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We Adapt Fast, But That’s Not Always The Best
Lessons from tuskless elephants: when to adapt and when to stay firm.
The Elephant In The War
During Mozambique’s Civil War, which ravaged the country for almost two decades, elephants were driven to the brink of extinction. The reason, as you may suspect, was the poaching carried out by both sides of the human conflict; ivory was one of the main ways in which the two fronts financed their war efforts.
Fortunately, when the war ended in 1992, there were still some elephants left to be protected. A notable difference between the remaining elephants and those that had perished was that many of the surviving animals were tuskless. No, the explanation for this isn’t that the poachers, in a sudden fit of conscience, managed to develop a way to rob the elephants of their tusks without killing them. Instead, a genetic mutation was at play: a certain gene had always made some of the elephants tuskless, and those weren’t elephants the poachers would be interested in. Evolution was fast: in under twenty years, the number of elephants without tusks increased sensibly.
Survival Of The Fittest
We often think of the term “survival of the fittest” as if it were akin to survival of the strongest, but it…