Species evolve, flourish, then die out. that is evolution. My question: when humans interfere with this, what are the results? take for example the Ginko tree-the species has been in decline for millions of years, but humans have 'rescued" these trees, and transplanted them to almost every inhabited country. they had been reduced to a very small change in the mountains of China, and hence vulnerable to extinction.
Or the species Canis Familiaris-there are probably 100’s of millions of dogs alive today, compared with a few thousand wolves.
When man interferes with the natural process of evolution, are the results good or bad?
Now we are contemplating bring back long-extinct species (like the Tasmanian Wolf and the Giant Mammoths-will these efforts make the world better or worse.
There are plenty of examples in nature of species that have merged or are otherwise totally dependent on other species. Where would you draw a distinction between interdependent species in “nature” versus a plant that is dependent on mankind, who cultivates it for its own survival, and thus is a part of the web of life? From a certain perspective it’s just another example of interspecies dependency.
Also, I think the numbers are a bit off for wolves. There are tens of thousands of wolves in Canada alone.
I believe this is one of those problems where there is no “good or bad”, it just is. Evolution, like science, isn’t divided by a Human vs Nature , we are an intrinsic part of the process whether it is exterminating the passenger pigeon or reviving mammoths. The only real difference between us and the C-P extinction event is we have a modicum of control and direction over what we do, but we really can’t tell what the long term what the results will be overall.
My personal belief is that adding variety tends to make the whole system more robust overall; Monocultures on a large scale tend to be detrimental over the long haul.
The result is that evolution proceeds along a different path.
“good” and “bad” are subjective descriptors; whether the results of our interference are seen as “good” or “bad” will depend on who is assessing the results and what they value.
Example: wolves were deliberately reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in 1995. This was:
-“good” for the wolves
-“bad” for the elk, whose population had exploded during the absence of the wolves
-“good” for certain forms of vegetation that had been overgrazed by the elk
-“bad” for any hikers/backpackers who might encounter a hungry wolf in the wild (none so far, but there’s always tomorrow)
Our interference with the process of evolution has been both good and bad for humanity. We have amazingly productive crop species and barnyard animals because of our careful control of breeding (“good”), but our inadvertent interference with the evolution of bacteria (via the misuse of antibiotics) has resulted in some bacterial infections that are difficult or impossible to cure (“bad”).
We cannot “interfere with” or “thwart” evolution. Evolution does not have a goal. There is no ideal “this is how it’s SUPPOSED to happen” plan that we’re deviating from. Evolution is merely the result of shit happening. There is no value judgement to be placed on one type of shit happening instead of another type of shit happening. There is no “good” or “bad” evolution, and there are no “good” or “bad” results except as WE choose to label them. Evolution doesn’t care. Yes, it is true that humans have altered and are altering the selective pressure other species experience compared to a hypothetical alternate Earth in which humans never showed up. So what? We cannot point at that alternative hypothetical and say “that one over there is RIGHT, and this one is WRONG.”
We can choose to deliberately alter evolutionary paths by, say, domesticating animals or rescuing species that are on the brink of distinction. We choose to do these things for our own selfish reasons - we like those trees or because porkchops are amazingly tasty. But we need not fear the judgment of the Evolution Fairy who in her righteous wrath is going to swoop down and invoke genetic drift into extinction.
Well, it has to do with whatever works for survival’s sake. Right now the best survival tactic for Felis Domesticus is sitting on my lap purring.
If the world changes, the best survival tactic might be catching rats and songbirds.
Which is wrong and which is right? Both, and neither. Whatever it takes to survive. Those that survive will reproduce, and the species will go on. And if the species can’t adapt, something else will move in and take its niche.
[ETA: sorry for this hijack - just sharing some related thinking]
I thought this thread was going to be about the % of humans who are alive right now who wouldn’t be without human intervention. It feels like we are extending a “plank of survivability” out past what natural processes would typically support. ISTM we are taking a further step out onto that plank with every generation, and perhaps at a faster pace, e.g., internet natives who rely much more on their online lives than non-natives. When there are disasters and other events it feels like I can see that plank just cut off for the affected population.
I agree. And we’re not stopping evolution. We’re just changing the conditions under which some species (including us) evolve.
When chickens roamed the wild, they lived under one set of conditions and the species gradually adapted to it. When chickens were captured by humans and began living under human ownership, the species lived under a different set of conditions and the species adapted to that. Those chickens which have traits their human owners favor are more successful at breeding, they pass their traits on to more offspring, and the chicken species evolves.
Evolution is still happening in humans. We’re just evolving under a different set of conditions.
During the ice age, elephants which had longer hair were better adapted towards their situation. So elephants became wooly mammoths. But when the ice receded, long hair no longer gave an advantage.
When humans were living out in the wild, having a disease was likely to kill you. So the humans that were susceptible to diseases tending to die more often and have fewer offspring. Humans that were resistant to diseases tended to live longer and have more offspring. We were evolving for disease resistance.
Then we developed medicine that could cure many diseases. Natural resistance was no longer as big a factor in survival. A human could live and have offspring regardless of whether he was susceptible or resistant to diseases. We stop evolving for disease resistance.
But we’re still evolving. Having offspring involves choices. If you’re a human being who is charming and attractive and prosperous, you’re going to be more successful at mating. So our social lives are an evolutionary factor. As a species, we are evolving to be better at the traits that help us get laid.
Yup. Chickens, like a lot of other species, have performed a remarkable feat of evolution. They’ve found a surrogate species that provides them with almost all of their needs for survival and reproduction, including transporting food to the chickens, cleaning up their waste, and even protecting them from diseases. Through this miracle of adaptation, chickens have become wildly successful on an evolutionary scale. The fact that they live lives of terrible suffering is irrelevant to evolution.
Human selective breeding no more “thwarts evolution” than the brakes on my car thwart inertia.
It’s a quibble, but Jared Diamond (and others) have pointed out that epidemic diseases (as opposed to congenital or parasitic diseases) require large, dense populations of potential victims in order to propagate and survive (essentially, enough potential victims that the disease can run through part of the population at a time, while other parts recover and/or give birth to new potential victims). As such, epidemic diseases only existed in herd and flock animals, not small bands of widely-separated humans, until human population density became sufficient (more or less, when we stopped being hunter-gatherers). So, as Diamond says, humans were primarily selected for survival smarts when we were “out in the wild,” and started being primarily selected for *disease resistance * once we began living in settled communities fed by farming (which is also when our close association with herd and flock animals began, exposing us to epidemic diseases which made the jump from animal hosts to humans). Eventually so many epidemic diseases were running through such dense human populations that Diamond argues “civilized” humans are primarily selected for disease resistance over any other trait.
We may now, or soon, be moving toward no longer being selected for disease resistance, but I’d hazard that so far we’re mostly shifting what diseases we are selected for resisting from one pathogen to another, not eliminating the whole trait.
I’m still mad about algae and all that damn oxygen they dumped into the atmosphere. Don’t they know how many species they killed off? Evolution hasn’t been done right for the last billion years.
But that’s all spilled milk. In the meantime, I’m setting up a “free the mitochondria” petition.
The important thing to remember when discussing species extinction is that every action has a ripple effect far beyond the individual species in question. The example above about the wolves in Yellowstone is a perfect example. When you tamper with species, you tamper with entire systems. This also works when considering re-introducing a species which has gone or is going extinct. Unless the reintroduction takes place almost immediately, the system has changed as a aresult of the departure of the species. It may sound like a fabulous idea to have a real-word Jurassic Park, but how would this affect the entire ecosystem around it. Perhaps dinosaurs once were accommodated in Costa Rica millenia ago, but the system has moved on without them and reintroducing them could and likely would cause the extinction or gross adaptation of many other species.
I think any efforts we make along the lines of mechanically altering ecosystems to ‘make up’ for the damage we’ve done should be directed to retaining existing species more so than trying to reintroduce new ones. The best thing we could do is to attempt to recreate some of the habitats we (humans) have destroyed or critically endangered and let nature do the repopulating herself.
This would imply that highly attractive and prosperous people have more offspring than those that are not, which I’m guessing is far from the case.
Yes but…being charming and attractive and prosperous does not really provide any advantage in adapting to the environment, which is the first requirement. The successful mating comes later.
Huh?
“Adapted to the environment” means nothing in evolution except “successful mating.”
It may well be that “survival of the fit” in modern humans favors “too stupid to use birth control.” Evolution has no problem with that. It’s only us silly humans who think there is an inherent advantage to being smart, strong, agile and self-controlled.
But it seems that evolution gives rise to more complex forms of life. A Ginko tree is very primitive-if we “rescue” it from its (deserved) extinction, are we crowding out a more complex type of tree?
I frequently think of this topic
While I believe many “disasters” ie; forest fires, floods etc are a natural happening that we might not like or understand or even try to stop, but its nature.
Why build in natural disaster areas if you are not expecting upheaval?
Whether or not human intervention is making a mockery of the natural overall evolution of things is yet to be determined-look at what happened when aliens came to town…we all got smarter!
Well not all…some of our species did not get out of bed that day to get in line for the extra brain power offered
Back on topic…who’s to say what was or is suppose to happen in our day to day evolution wasn’t meant to be?
They’re out there watching us, their experiment on us is ongoing and if they don’t like what is happening I guess they’ll have to return to destroy or improve Earth’s inhabitants
(I’m here to entertain, not to make sense! Please laugh if duly inclined)
(I never said I was one of those that got out of bed to get in line…) 
“good” and “bad” are human, not natural, concepts. Point in fact, “natural” and “unnatural” are also human concepts. So far as nature is concerned, if one of the species on the planet evolves into something that has the ability to formulate and mass produce sodium erythorbate, manipulate the evolution of other species, and eradicate species at will, that’s just as good and natural as anything else.
So basically, the question is meaningless.
Evolution gives rise to all sorts of life. Every bacterium in existence today has experienced just as much evolution as you or I. You could argue they’ve actually had far, far more, given the respective generation time. There’s nothing special about “complex”. Complexity is just one more of a zillion different strategies that result in survival.
Everything we do - rescuing a species, not rescuing a species, cutting down a tree, having a burger for lunch - impacts the environment in some way, and therefore affects evolution in some small manner. But evolution has been affected and driven by interactions between life forms since approximately day two of the history of life on Earth, so there’s not much point in worrying about it.
My point is that there IS NO “CORRECT” evolutionary path that Earth “SHOULD” be following, and so it is nonsense to claim that we’re somehow interfering or thwarting or stymieing that path. Are we crowding out complex life forms when we save simple forms? Perhaps, perhaps not. But so what? As far as evolution is concerned, ALL that matters is survival and reproduction. That’s it.
Yes, we change the environment constantly. And yes, I think we have a responsibility to try to make those changes more intelligently and responsibly that we’re doing right now. But the motivation for doing so is pure self-interest. We want to make a planet that’s nice and lovely and friendly for US, and that often includes things like biodiversity and not driving all of our ecosystems to destruction. It has nothing to do with preserving a mythical Golden Era of Evolution, where nasty humans couldn’t interfere, because that’s pure fantasy.