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Are elephants evolving without tusks? + Hollywood's implausible alien ecosystems

#1
C C Offline
Is Poaching Causing Elephants to Evolve Without Tusks?
http://m.nautil.us/blog/is-poaching-caus...hout-tusks

EXCERPT: [...] Scientists have noticed that some elephant populations with a history of poaching show higher than expected rates of small or missing tusks, even in calves born after poaching ends. Does that mean elephants are evolving smaller or missing tusks in response to poaching? “I don’t think it’s a great stretch of the imagination to think that might be true,” says David Coltman, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Alberta. He studies how trophy hunting affects bighorn sheep populations. “What’s difficult is identifying compelling evidence.”...



We’re Still Waiting for Hollywood to Depict a Plausible Alien Ecosystem
http://m.nautil.us/blog/were-still-waiti...-ecosystem

EXCERPT: You might expect scientists to heap scorn on Hollywood’s depiction of aliens, but they’re generally forgiving. Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at the Technical University of Berlin, remarks that most science-fiction aliens are either riffs off the weird life we see in Earth’s deep ocean, such as the squid-like creatures of Arrival, or versions of now-extinct animals from earlier in our planet’s history, such as the adult trilobite in Prometheus. And that’s not a bad strategy.

“If you want to study a lot of different body shapes or forms, look at the Cambrian Explosion,” he says. “If you look at a museum exhibit of life from 500 million years ago, you see trilobites and other unique types of life. There’s a lot of variety.”

What irritates him and others isn’t what movie aliens look like, but the magical things they do. Leave aside their physics-defying technology and consider just their most basic attributes, such as metabolism. “Prometheus was especially terrible this way,” says Caleb Scharf, the director of astrobiology at Columbia University. “[That movie had] the idea that a little thing can grow into an enormous thing when you’re not looking, even though there’s nothing to eat. They left this thing alone, and the next thing you know it’s this enormous tentacled thing.”

Jim Cleaves, a biochemist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, has the same complaint about the movie Alien. “The alien always bothered me,” he says. “Somehow it manages to turn a few pounds of biomass into several hundred pounds of really hyperactive alien really quickly, without actually eating anything.”

For scientists, it’s precisely the mundane concerns that are how we will identify life. No matter what form it takes, life in the universe needs a metabolism. It has to take in energy in order to grow and maintain its daily needs. Another essential quality is that living things do not exist in isolation; they evolve in response to their environment. This context, too, tends to be overlooked. Screenwriters commonly depict aliens without an ecology that would support their existence.

“The one that always bugged me was Starship Troopers,” Cleaves says. “The giant colonies of ‘bugs’ on their planet seems the equivalent of having herds of buffalo, and nothing else, running across the Sahara Desert. What do they eat? Where is the water?”...
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#2
Syne Offline
(Dec 6, 2016 12:47 AM)C C Wrote: “What’s difficult is identifying compelling evidence.”...

I have more trouble with the lack of a compelling theory of how this sort of thing could effect evolution than I do whether the correlation implies causation.
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