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Comment by ryukafalz | Hacker News Reader

Probably not quickly enough. Ecosystems can adapt if given enough time, but the recent rise in ocean temperatures has happened very quickly by evolutionary standards.

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

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>Probably not quickly enough. Ecosystems can adapt if given enough time, but the recent rise in ocean temperatures has happened very quickly by evolutionary standards.

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.

Yes, and in fact the extinction event associated with this high-velocity change is termed the "Holocene Extinction" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

I kinda agree with the GP that this seems weird. Yes, ocean temps are rising very quickly, but this experiment only took 5 years, and was presumably a only a tiny fraction of how many wild coral there are. Ocean warming has taken place over several decades, and with millions of times as large of a natural population. It just seems weird that, if this kinda of adaptation is possible (and they showed it is), it wouldn't be happening in the wild. And that does seem to be true, it just seems weird.

I wonder if the fact that mature corals are stationary makes it harder for them to adapt. If the surviving corals are too far apart, it could be that they're unable to reproduce sexually. Coral larvae seem to be mobile until they find a structure to settle on, but if the larvae never have a chance to form...

(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.)

What makes you think it isn't happening in the wild? Evolution does not happen on the timescales of human lifetimes.

Richard Lenski would disagree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...

Can somebody explain to me why this is apparently being downvoted ? Is Richard Lenski very far from the consensus of his field ? Scientific dishonesty ?

I imagine it's because 73k generations of bacteria takes a lot less time than 73k generations of coral or other larger organisms.

It's important that people understand that the mechanism of evolution has been conclusively demonstrated in a laboratory within a single researcher's lifespan.

Which offers no relief to the predicament of coral, which was the original context of this convo.

Yes, but. E. coli is E. coli and coral is coral. It may not be the case that coral can, on its own, evolve in the ways necessary to save itself from heated oceans in the time that E. Coli could.

It is happening in the world. It just looks more like Asian carp and zebra mussels and kudzu than a nice diverse ecosystem.

Something will live on coral reefs in a thousand years. We’ll have still lost something beautiful.

There are many coral reef systems doing quite well.

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.

In nature, you don't necessarily have the needed genetic diversity or controlled conditions, in the right combinations, the way you can obtain them in the lab. And "several decades" is probably not enough time in evolutionary terms to adjust, if I had to guess.

I think the prevailing theory of evolution is punctuated equilibrium(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium)

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 think the notion of its status as a "prevailing theory" is overstated, and is an idea that exists more in the minds of lay audiences than in the profession (see criticism section).

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.

Nature doesn't have the right conditions to deal with the changes in nature?

Why the disbelief? You are literally describing the process of species extinction due to failure to adapt. This should not be a new concept.

If not nature.... where do you get diversity from?

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.

That depends on the scale of the changes. Life can make a planet habitable, but our sun will eventually die, and the systems that ecosystems raised to control the changes in its favor will be unable to fix that. Only we could do something about it.

It's the cosmic scale equivalent to Mike Tyson's saying about everyone has a plan. Life finds a way, until your sun explodes.

Decades isn't even a blink of the eye in evolutionary timescales. Coral don't just end up breeding more temperature resilient offspring, a bunch has to die first. The ones that don't die may carry on, but that might be 2% of the population. So sure, they might evolve and carry on but 98% might die at the same time.

But, most historical changes are quite dramatic and quick. And evolution is meant to happen quickly too, no?

Thanks for sharing

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