And: on the 'r' side of the r/K reproductive strategy. Whales are literally the exemplar of K-selection, that is a very small number of high-quality offspring.
Whale lifespans are long, populations and fecundity / brood sizes are small, sexual maturity relatively late, and childhood mortality relatively high. All of these make for slower rather than more rapid evolution.
Species such as krill (on which many whales feed) are far more likely to evolve rapidly in the face of increasing selection pressures. Whales might well find themselves boxed into an inescapable evolutionary corner.
Evolution of small things like algae and the krill which feed on it and feed the whale is quite fast. Single celled organisms reproduce on the scale of 20 minutes and hold immense amounts of genetic diversity in their populations to facilitate the success of a better adapted line almost immediately. Additionally, they are adept at horizontal gene transfer from other well-adapted organisms.
This would be great news if the whale literally only required krill to survive, but complex megafauna have complex needs, so the ability of krill and other small creatures to evolve is largely irrelevant in a discussion regarding the ability of megafauna to survive. This is especially true if you read TFA and see that the whales already adapt to eat different things as necessary.
My point is, for instance, that they need appropriate temperatures in the water. Again, nothing survives PURELY based on caloric intake. It does not matter much at all if krill evolve.
Algae are the bottom of the ocean food chain. Everything interacts with it. But algae's happy to grow in a bowl of water left in the sun.
Lots of things eat krill and small fish. They're near the bottom of the foodchain too. In addition to algae, krill are opportunistic omnivores who often consume detritus. But their primary diet is algae. Small fish tend to be pretty similar.
It's not that other things don't interact with algae or krill or small fish, it's that those groups are the foundation bedrock of the ocean ecology. And single celled organisms like algae are tough as nails in aggregate. Couldn't kill them all if we tried. Pool owners will be familiar with the struggle.
But it's not a bottom up interaction. If whales are killed off from climate change, then those other things can get out of control. Too much algae, and then you have hypoxic environments.
A perfect example of this is when sea otters were nearly hunted to extinction which caused sea urchins to flourish which caused the death of coral and coastal environments which started to affect the larger things that depended on those environments.
My point is that any change to the careful balance can have non-linear effects.
I think we're coming at this from different directions. The OP I responded to originally said: "Warming will kill off most of the systems these animals depend on within 30 years." which isn't what you're talking about. A top-down extinction looks like whaling in the 1800s and we already had that. Now they're on the mend.
Right, this is my point. Looking at krill is looking at one PIECE of the stack. Other things support and interact with that stack. The stack is the whale. The point is that it doesn’t matter if this one single piece of the stack can evolve, it’s not nearly enough.
It could easily become this fast or even faster, if we would just stop worrying so much about "playing god" and focus instead on getting good at this job. We don't have much time for this either, as AI is on the trajectory to take over that mantle in the next decade or three, whether we like it or not.
But seriously, we may not have much choice. Natural evolution stopped being able to adapt to environmental changes after it created us; genetic engineering is essentially the only way to make biology adaptable enough again.
The next question is which traits to do you choose and the next question is which traits are better, because choices will imply ordering, and then you open a big can of worms that last time killed millions of people. So maybe there's other ways to avoid doom that didn't create doom last time we went down the path.
Unpopular opinion for obvious reasons, but probably the only realistic one apart from just witnessing one extinction after another. Pollution and climate change aint going anywhere until we elevate whole world to the level of say western Europe.
But since we humans are pretty arrogant with our wisdom and lack long term patience, I can see many ways where well-intended meddling can end up in catastrophe overall.
You are paying less monthly if you commit to annual pricing, if not, you can still pay monthly pricing which is higher. Commitment means you will likely be a paying customer for a year at the least and hence company gives you a discount. What’s the insidious aspect? The whole thing can be confusing, yes, but it does what it says.
Maybe it is the same level of consciousness but different physical limitations? Simply imagine being locked in in an insect body with different perception and abilities, and a wiped memory.
Observing animals' behavior (in the wild and through experiments like the one here) and studying how their brains work to see that they often have the same kind of mental features as us (including whichever you'd classify as consciousness) - just at varying degrees of sophistication.
Some would argue that "consciousness" is something non-physical that has no impact on the physical world, and so is not physically detectable or responsible for any behavior, but I feel then it inherently cannot be whatever we mean by "consciousness" that we're directly aware of and talking about in the physical world (because that itself is a physical impact).
The main idea of what I am saying is that some entity could have kicked things off, for whatever reason, and not be able to stop or control it. Perhaps they were just like you or I, and they released some tech which formed the universe as we know it today. Perhaps they are outside of this universe and cannot see into it or control it, perhaps they were inside and were obliterated, perhaps they are still here somewhere sitting around waiting for the universe to end, who knows! Everyone expects a god to be all-powerful or something, but they could be some mortal being who only had a lot of power for a moment when they knocked over the first domino. We probably can't know how the universe started, in any case, so this is all just brainstorming for new sci-fi and fantasy novels at this point.
reply