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Giant ape went extinct 100,000 years ago, due to its inability to adapt
- bcook 11y agoAm I wrong in thinking that a majority of extinct species are gone for exactly the same reason (insufficient adaptability)?
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoOr extinction events
- nwatson 11y agoE.g. competition with people.
- goldenkey 11y agoSame thing happened between populations. Competition of hunter gatherers with farmers. People suck :-/
- evincarofautumn 11y agoWell, 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.
- danieltillett 11y agoWell the choice was let your children die of starvation or farm more land. I know which one I would have taken.
- evincarofautumn 11y agoYeah, 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.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoThat's nonsense. Feeding people doesn't make them have children. IT keeps them from dying of starvation.
- goldenkey 11y agoIncreasing food production causes increases in population. It causes more people to starve because it is ultimately unsustainable.
- bcook 11y agoInsufficient adaptability to extinction events. ;) But seriously, I must be missing something. The phrase seems overly generic.
- sravfeyn 11y agoI 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'
- pizza 11y agoThey 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?
- wonderlust 11y agoIf its the Ancestor of orangutan, then how is it extinct?
- opop1 11y agocoming soon to a cinema near you thanks to Disney.
- dredmorbius 11y agoInteresting 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 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.).
- pizza 11y agoVery 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.0129 http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.0129 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_theory_of_ecology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_theory_of_ecology
- dredmorbius 11y agoLikewise, 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.
- Someone 11y agoCopy-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.
- sandworm101 11y agoHas any species ever died out for anything other than "inability to adapt"? If they were able to adapt, wouldn't they still be here?
- InclinedPlane 11y agoIn a way, yes, mass extinctions.
- danieltillett 11y agoEven this is a failure to adapt.
- hussong 11y agoAre there species that can adapt in time to survive asteroid impact, volcanic eruptions or other catastrophic events?
- martiuk 11y agoHumans 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.
- tw04 11y agoYou'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.
- danieltillett 11y agoYes most species, but they are rather small. If you want to see tough then have a look at what Bacteria and Archea can survive.
- cm2187 11y agoOne can use this headline as is for so many large companies.
- m0llusk 11y agoMost 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.