Diego, A Centenarian Giant Tortoise Whose Sex Drive Saved His Species | Hacker News Reader

Diego, A Centenarian Giant Tortoise Whose Sex Drive Saved His Species

nytimes.com

94 pointsThevet19 comments

Any chance his sex drive is genetic? We might end up with islands filled with horny tortoises.

If that were to become a problem, we only need to get Charles Darwin's cookbook.

I heard that the total population of humans was once reduced to a few hundred. Was that just a myth, or was there a time that humans were in danger of extinction?

http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/ho...

It says the lowest estimate was 40.

I wonder how they came up with that number. If it's via genetic testing on current humans, they wouldn't be able to tell whether it was actually just 40, or whether there might have been some other human populations at the time, that just didn't happen to leave any descendants. (But only died out much later.)

That's pretty much the same thing because it means that that population was cut off our current gene pool so they have no effect on our survival or possible extinction.

Not necessarily.

Compare the following situations:

- Only one group of 40 breeding pairs left. Very risky.

- A bunch of pools of left, one of them consisting of 40 breeding pairs only. Over time the small pool recovers to a few thousand people, and at that time the other pools have some accidents and die out.

The second situation was never as risky as the first. But we wouldn't be able to tell them apart from current genetics.

>The second situation was never as risky as the first.

But if both situations have the same outcome -- everyone not descended from the 40-pair group is dead -- does it make sense after the fact to distinguish them by "riskiness"? It seems to be a distinction without a difference, as the saying goes.

Why? If I buy hundred lottery tickets, I am at a hundred times greater 'risk' to win the lottery than if I buy only one ticket.

In either case, the most likely outcome in the end is still that I don't win the lottery. But the chances were different.

No, we already know the outcome of those groups that may or may not have existed and that is that they had no outcome on the current gene pool meaning that in essence they did not exist as far as survival goes.

In your analogy it's like buying 40 lottery tickets knowing that 39 of them will not win for sure vs buying just 1 ticket.

Sure, but you only know that after the fact. Basically, talking about `risk' after the fact is a murky business. (And can invite a lot of philosophical debate about frequentist vs Bayesian interpretations of probability. And determinism.)

What if the surviving pool killed the other pools? In the absence of that one surviving pool, there would have been another. Or maybe even more?

>What if the surviving pool killed the other pools?

Well, what if they did?

I think that I have been incorrectly assuming that this subthread was about whether, in 2017, we could tell which of two things had happened -- either "there was a time when there were only 40 pairs of humans on all the earth", or "everyone today is descended from a 40-pair group that may have coexisted with others but for some reason those others died out."

If in fact we're instead talking about whether we can make any distinctions whatever between the two situations, even though we know now that whichever actually occurred, humanity didn't go extinct, then I retract my objections.

Oh, I was musing whether we can tell today---both in practice or in theory.

Neanderthals would have still been around at that time. I wonder how they were affected.

The article's headline is what every man dreams his epitaph would read.

Not really. I like sex, but I really do not care about reproducing, that much. And sex is really not that important to me. My dream is to create something awesome that I can show off to the whole world. I have a feeling that most males are like me, they simply settle for something easier like sex.

It's pretty challenging to settle on being a centenarian giant tortoise tho

Sex drive and libido is a function of hormones in your body, and nitrogen retention. My guess is that your Estradiol is fairly high and your testosterone levels are below average resulting in a diminished sex drive.

There is nothing wrong with having lots of sex and liking sex, it's a natural state our body desires and you can still get the work you want accomplished and have lots of sex.

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