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What was surprising is that the mice didn’t end up evolving some traits and instincts optimized for the new conditions. I would’ve thought they would learn new
by tonmoy 4y ago
What was surprising is that the mice didn’t end up evolving some traits and instincts optimized for the new conditions. I would’ve thought they would learn new behavior after a few generations to thrive in the new environment. This makes me think that a post scarcity environment may not be enough to ensure the survival of a species
- kibwen 4y agoThis is the fallacy of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger". Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, adversity reduces strength rather than increasing it, especially if it happens too frequently and too severely. Evolution/adaptation works over long periods of gradual change, which is why the effort needed to survive, say, a global climate apocalypse varies widely based on whether the same amount of warming happens over 10 years, or 100 years, or 1000 years.
- rossdavidh 4y agoNot sure, but it occurs to me that some lab animals have reduced genetic diversity compared to wild types of the same species. Sometimes this is by design, to reduce variation, sometimes just because the way the lab animals are bred happens to make a few of them the ancestors of the general population (especially if you're buying all your lab mice from the same place). So, they might have had a better chance of evolving behavior more optimized to the situation, if they had more genetic diversity to work with. Just an hypothesis.