Perhaps a dumb question, but wouldn't we expect the rise in ocean temperatures to be cause nature to be doing this selective breeding right now?
There was a good episode of PBS Weathered on this recently if you want an idea of how quickly this has happened: https://youtu.be/YEH9nX5sudk?si=iCivRPwK8AI4sjKU
Exactly, which I think is always the key point at issue that needs to be raised any time someone says "well earth has been this hot before." Never at this velocity, at least not without extinction events.
Which holds that rather than a slow gradual change, species under go a rapid change and then are stable after that change.
If that hold true, then the driver would be that you have low impact changes going on all the time that do not take hold but once a beneficial change is introduced it spreads rapidly.
I agree with the criticisms that Gould, unfortunately, spent much of his career attempting to position himself as an intellectual revolutionary, overstating the primacy of PE and was in many important respects an intellectual fraud. Gifted as he was as a critic of intelligent design, I think he set back our understanding of evolution almost as much as he helped.
It seems such hybris to believe that mere humans have a better handle on what 'nature' needs, than, er, nature.
The embedded idea is both guilt-ridden and egotistic. Amazing destructive humans are harming 'nature' (antropomorphised) but other, good humans are here to redress the balance by doing this or that. At which point, whatever is there is no longer 'nature' but some sort of themed garden.
(Corals can also reproduce asexually via fragmentation, but that won't help with genetic diversity in the wild I'd imagine. Researchers seem to take advantage of this for selective breeding though.)
Something will live on coral reefs in a thousand years. We’ll have still lost something beautiful.
The great barrier reef living system is only about 6k-8k years old. Much of that was land not too long ago.
The sea level rose there about 20k years ago (coinciding with the Last Glacial Maximum) and slowed to a near halt 6k years ago allowing coral to grow there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...
"Survival of the fittest" means "whatever doesn't die, wins."
First you need things capable of not dying in x circumstances. After adversity kills everything else, you have the "winners."
This will incline species to develop tolerance over time, usually several generations. Human caused climate change is happening on a timescale that isn't very supportive of that process.
RIGHT NOW there are coral that are already heat resistant. When the ocean temperature rises, the corals that can’t tolerate it will die off and the ones that can tolerate will survive. Then because of less resources being used by those that died, the coral with heat tolerance will thrive. This is how evolution works.
Dragonflies used to have like two foot or four foot wings spans. Now their relatively small and presumably play a very different role in the ecosystem.
Mother Nature isn't some Christian God that loves you and looks out for you. The fact that nature isn't looking out for our welfare is likely why things like Christianity are popular: Because actual reality scares the hell out of people and they need some kind of emotional opiate so they can go "La la la not listening!" and get through the damn day.
Evolution does tend to fill open niches, but not all that instantly.
Coral systems live, spread, and die. That's what they do.
These processes happen over thousands of years.
but to play that game, you also learn about adaptation in high school
The fundamental confusion here is the notion that, absent one's own personal expert credentials, we have no access to any expertise or authority of any kind that can be brought to bear on this question (funny that that requirement applies only one way).
The vital role of coral in supporting marine ecosystems is a general and well understood phenomenon. So much so that our ordinary access to expertise through science communication in the media, our summary of this understanding as reflected in high school education, and, if needed, in major reports from NGOs is sufficient to address the question and indeed is central to the purpose of those respective institutions. Those are access to pertinent expertise for this kind of question.
I promise you, that this consensus has not overlooked the possibility of everything being made right by adaptations later on as you seem to be implying, and I promise that no version of explanations of evolutionary adaptation has ever taught that adaptation guarantees, as a cosmic law, compensation for the destruction of ecosystems. The same resources noted above are sufficient to dismiss this as an ordinary biology 101 confusion.
I think you need to be more careful about what your unqualified promises are.
As for the effect of coral bleaching on fish, you can google it and I've definitely read about it before, seen ecologists talk about it, etc. The expectation is that it will reduce the number of fish significantly.
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/central-pacific-coral-reef-sho...
I think that temptation to stand in awe before a cosmic mystery is a common one and, in many cases a laudable one. In this case, that temptation is getting in the way of some very-knowable facts which are spelling out doom. "Not playing god" in this context seems to amount to standing by as an extinction event unfolds, and I don't think the desire to get lost in existential ditherings is an acceptable reason to stand by and let that happen.
That is still unknown and constantly shifting in predictions.
Yes we should minimize our effects on the environment as much as possible, and we are doing a lot better in that goal, but we still need to live.
I wouldn't say living our lives is playing God.
No, it's not an unknown. Please stop with this cowardly delusion. Human activity is changing the Earth's climate at unbelievable rates compared to the historical norm. XKCD for scale: https://xkcd.com/1732/
What is "fast enough" is in the eye of the beholder, life doesn't really care about boom and bust cycles or extinctions, but people really don't like change so we can do it faster and do a bit of reef gardening.