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One of the most successful adaptive strategies on earth right now is to be delicious and/or addictive to humans. It guarantees you'll get planted and tended at
by ef4 12y ago
One of the most successful adaptive strategies on earth right now is to be delicious and/or addictive to humans. It guarantees you'll get planted and tended at large scale. :-)
- mhurron 12y agoIt's also caused the extinction of many things. I don't know if that's really the winning track.
- wyager 12y ago>I don't know if that's really the winning track. It is usually either evolutionary irrelevant or advantageous for one species to cause the extinction of another. It can help to eliminate resource competition or predators.
- possibilistic 12y agoI think the fitness landscape is too complicated to justify that kind of assessment. Even with the non-universal qualifier "usually". I think a more correct statement would be to replace "usually" with "can be", and mention the possibility of it also being disadventageous or disasterous. At this point the entire statement becomes somewhat meaningless, though. Maybe it should just be "too complex to assess without a study per-ecosystem; it depends". I'm sure someone more familiar with the research can express all of this mathematically and and confirm of deny the existance of an overall, cross-cutting model. It may even be common knowledge in evo bio/ecology/etc. All I can mention on my phone right now is "keystone species", "s curve", and "wolf/rabbit populations". (or was it elk?) anyway, the latter search term leads to info on cyclical and highly dynamic ecologies. Check it out.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- bluecalm 12y agoIt's also useful to be cute or produce nice flowers. Then humans will even build houses for you and work hard to provide food and entertainment.