"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

[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