"It is time to let the Panda go"

[karohemd]

Interesting viewpoint and I think quite valid as "survival of the fittest" applies here and the panda is, quite frankly, too stupidill adapted to survive. It would be entirely different if all it took was to conserve or expand his habitat.

I'd be interested to hear what my naturalist/conservationist friends think about this.

(thanks to raggedy_man for the link)

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Well, selection pressure must have been in favour of it at one time, or it wouldn't have evolved into a self-sustaining species in the first place.

Are you sure? I think this a myth.

Over time, fitter creatures will tend to replace less fit ones in any given environment, but there's no rule which says all environments have to be fiercely competitive all the time.

You see this over shorter timescales in the world of business all the time. One day there's lots of money sloshing about and you get an explosion of interesting-sounding startups. Then ten years later there's a shortage of cash and the vast majority of them vanish again. They were never actually fit in the usual sense of the term.

[professoryaffle.livejournal.com]

Indeed a not insignificant proportion of evolution is down to random genetic drift rather than selective pressure

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Or to be more precise, it's all random genetic drift, sometimes filtered by selection pressure.

[professoryaffle.livejournal.com]

very true

[mr-malk.livejournal.com]

Rhubarb.

It might be unpredictable, it might even be chaotic, but there's no way it's random.

[professoryaffle.livejournal.com]

Random genetic drift follows the definition of the statistical adjective random quite well as defined by the OED

'b. Statistics. Governed by or involving equal chances for each of the actual or hypothetical members of a population; (also) produced or obtained by a such a process, and therefore unpredictable in detail.'

From the OED, subscription needed

Most loci in a genome aren't under any strong selective pressure or purifying selection which means the chance of any single allele reaching fixation in the population is roughly equal accounting for differences in allele frequencys, variable mutation rates can alter this

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

there's no rule which says all environments have to be fiercely competitive all the time

I appreciate that: I was simplifying for brevity, and ended up overstating the case. Better would have been something like "selection pressure must not have been against it at one time, or..."

[professoryaffle.livejournal.com]

This is true the environment which suited it and encourage population spread and spread of these alleles to fixation must of existed for a long time >100000ya and it might be that without human intervention that it would of continued

Unfortunately humanity forces other animals to adapt or die out, some do very well, rats, seagulls and rabbits and others really suffer badly, their adaptability is one of those things which alters this and unfortunately pandas really don't appear very adaptable.