Comment by cfontes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cfontes | Hacker News Reader

This is very sad but natural selection now is unfortunately like this now. Unless you are small and can eat human garbage or we care about your species in some extend (Cows, Pigs, Horses, Dogs, Birds, Cats and so on) you are going to become extinct in the next couple of hundred years. Which is depressing to say the least. Even if technology brings them back, it will be for zoos only for a very long time because the real problem is that their environment is gone, so it's not even worth it unless we have that problem fixed.

I am a bachelor in Biology besides the computer degree and this is something I perceive as a deep loss not because of this specific specimen but because of the trend it again confirms. We have modified the key features a species need to survive because of the way we are and big beautiful beasts like this are essentially doomed unless we change our ways, which I am very pessimist about.

I guess this is something we will need to get used to, it is going to happen more times in the future, our grand children might be the first ones to not see a live elephant or giraffe animals so common in cartoons and they toys will be like dinosaurs for them. It's terrible to think about it.

This is not really from natural selection.

Rhinos have been killed by humans by the hundreds of thousands over the last 30 years.

There's nothing natural about that.

Humanity is not natural apparently?

Humans using machine guns and grenades to mow down entire packs of rhinos and elephants in order to use chainsaws to remove horns and tusks from corpses?

Nope, that's not natural in my book.

Their point probably is that humans are a part of nature as well because we naturally evolved from animals, and that moved us to the very top of the food pyramid. Sometimes animals evolve bigger teeth to survive - and humans evolved bigger brains.

Humanity's existence is natural, but humanity's contemporary actions are—by definition—not natural. It is for this reason this very human word "natural" was invented: to distinguish some ("natural") activities from some ("artificial") human activities.

It is worth noting that the word natural is itself not "natural", the word is a human invention used to separate our own activities from others.

I think it depends on where you draw the line for the word "natural". If you include human behaviour, it is natural, but yes, otherwise it is typically known as "artificial selection" in this context.

Exactly my point.

I would draw the line differently, with artificial selection meaning intentional breeding activities.

Anything that's incidental to changes in the animal's environment, including increased predation or habitat destruction, would still count as natural selection. That includes cases where the predator is a particularly vicious species of great ape.

Yes, it is critical that we are pendantically correct in this matter. Alignment on the definition of natural selection is the only way to make sure we save the rest of the Rhinos.

> There's nothing natural about that.

What does natural mean then? It's not like they disappeared by some magical event or an asteroid falling on the face of the Earth.

Typically, "natural" means "not of human manufacture". That it's general meaning, and how it is meant in this case too.

That's not quite true. Natural selection is typically contrasted with artificial selection, in which individual traits are deliberately selected.

In the case of poaching, poachers are not intentionally trying to change the phenotype of the animal. They want to collect the horns/head/etc. The selection itself is an emergent side effect and, I would say, the natural result of a highly effective predator being introduced into the environment.

Natural selection is the process by which the traits that are most suited to surviving reality get passed down. That's all there is to it when you don't sugar-coat it

For so-called “traditional medicine”. Barbaric, yet zero sanctions, boycotts, or any economic consequences really. And once all the rhinos, tigers etc are gone and they can’t do it anymore, only then will they realize it never worked in the first place! :-(

On the plus side, the other subspecies, the southern white rhino was down to only a few hundred individuals a century ago, but is now estimated to have a population of 20,000.

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