Hunters Are Breeders
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It’s Survival of the Weak and Scrawny
Researchers see ‘evolution in reverse’ as hunters kill off prized animals with the biggest antlers and pelts.“Tusks used to make elephants fitter, as a weapon or a tool in foraging—until ivory became a precious commodity and having tusks got you killed. Then tuskless elephants, products of a genetic fluke, became the more consistent breeders and grew from around 2 percent among African elephants to more than 38 percent in one Zambian population, and 98 percent in a South African one. In Asia, where female elephants don’t have tusks to begin with, the proportion of tuskless elephants has more than doubled, to more than 90 percent in Sri Lanka.”
They say hunters are effectively “breeding” wild populations, which is genetically dangerous. The article says, “It’s highly likely to result in the end of a species.”
source: Newsweek
Kind of an inconsistent article in my view. It’s right on the mark at one point, noting that “Darwinian natural selection has nothing to do with what’s good or bad, or the way things should be.” It then spends the remainder of the article basically saying that hunters are killing off the “good” members of the species while only the “losers” and “poor breeders” remain.
The idea, I guess, is that human predators are taking out the one end of a species while non-human predators continue as they always have taking out the other end. Evolutionarily speaking, this is not problematic.
(Of course in an ethical context it would be best if both the human and non-human predators could be somehow eradicated.)
I think they are defining “good” as evolutionarily successful, not metaphysically or ethically, Jay.
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