Giant ape went extinct 100,000 years ago, due to its inability to adapt | Hacker News Reader

Giant ape went extinct 100,000 years ago, due to its inability to adapt

sciencedaily.com

30 pointsdiodorus27 comments

I find evolution terminology funny.

Aren't the terms 'something going extinct' and 'inability to adapt' essentially same. They are symmetrically causal to one another. It has inability to adapt, hence it went extinct; it went extinct hence we say it didn't have the ability to adapt. What new unit of knowledge do we gain by saying something like the OP's title?

In short, the 'ability to adopt' is itself measured in terms of whether 'something is extinct or not'

They mention that the ape was mainly restricted to forests - wouldn't a metabolically-imposed habitat restriction limit the species' exposure to ex situ adaptations?

Which is to say, we gain insight into how metabolism, specialization and extinction play together. Although, perhaps this is what you meant by correlating extinction and inability to adapt?

Copy-pasted summary, with emphasis added:

"The demise of the giant ape Gigantopithecus has been the focus of recent study, where researchers have reached the conclusion that the presumably largest apes in geological history died due to their insufficient adaptability. Analyses of fossil tooth enamel show that the primates were restricted to forested habitats."

So, the forest turned into savannah faster than they could adapt. Similar things happened and happens to zillions of species.

Interesting adjunct of the Red Queen hypothesis: species survival probabilities are largely constant over time, or conversely, species don't get better at surviving simply by surviving longer.

"Leigh Van Valen proposed the hypothesis to explain the "Law of Extinction",[1] showing that in many populations the probability of extinction does not depend on the lifetime of this population, instead being constant over millions of years for a given population."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_queen_hypothesis

This strikes me as fascinating, and makes me wonder about where similar rules do or don't apply (e.g., business, organisational, or national longevity, hardware failure rates, etc.).

Very interesting. I'm hardly a bio/ecologist but I think that I have some links you may find pertinent:

* The Lindy effect [0] is a theory of the life expectancy of non-perishable things that posits for a certain class of nonperishables, like a technology or an idea, every additional day may imply a longer (remaining) life expectancy:[1] the mortality rate decreases with time. This contrasts with living creatures and mechanical things, which instead follow a bathtub curve, where every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy (though longer overall life expectancy, due to surviving this far): after childhood, the mortality rate increases with time.

* Correlations, Risk and Crisis: From Physiology to Finance [1] - "in crisis, typically, even before obvious symptoms of crisis appear, correlation increases, and, at the same time, variance (and volatility) increases too."

* Liebig's Law [2] - growth is constrained by the minimum resource, not the total of resources

* Metabolic theory of ecology [3] - the metabolic rate of an organism governs observed ecological patterns

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.0129

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_theory_of_ecology

Likewise, interesting. I'm quite familiar with Liebig's Law, and the Metabolic Theory sounds an awful lot like Geoffrey West's work on scale effects (of pretty much everything: mammals, forests, cities, economies). Lindy Effect and Risk/Crisis correlations I need to look at.

Appreciate the references.

Has any species ever died out for anything other than "inability to adapt"? If they were able to adapt, wouldn't they still be here?

In a way, yes, mass extinctions.

Even this is a failure to adapt.

Are there species that can adapt in time to survive asteroid impact, volcanic eruptions or other catastrophic events?

Humans could, if we (as a species) could all work towards survival, the most powerful feature we have evolved is the intelligence to adapt rapidly within lifetimes rather than over millennia.

I'd like to think most countries would band together to be able to survive a sudden event as all of their survival is dependant on it.

I'd say most species couldn't adapt before a sudden event (how would they know?) but can adapt to the after effects of such event.

You're assuming they'd stop looking out for #1 and stop fighting over whatever limited resources were left. I'd like to believe it would happen, but history doesn't really reflect that.

Yes most species, but they are rather small. If you want to see tough then have a look at what Bacteria and Archea can survive.

Am I wrong in thinking that a majority of extinct species are gone for exactly the same reason (insufficient adaptability)?

Or extinction events

E.g. competition with people.

Same thing happened between populations. Competition of hunter gatherers with farmers. People suck :-/

Well, totalitarian farmers. Humans cultivated crops for a long time here and there before we got the bright idea to put the entire world under the plough.

Well the choice was let your children die of starvation or farm more land. I know which one I would have taken.

Yeah, but unfortunately we didn’t account for the fundamental rule of ecology: more food, more population.

The world population grows every year because we produce more food every year. Food is what the new people are made of. Somewhat counterintuitively, this is perfectly compatible with the continued existence of starving people.

That's nonsense. Feeding people doesn't make them have children. IT keeps them from dying of starvation.

Increasing food production causes increases in population. It causes more people to starve because it is ultimately unsustainable.

Insufficient adaptability to extinction events. ;)

But seriously, I must be missing something. The phrase seems overly generic.

One can use this headline as is for so many large companies.

coming soon to a cinema near you thanks to Disney.

If its the Ancestor of orangutan, then how is it extinct?

Most primates are adapted to very specific environments and diets and because of that are quite vulnerable to change. There are only two species of primates that are known to thrive when their environments are completely changed, the so called "weed apes". These are humans and rhesus which both form social structures that enable adaptation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com