Researchers study the genetics and behavior of elephants born without tusks | Hacker News Reader

Researchers study the genetics and behavior of elephants born without tusks

nationalgeographic.com

44 pointsnew_guy32 comments

I saw an elephant pull its tusk out at the Zoo once. It was just before they moved them to another place. Everyone was asking and the staff didnt even turn around. It felt like they were covering something up, I thought this might be about it. Instead it was about elephants being born without tusks, which is interesting, but not the same thing.

Well, in my brief research, it seems that it is similar to a tooth, so it would just be the equivalent of a human pulling out a tooth?

How did it pull it out, lacking hands and dexterity?

They got a big ol limb on their nose called their trunk that I assume they use

Evolving?

Please let's not get snagged by a word. We've changed the title to something less triggery.

There’s nothing wrong with the word. It’s not evolution by natural selection, but it’s a change in allele frequency / phenotype at population scale. It’s evolution.

Why in the hell is HN moderating titles based on being “triggery”? National Geographic can publish it but HN can’t?

I don't have any objections to the word, but have learned from experience that when the dreaded title fever strikes, it consumes everything. Therefore don't fight it.

triggery of shitty discussions. Pointless empty squabbling and the like.

Do we really have young earth creationists here, or is it squabbling by pedants instead?

There's nothing wrong with this usage of the word? (I've got a degree in biochemistry is that helps at all??)

What kind of crappy conversations tend to happen from the usage of that word?

It's weird that the title was changed so drastically:

> Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks

> Researchers study the genetics and behavior of elephants born without tusks

for the sake of a word. Do we have many young-earth creationists on HN?

Not that it’s worth anything much but I was visiting my mom who to today was telling about how elephants are evolving to not have tusks - as if it was a one to two generation choice they made.

Exactly what that word implies to some.

Evolution doesn't happen by choice. It's just survival of the fittest. Where "fitness" here is to not get shot by people. If that is achieved by having smaller or no tusks, then so be it.

Is selective breeding because of external factors the same thing as “survival of the fittest”?

Yes, they are "fitter" if they don't have tusks. What if there was some bacteria which infected the tusks which lead to death somehow... Would that not count as evolution?

Are they just not a different breed?

The language of journalism handles this topic poorly.

No language issue here.

> Elephants with a rare “tuskless” genetic trait had a better chance of surviving Mozambique’s long civil war, financed in part by poached ivory. About a third of surviving elephants’ daughters have no tusks.

That's as squarely central an example of "evolving" as it gets.

Selective breeding?

If I eat all the green peas and plant the yellow peas, it won't be a surprise that the next generation is all yellow, yet nobody would say the peas have evolved a new color. Same process though.

I'm not saying it can't be called evolving, but probably some people assume a more "natural" selection process.

This is quite natural, imo. Its well past the vague border of artificial vs natural. Its quite literally nature’s reaction to human presence, with no intentionality from humans, and directly against their wishes (obviously, they want more ivory, not less).

If this were a movie about nature v technology, this would clearly be on nature’s side. It’s not even close to resembling the heavy handed nature of selective breeding for eg dogs.

Im not sure how evolution would not be appropriate here, unless you considered that anything that touches humans is unnatural, and with transitive property, any third party touching the things humans touched is also made unnatural. If you accept this event as not being evolution, does anything still count as evolution since the 1800s?

I would draw the line at direct intervention. Those moths that evolved darker colors in response to soot in the industrial revolution were responding to a change in environment, not some Victorian era Pokémon craze that hunted down all the white moths.

Yes it is selective breeding done by nature. So you probably don't see stupid people with rifles as part of nature? On a historic scale what makes them different than just some other random predator?

Yes, that process is called evolution. As you note, there isn't a difference in any sense.

Well, yes there is a difference, evolution works by natural selection since nature is incredibly smart and the only changes that get actualized are those that are beneficial for survival and reproduction and those that do not hinder it.

Artificially controlled selective breeding doesn't mean evolution, take for example bulldogs which have been overbred by humans that prioritized looks, so a modern bulldog's health is frail compared to its ancestors, hardly what one would call evolution.

But on the elephants case, yes it is evolution as human interference seems to be mostly as a "regular" predator.

It depends on what you consider environment. We are part of the environment for those animals, and they have evolved to increase survival and reproduction in this environment that contains us.

The bulldog health might be frail, but as a species it thrives in this environment containing us, as you can find them all around the world. The wellbeing of the individual is not an objective of evolution, just increasing survival and reproduction in a particular environment.

Clearly I'm at fault here, my comment was pure garbage, I'm sorry(I'm not being sarcastic).

But I think there's a valid point there amid the nonsense, I see a qualitative difference between natural selection such as the elephants losing their tusks and selective breeding such as the bulldog example.

Mainly due to the fact that on the first case elephants are still choosing their partners and on the latter we're forcing dogs to mate which I see as a conscious interference in the process of natural selection.

Yes, bulldogs still exist, but were we to go extinct and they'd probably go with us as our selective breeding made them dependent on our technology which I think is true for some of the domesticated animals at least.

I say nature, as in natural selection, is incredibly smart because it seems to be a system to act based on pure, cold, although short sighted logic. The advantage our intelligence have over nature's, in my perspective, is long term planning, but given a bigger context there's no objective base to claim that's actually smarter as we might be running towards our own extinction, and I believe life will survive us.

> nature is incredibly smart

No, nature is not smart. If some feature helps you survive - even if it would be 'judged' bad in some other context - it is being selected for. That's evolution

> a modern bulldog's health is frail compared to its ancestors, hardly what one would call evolution.

And yet here it is, survived. The difference between selective breeding and evolution is just nuance and speed really, from the fact that it has some intelligent being with 'purpose' selecting deliberately.

> Well, yes there is a difference, evolution works by natural selection since nature is incredibly smart

No, this is magical thinking. Evolution works by differentials in the rate of effective reproduction.

> the only changes that get actualized are those that are beneficial for survival and reproduction and those that do not hinder it.

This isn't correct.

> Artificially controlled selective breeding doesn't mean evolution

Selective breeding is still evolution, it's just directed evolution. It's all evolution.

I'm talking about the use of language, not questioning the factual basis of the article.

I wonder if we should call it a breeding program though, as that's the usual word for evolution due to human slaughter.

(Note that I made a top level comment and dang rolled it into this thread; I forget that when I initially replied here)

To me "breeding" means intentionally selecting for desired traits. That's not what's happening here. In a sense, it's the opposite--presumably, elephants without tusks is exactly what poachers don't want.

Yeah, I was being flip there, not really offering a serious thought.

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