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Without knowing anything about the general or scientific use of those terms, just by looking at the words, I think it is fine the way the title is worded. What

Without knowing anything about the general or scientific use of those terms, just by looking at the words, I think it is fine the way the title is worded. What is the actor here that responds? It is the process of evolution, in the same way you could say the climate reacts to a change in solar activity. So the process of evolution reacts to a change in the ecological system - more poachers than before - by changing the elephants to no longer having tusks. And the mechanism that achieves this change is that the elephants with the genetic variation making them tusk-less have a higher chance of passing on the genes because they are less likely to be killed by poachers.

sph 4y ago
The issue OP has is that the article conflates cause with effect. It's not poachers that cause elephants to evolve not to have tusks. It's that some elephant got a rare mutation, and those mutated elephants aren't as targeted by poachers, thus are able to survive more easily. Plenty of popsci journos write as if nature is intelligent and driven by some purpose.
- danbruc 4y ago
  It's not poachers that cause elephants to evolve not to have tusks. Cause and effect are very complex concepts, probably not even well understood ones, but I would rather avoid descending into the philosophy of cause and effect, so I will just pick a potentially naive idea of cause and effect. Assume a counterfactual world without poachers, would the elephants evolve to be tusk-less? No, so the poachers cause elephants to become tusk-less. It's that some elephant got a rare mutation, and those mutated elephants aren't as targeted by poachers, thus are able to survive more easily. That is the mechanism at play under the hood, but it does not mean that the abstraction of poachers causing tusk-less elephants or even more abstractly that evolution causes tusk-less elephants under those circumstances are not also valid descriptions. Plenty of popsci journos write as if nature is intelligent and driven by some purpose. Which - to a certain extend - is fine. Countries go to war, wars cause destruction, companies go bankrupt, rivers flow to the ocean, holidays make people happy, programs produce outputs, moving the mouse with the left button down selects text, ... none of this is really true in a certain sense. But that is fine, all our words are abstractions and we understand what they really mean, they do not have to be understood literally and the meaning can be context-dependent.
  - bigDinosaur 4y ago
    It's amusing how downright hard it is to avoid teleological explanations of evolution. In this case it is important to note that this mutation presumably existed before poachers so they cannot be the cause of the actual genetics of tuskless elephants - but they are the cause of why the ratio is now changing. So I'd say your counterfactual is wrong: there would be a few tuskless elephants but having no evolutionary advantage they would not become the dominant phenotype. If a species lacks the preexisting genetic diversity here, it dies.
    - danbruc 4y ago
      That is the way I wanted my sentence to be understood, »evolve« in »[...] would the elephants evolve to be tusk-less?« is intended to mean nothing more than become dominant due to evolution and I do not see how that word in that context could be understood as anything else.
      - bigDinosaur 4y ago
        Fair enough. I don't actually think you're wrong, to be clear, I think it's just easy to mix together related but distinct concepts here and the teleological angle makes that surprisingly easy to do (but it's almost impossible to actually avoid).
        danbruc 4y ago
        Isn't teleology a red herring here? We may use language that sound teleologically - nature wants this or that - but that does not imply that we actually have any teleologically world view behind that. If someone says that the universe wants to minimize the action, then I don't think they ascribe any desires to the universe [1], they just want to say that physical systems behave in a way that minimizes the action which we figured out by inspection and experiment. [1] At least by default, they can of course clarify that they actually think the universe has desires.
    - phkahler 4y ago
- rrgok 4y ago
  Dumb question: I'm always amused by this phrase "...as if nature is intelligent and driven by some purpose..". Are you not, as human being, part of nature? How is possible from an unintelligent being emerge something intelligent? Either the seed was already there or otherwise I don't know how it would be possible. Would you consider human beings not intelligent and not driven by purpose?
  - sph 4y ago
    I rephrase: evolution of life as we know it (that's what I meant by nature) is not intelligent nor driven by any purpose, not even survival. It's randomly throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Maybe the resulting organism lives longer, maybe not. We only see the result of it. The observation that evolution helps find a better local maximum is literally survivorship bias.
    - deafpolygon 4y ago
      Evolution of life is different from mutation. We can have mutation anytime, but evolution of life is more or less the basis of 'natural selection' in which mutations that favor survival is selected.
    - robocat 4y ago
      Evolution is a severely misunderstood and misused word. We say a business evolved, to mean changed. We say we evolve an idea, with the implication of intelligent action. We say someone can win the Darwin Award even if they are older and already reproduced: to properly win the Darwin Award, one would need to die before reproducing, or kill their genetic offspring as well as themselves (to properly win the Darwin Award, one would need to kill all the genetic branch of their family tree). Biological evolution is due to reproductive selection. Evolution is primarily related to reproduction: survival only matters if it affects reproduction (after all, nothing survives in the long term). Evolution is not really defined as random change: evolution occurs due to selection pressures that amplify the genetic population of the most successful reproducers. Genetic mutation and recombination is somewhat random, but not purely random (certain mutations are more or less likely, and the pool of successful recombinations is very biased). It is a frustrating topic, because in biology evolution has a very particular meaning, yet biological evolution is usually misunderstood. The misunderstanding is due to the popular incorrect metaphors and alternative meanings for the word. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution Disclaimer: I am not a biologist. I’m trying to be as clear as I can, while making sweeping simplifications (e.g. ignoring kin selection etcetera!) I welcome any mistakes being corrected by lurking biologists.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  Isn't that the very mechanism under which evolution operates? Survival of the 'fittest' doesn't mean strongest/fastest. Clearly, due to poaching activities, tuskless elephants are being 'selected' for survival.
  - hoseja 4y ago
    Survival of the fittest is only an approximation, the true state is a tautology though: survival of those who survive.
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  If we're going to play semantics here, then yes, maybe the first elephant to be born tuskless is the cause but every subsequent tuskless elephant is an effect elephant, so, the statement is still true, if only for an overwhelming majority subset of the elephants.
- gumby 4y ago
  > Plenty of popsci journos write as if nature is intelligent and driven by some purpose. You might want to read “The intentional stance” by the famous philosopher Daniel Dennett. This is a pretty useful analytic approach for many problems (e.g. we commonly say things like “the thermostat tries to keep the temperature within three degrees of its set point”). I agree it is distressing that many people interpret such metaphors literally.
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  > Plenty of popsci journos write as if nature is intelligent and driven by some purpose. This has become the midwit anthem, as pg put it, whenever we use causal language to describe evolutionary pressure.
- Konohamaru 4y ago
  If the poaching activity is acting as an amplifier for that rare mutation's frequency, then yes, the poachers are in fact causing those elephants to evolve not to have tusks.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  It's not that it conflates per se, it's that it gets the text book defintion of evolution completely wrong. Full stop. You're correct. This happens often, too often.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
> change in the ecological system - more poachers than before - by changing the elephants to no longer having tusks Change in the body - more torn hymen than before - by changing the humans to no longer having hymen. Right?
- Chris2048 4y ago
  Not sure why you think this example is better - a torn hymen isn't as fatal to humans as a poacher is to elephants.
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    Because if 'evolution reacts' (q) then it would react by removing hymen. Also because women without torn hymen don't pass genes. Did evolution reacted by removing tusks? PS if you start to tell me how a hymen could be untorn even in the case of a complete vaginal intercourse I would slap you over TCP/IP.
    - Chris2048 4y ago
      Why would it? Women without torn hymen don't pass genes because they didn't have sex, not because they possessed a hymen. As soon as they have sex, the hymen tears - so it poses no barrier to passing on genes.
spfzero 4y ago
I don't know if I would call this an evolutionary response. It's more like the remnant effect of the one-time bottleneck the article mentions. The proportion of females with the gene for tusks was almost wiped out, while the number of females without that gene stayed the same. There have only been a few generations gone by since then, but you would imagine the same factors that made the gene for tusks more successful in the first place, would start to again predominate, but it will probably take many generations for it to come back to where it was. That part, the recovery, could be called an evolutionary response.

sph 4y ago

The issue OP has is that the article conflates cause with effect. It's not poachers that cause elephants to evolve not to have tusks. It's that some elephant got a rare mutation, and those mutated elephants aren't as targeted by poachers, thus are able to survive more easily. Plenty of popsci journos write as if nature is intelligent and driven by some purpose.

danbruc 4y ago
It's not poachers that cause elephants to evolve not to have tusks. Cause and effect are very complex concepts, probably not even well understood ones, but I would rather avoid descending into the philosophy of cause and effect, so I will just pick a potentially naive idea of cause and effect. Assume a counterfactual world without poachers, would the elephants evolve to be tusk-less? No, so the poachers cause elephants to become tusk-less. It's that some elephant got a rare mutation, and those mutated elephants aren't as targeted by poachers, thus are able to survive more easily. That is the mechanism at play under the hood, but it does not mean that the abstraction of poachers causing tusk-less elephants or even more abstractly that evolution causes tusk-less elephants under those circumstances are not also valid descriptions. Plenty of popsci journos write as if nature is intelligent and driven by some purpose. Which - to a certain extend - is fine. Countries go to war, wars cause destruction, companies go bankrupt, rivers flow to the ocean, holidays make people happy, programs produce outputs, moving the mouse with the left button down selects text, ... none of this is really true in a certain sense. But that is fine, all our words are abstractions and we understand what they really mean, they do not have to be understood literally and the meaning can be context-dependent.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  It's amusing how downright hard it is to avoid teleological explanations of evolution. In this case it is important to note that this mutation presumably existed before poachers so they cannot be the cause of the actual genetics of tuskless elephants - but they are the cause of why the ratio is now changing. So I'd say your counterfactual is wrong: there would be a few tuskless elephants but having no evolutionary advantage they would not become the dominant phenotype. If a species lacks the preexisting genetic diversity here, it dies.
  - danbruc 4y ago
    That is the way I wanted my sentence to be understood, »evolve« in »[...] would the elephants evolve to be tusk-less?« is intended to mean nothing more than become dominant due to evolution and I do not see how that word in that context could be understood as anything else.
    - bigDinosaur 4y ago
      Fair enough. I don't actually think you're wrong, to be clear, I think it's just easy to mix together related but distinct concepts here and the teleological angle makes that surprisingly easy to do (but it's almost impossible to actually avoid).
      - danbruc 4y ago
        Isn't teleology a red herring here? We may use language that sound teleologically - nature wants this or that - but that does not imply that we actually have any teleologically world view behind that. If someone says that the universe wants to minimize the action, then I don't think they ascribe any desires to the universe [1], they just want to say that physical systems behave in a way that minimizes the action which we figured out by inspection and experiment. [1] At least by default, they can of course clarify that they actually think the universe has desires.
  - phkahler 4y ago
rrgok 4y ago
Dumb question: I'm always amused by this phrase "...as if nature is intelligent and driven by some purpose..". Are you not, as human being, part of nature? How is possible from an unintelligent being emerge something intelligent? Either the seed was already there or otherwise I don't know how it would be possible. Would you consider human beings not intelligent and not driven by purpose?
- sph 4y ago
  I rephrase: evolution of life as we know it (that's what I meant by nature) is not intelligent nor driven by any purpose, not even survival. It's randomly throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Maybe the resulting organism lives longer, maybe not. We only see the result of it. The observation that evolution helps find a better local maximum is literally survivorship bias.
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    Evolution of life is different from mutation. We can have mutation anytime, but evolution of life is more or less the basis of 'natural selection' in which mutations that favor survival is selected.
  - robocat 4y ago
    Evolution is a severely misunderstood and misused word. We say a business evolved, to mean changed. We say we evolve an idea, with the implication of intelligent action. We say someone can win the Darwin Award even if they are older and already reproduced: to properly win the Darwin Award, one would need to die before reproducing, or kill their genetic offspring as well as themselves (to properly win the Darwin Award, one would need to kill all the genetic branch of their family tree). Biological evolution is due to reproductive selection. Evolution is primarily related to reproduction: survival only matters if it affects reproduction (after all, nothing survives in the long term). Evolution is not really defined as random change: evolution occurs due to selection pressures that amplify the genetic population of the most successful reproducers. Genetic mutation and recombination is somewhat random, but not purely random (certain mutations are more or less likely, and the pool of successful recombinations is very biased). It is a frustrating topic, because in biology evolution has a very particular meaning, yet biological evolution is usually misunderstood. The misunderstanding is due to the popular incorrect metaphors and alternative meanings for the word. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution Disclaimer: I am not a biologist. I’m trying to be as clear as I can, while making sweeping simplifications (e.g. ignoring kin selection etcetera!) I welcome any mistakes being corrected by lurking biologists.
deafpolygon 4y ago
Isn't that the very mechanism under which evolution operates? Survival of the 'fittest' doesn't mean strongest/fastest. Clearly, due to poaching activities, tuskless elephants are being 'selected' for survival.
- hoseja 4y ago
  Survival of the fittest is only an approximation, the true state is a tautology though: survival of those who survive.
throwawaymaths 4y ago
If we're going to play semantics here, then yes, maybe the first elephant to be born tuskless is the cause but every subsequent tuskless elephant is an effect elephant, so, the statement is still true, if only for an overwhelming majority subset of the elephants.
gumby 4y ago
> Plenty of popsci journos write as if nature is intelligent and driven by some purpose. You might want to read “The intentional stance” by the famous philosopher Daniel Dennett. This is a pretty useful analytic approach for many problems (e.g. we commonly say things like “the thermostat tries to keep the temperature within three degrees of its set point”). I agree it is distressing that many people interpret such metaphors literally.
hombre_fatal 4y ago
> Plenty of popsci journos write as if nature is intelligent and driven by some purpose. This has become the midwit anthem, as pg put it, whenever we use causal language to describe evolutionary pressure.
Konohamaru 4y ago
If the poaching activity is acting as an amplifier for that rare mutation's frequency, then yes, the poachers are in fact causing those elephants to evolve not to have tusks.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
It's not that it conflates per se, it's that it gets the text book defintion of evolution completely wrong. Full stop. You're correct. This happens often, too often.

justsomehnguy 4y ago

> change in the ecological system - more poachers than before - by changing the elephants to no longer having tusks Change in the body - more torn hymen than before - by changing the humans to no longer having hymen. Right?

Chris2048 4y ago
Not sure why you think this example is better - a torn hymen isn't as fatal to humans as a poacher is to elephants.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  Because if 'evolution reacts' (q) then it would react by removing hymen. Also because women without torn hymen don't pass genes. Did evolution reacted by removing tusks? PS if you start to tell me how a hymen could be untorn even in the case of a complete vaginal intercourse I would slap you over TCP/IP.
  - Chris2048 4y ago
    Why would it? Women without torn hymen don't pass genes because they didn't have sex, not because they possessed a hymen. As soon as they have sex, the hymen tears - so it poses no barrier to passing on genes.

spfzero 4y ago

I don't know if I would call this an evolutionary response. It's more like the remnant effect of the one-time bottleneck the article mentions. The proportion of females with the gene for tusks was almost wiped out, while the number of females without that gene stayed the same. There have only been a few generations gone by since then, but you would imagine the same factors that made the gene for tusks more successful in the first place, would start to again predominate, but it will probably take many generations for it to come back to where it was. That part, the recovery, could be called an evolutionary response.