.
High time to put out a working definition from the field of biology in this thread: evolution is a change in the allele frequencies within a population over time.
A fine example in humans is that we are evolving on the whole darker skin tones due to a shift towards a greater occurrence of those alleles that code for more pigment because China and India as well as many countries labelled third world are growing in population prodigiously while Caucasian populations are stable or shrinking for the most part.
This is in no way due to predation yet it is evolution and there are plenty of other examples.
Evolution occurs for numerous reasons such as kin selection, sexual selection, mutation, genetic drift, the founder effect, environmental changes, et cetera all of which are not tied to predation.
NonrandomPerson, since that comment was in no way relevant to this thread, much less pertinent to anything that I said, why did you quote me before posting it? 
You stated that stopping predation stops evolution. Stated it as absolute even by your own words which is silly to do without extraordinary evidence to refute a well established theory. I pointed out that evolution occurs without predation within bounds of the current theory quite easily. If that is not pertinent then I don’t know what is.
No, I didn’t. Try reading for comprehension.
So if you admit that animals cannot eat cellulose what is stopping the hypothetical situation where animals cannot eat animals? I’m proposing a multistage symbiotic relationship in which animals cannot eat animals, plants cannot eat dead animal matter, but a fungus can eat dead animal matter and unlock the nutrients for plants to use. The plants can then be eaten by animals.
Animals can eat cellulose just fine. What we can’t do is digest it.
The same thing that stops the actual situation of animals being unable to eat cellulose.
In addition to the seven other apparently insurmountable objections that I raised above.
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If the fungus can digest animal matter, why doesn’t the fungus become predatory? After all, we have hundreds of species of predatory fungi and plants on this planet, and here they have to compete with animals. So on a world where there is no competition, why wouldn’t fungi become specialised predators?
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If the only force that disposes of animal carcasees is a fungus, then why wouldn’t pants become predatory? It seems inevitable that any plant that kills every animal that t comes into contact with will liberate all the nutrients n that animal body into its own root zone.
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If animals cannot eat animals, then why do animals not all simply become photosynthetic? What is the advantage of a mobile animal lifestyle if there are no predators. Quite simply, why waste energy moving if the objects that you are eating cannot move, and nothing that eats you can move?
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Many animals on this planet practice gardening techniques or various sorts. So if fungi can release the nutrients in an animal carcasse, why wouldn’t ants, for example, simply slaughter every animal they can find to feed their fungus gardens?
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How would such a situation even evolve? What was the first organism that couldn’t be digested by any other organism, and how did that happen?
Those are the basic objections. There are numerous others listed above.
Only convoluted really because of somewhat nitpicky responses.
Including that one, which is a wild overstatement if I’ve ever seen one. According to your very pessimistic view of “tooth and claw”, human laws against raping/looting/pillaging/etc. will never work either. Yet despite all the misery in the world that we can focus on, it is a fact that for instance Paris Hilton can generally walk down the street with her sexual assets on display, wearing expensive jewelry, and get to her destination without being gang-raped and robbed of her valuables.
Okay, then, I’ll flip it around: if this is so, why are there any herbivores now? Hmmm…didn’t think of that, did you!
Some of your other nitpicks are more interesting and have some validity, although you still made some puzzling statements like “Wolves still kill every animal they come across, they just won’t eat them”. Well, except that did you forget that the aliens have basically made a law against murder, not just against predations?
You say essentially that a law against murder makes everyone a murderer because everyone causes someone’s death somehow, even if indirectly. Yet, again, we manage to do a reasonable job in our courts of law of making a distinction between prosecuting people for intentional unjustified killing and prosecuting them for some butterfly effect that causes death indirectly.
Your very complex (and, as I said, somewhat interesting) notions of how indirect predation could still happen, it seems to me, ignore the fact that on some basic level, all animals are directly or indirectly operating on solar energy (well, except for those that live around black smokers in the deep sea). And at some point I think either being a really good herbivore or a really good scavenger is going to be an “easier” route to grabbing one’s share of that solar energy than being some complicated indirect predator.
After all, in a world where killing animals for meat is prohibited, the total biomass will be about the same (I’d think); and since all animals die eventually, why not just be a straight up scavenger if meat is your thing, rather than engineer (yes, evolution is mindless–but again, words like this are hard to avoid) a complex method of predation?
“Try reading for comprehension” is such a jerky thing to say–and I’d say NonRandomPerson’s points show quite a good level of comprehension of what your post necessarily meant even if you don’t stand by it.
This is a complete non sequitur.
Once again, this is a total non sequitur. In what was does the advantage of being the sole predator in world full of defenceless prey preclude being a herbivore in world with a plethora of both herbivorous and carnivorous creatures.
If you actually want an answer to your question: There are herbivores today because there is an unexploited energy resource available, and where such a resource exists something will evolve to exploit it. How does this go any way towards addressing my point, which is that being the sole organism able to exploit the energy in the bodies of other organisms provides a huge evolutionary advantage?
What is that based on? When did this law get passed? This is once again a total* non sequitur.* Nobody has even used the word murder in this thread prior to this.
Nonsense. Nobody used the word murder before you. I certainly did not.
What you are failing to understand is that diversification isn’t driven by being “easy”. It’s driven by being competitive. Available energy is limiting in any ecosystem. If an organism can gain access to available energy that isn’t being exploited, it will have an evolutionary advantage regardless of “easy”. It was easier for a fish to hunt in the water than on land, yet fish still moved onto land to hunt. It was easier for a hoofed animal to hunt on land than in the ocean, yet hoofed animals still moved into the oceans to hunt. It’s easier for a wombat to eat grass than to climb trees and eat eat toxic eucalypt leaves, yet some wombats still moved into the trees and ate eucalypt leaves.
Easy simply does not enter into it when one is discussing diversification. All that matters is whether an option makes more energy available.
Regardless of whether killing animals for meat is prohibited or not, the total biomass will be about the same. It depends entirely on net primary productivity and mineralisation rates. The effect of predation is trivial.
As for why it would be “engineered”: for exactly the reason that real lifeforms in the real world engineered such a solution literally hundreds of thousands of times. Because there is energy available in the bodies of other animals. Any animal that is able to exploit that energy in addition to the energy available to its nearest relatives will have an evolutionary advantage. It can’t fail to. It has more energy available to reproduce.
This is a very basic, fundamental concept that you are failing to grasp. Life can be summarised as a struggle to obtain the energy needed to reproduce. Those organisms that can obtain the most energy for themselves and their descendants will outcompete all others. It’s an indisputable fact that there is a very dense energy source available ion the bodies of animals. Any organism that can exploit that energy source in addition to the energy sources available to its siblings must, by definition, be able to obtain more of the energy needed to reproduce. It can’t be any other way. How easy it is to do so is of no significance.
Well correct me if I’m wrong Blake, but I think you are saying that even if at some point there was no predation going on, over time it would start up as a result of evolution. And the only way to prevent that would be to stop evolution. Is that correct?
Okay, Blake. First of all, there’s really no need to be a tiresome pedant. A perfectly robust debate can take place in which the back-and-forth goes something like this:
Instead of this:
I will try for the rest of this post to set a good example by ignoring your jibes and addressing your debate points substantively and impassively. To wit:
No, the word has not been used–you are quite correct. I believe however that “the aliens have basically made a law against murder, not just against predations” is a reasonable paraphrase of what I stated in an earlier post: “Any creature that comes as close or closer to sentience as a mayfly does, that intentionally kills any other creature that also comes that close or closer, is sterilised.” Apparently you disagree that this was an accurate paraphrase, but I don’t believe hashing out the issue of whether it was or was not would be productive–so how about if instead we just substitute the longer phrase for the places where I used “murder”, okay?
I dispute your premise, since scavengers would still be able to exploit that same energy. If the premise is invalidated, so is the huge evolutionary advantage.
Again, though, I dispute your premise (that this energy “isn’t being exploited”; whether it is “available” given the conditions created by the alien beings’ rules is also questionable but that is not necessary to my argument). Currently, we have both scavengers and predators. Without the “law” I’ve introduced as a thought experiment, scavengers benefit by not having to chase prey or to endanger themselves when prey animals fight back.
So why are any animals predators now, rather than all waiting to harvest the meat upon natural or accidental death? Because an ecosystem of only herbivores and scavengers is unstable since at least a certain number of predators can profit by using an evolutionary survival strategy (ESS) in which they “jump the queue” and grab that meat before it is available to the scavengers. This I think is a big part of your argument.
However, how “easy” something is can be an important factor. The viability of a predation ESS is predicated on the disadvantages (mobile prey that fights back) being balanced out by the advantages (earlier opportunity to consume the meat and thus less competition from other, scavenging meat eaters). But if you add in a huge new disadvantage (the alien intervention), it strikes me that the scale is tipped to a marked extent. It might be untenable for the intervention to attempt to completely prevent any consumption of “the energy available in other beings”, as you put it. But since scavengers can still consume that energy, the way for a carnivore to compete given the changed conditions provided by the alien intervention is to be a more effective scavenger rather than being a predator.
An analogy that comes to mind is a dam that has a hairline crack in it. If there is no other crack or hole in the dam, a certain amount of water will flow through that crack at a fairly steady rate. But if there is suddenly a much larger breach opened in the dam, water will no longer flow through the crack. It’s much “easier” to escape through the giant hole instead.
One more thought on this idea that evolution doesn’t proceed toward what is the “easiest”.
Take the peak of Mount Everest. I was at first tempted to call it “lifeless” (except for human visitors of course). But I’ll be careful and say that there may be some life there, but hopefully we’ll all agree that there is, if any, very little compared to most parts of the globe. Isn’t that, in some sense, because it’s “easier” for life to stick with other locales?
What if, slowly but surely, every other part of the earth somehow became even more inhospitable to life than the peak of Everest? (Never mind the mechanism–we can postulate, again, alien experimentation if anyone insists on an explanation.) If this happened quickly (even on a geological time scale), it might just wipe out most if not all life everywhere. But if it happened very, very slowly but inexorably, I suspect the end result would be that Everest would have more biomass, more life, than it does now while everywhere else would have less. Everest’s peak would become an “easier” place to live than anywhere else, and life is tenacious and clings to, well, life when it is backed into a corner. But so long as there are other, *easier *niches to inhabit, Everest will be left at least mostly alone.
Addressing them at all would be a nice start.
We can do that, and it still isn’t true.
No, by defintion they could not. Scavengers can only consume organisms that are already dead, which at any point in time is less than 1% of the total biomass of any given species. Thus a predator can not exploit 99% of the available energy. You yourself say this below.
It is certainly part of it, yes.
No, it isn’t tipped at all. All you’ve done is reduce the amount of available energy from predation by killing predators. As soon as any organism stumbles upon a way to harness the energy from other living organisms it gains a reproductive advantage because it has aces to energy that it relative do not have. The only way you can stop that is by instantly killing every organism that can obtain energy from a living organism in any manner whatsoever, directly or indirectly. And as I pointed out, doing that necessitates killing all animal life.
“Easy” doesn’t enter into it. If an organism can harness energy from other living animals, it gains a reproductive advantage. If you kill lit when it does so, it loses that advantage. “Easier” doesn’t come into play in any way at all. The only way you can stop organisms from harnessing the energy in other organisms is to micro-manage every ecological interaction to the nth degree. As soon as an organism clears ground and so facilitates the death of animals that need shelter, you have to kill it. As soon as an organism encourages plants to cover the ground, and thus encourages fire, you have to kill it. And so on and so forth. because in the real world such interactions will inevitably result in some organisms benefiting from enhancing the death of other organisms.
And if you do micro-manage every tiny ecological interaction to that degree, the question becomes meaningless. Environments and organism will evolve precisely how you direct them to evolve. It’s pointless speculating on what that might be because it has no common reference point to how thing happen on Earth. On Earth organisms benefit from killing other organism. If they can’t do it directly they do it vicariously though other organisms or through altering their environment. By manipulating every interaction to prevent that occurring you’ve produced a guided ecology that will do precisely what you want it to do. The original question no longer pertains.
No, by definition scavengers can *not *still consume that energy. At best they can consume 1% of it, in competition with many other scavengers.
Once again you are overlooking a simple and fundamental point: selection works on individuals, not species. A lion that foregoes eating an elephant calf today on the basis that it will be carrion in 80 years time is being selected against relative to its own sister that eats the calf right now. At any given point in time any given lion can either have access to 100% of the elephant biomass in its territory, or it can have access to the 1% that acts as carrion. What the species may have access to over a prolonged period of time is of no consequence.
What precisely is this analogy for? It’s yet another non sequitur.
No, it’s because there is more energy available in other locales. Easy doesn’t enter into it.
Simple question: what do you mean by “easier”. If easier isn’t shorthand for “more available energy” then what does it mean? You seem to be tying yourself in knots here. You concede that being predator is risky and strenuous and so forth and yet animals do it because it yields more energy, then you turn around and start talking about some niches being “easier” regardless of available energy.
There is no might about it. You are postulating a situation where there is less energy available. Most organisms will literally starve to death. Of course there will be less life.
Now you are blatantly begging the question. What you say is not true. You have no evidence for such a claim. The claim itself contradicts the laws of physics, never mind 150 years of ecological theory. Yet despite this you are trying to use it as the basis of your broader argument.
Consider this for one second: today, most of the Earth’s surface is ocean surface. Yet the ocean surface doesn’t have more life than tropical rainforests or coral reefs. Yet this is exactly what you predict should have happened. As the ocean surface slowly increased, it should have ended up with more life than anywhere else, simply because there is more of it than any other environment.
Of course it didn’t happen that way because ecology has to obey the laws of physics. If there is no energy available in an environment then the environment can;t support as much life. It doesn’t matter one iota how much of the environment there is. You could make the entire plane’s surface ocean, and there still wouldn’t be any more life there. More area doesn’t increase energy density.
No it wouldn’t. The amount of energy available per unit area would be exactly the same as it is today. It wouldn’t be any easier than it is now.
Why exactly do you think there would magically be a higher energy density just because there is more area?
Uh huh. :dubious:
So you think that evolution works by an organisms saying “That doesn’t look easy, I’ll evolve to live somewhere else instead”? Because if that isn’t how evolution works then how the hell could what you just said be true? If an organism has evolved to be able to garner the most energy on Everest, then in what sense it it easier for it to live somewhere else? And if an organism can’t evolve to garner the most energy on Everest then how the hell can Everest ever become an “easier” place to live in an alternative reality?
I’m sorry but you are not making any sense at all here. You are making assertions that are simply untrue. Statements that can be readily disproved by even a cursory reading of the literature or even simply examining them logically. And then you try to build an argument on those untrue assertions.
At this stage I think that rather than basing error upon error, you should perhaps try to actually address what I have said, and tell me which bits you actually disagree with and why, rather than trying to construct some framework based upon the idea that diversity hinges upon some subjective standard of “easier” .
Exactly. You would need to constantly and actively prevent any and all attempts to circumvent the prohibition, and ultimately the only way to do that is to kill all animals. In fact you would need to kill all lifeforms, since plants would simply evolve to fill the predatory niche if you left them. Any animal that can in any way arrange for other animals to die in ts territory gains an energetic advantage, and the ways to do *that *are infinite.
It’s a interesting question as earth in the Kingdom of God is suppose to have no predators and suppose to be paradise with all needs met. So animals will be able to express wonderful forms. In another posting it was noted that a certain fish in a non-predator environment became extremely colorful, so there may be a beautification of the animals.
On the TV show ‘River Monsters’ it was noted that a plant eating fish that was relocated to another part of the world became carnivorous (IIRC names the ball cutter by natives) because of lack of the food that it had in it’s native waters. So the jump to eating meat may have been from lack of food (which should not be the case in the KoG)
Predator vs. prey is another way of modeling “Entity A existing over Entity B because A destroys/consumes/assimilates the contents of B” with the advantage of propagating mutations of itself. We could look at extremely early examples if we wanted. Where are we drawing the line at predator/prey, here? Consider a leading model of abiogenesis (origin of life) which leads into evolution:
E.g. consider The Origin of Life - Abiogenesis - Dr. Jack Szostak - YouTube
Go to 06:40 or so. “A vesicle with more polymer, through simple thermodynamics, will “steal” lipids from a vesicle with less polymer. This is the origin of competition. They eat each other. A vesicle that contains a polymer that can replicate faster, will grow and divide faster, eventually dominating the population.”
I’m not even sure how you’d “enforce” such a barrier in the first place. It’s basically akin to putting a limit on physics somewhere, and given that limit, I’m not even sure the universe could exist in the first place. By not allowing an environment where “predatory” vesicles could even overtake “prey” vesicles because one molecule is better-suited, I dare say we couldn’t have life at all. The entire thrusting force behind evolution and natural selection is diversity, pressure, and competition between organisms in some way for resources to continue existing.