African elephants are rapidly evolving to lose their most precious physical trait--their ivory tusks. In a stunningly rapid instance of observable evolution, African elephant females are refusing to grow the ivory that poachers kill for.
Read this excerpt from National Geographic by DINA FINE MARON:
In Mozambique, researchers are racing to understand the genetics of elephants born without tusks—and the consequences of the trait.
"THE OLDEST ELEPHANTS wandering Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park bear the indelible markings of the civil war that gripped the country for 15 years: Many are tuskless. They’re the lone survivors of a conflict that killed about 90 percent of these beleaguered animals, slaughtered for ivory to finance weapons and for meat to feed the fighters.
"Hunting gave elephants that didn’t grow tusks a biological advantage in Gorongosa. Recent figures suggest that about a third of younger females—the generation born after the war ended in 1992—never developed tusks. Normally, tusklessness would occur only in about 2 to 4 percent of female African elephants.
"Decades ago, some 4,000 elephants lived in Gorongosa, says Joyce Poole—an elephant behavior expert and National Geographic Explorer who studies the park’s pachyderms. But those numbers dwindled to triple digits following the civil war. New, as yet unpublished, research she’s compiled indicates that of the 200 known adult females, 51 percent of those that survived the war—animals 25 years or older—are tuskless. And 32 percent of the female elephants born since the war are tuskless." read the entire article here
Scientists are calling this evolution, but tell me--have you ever heard of evolution occurring in only one or two generations? When I was taught evolutionary theory, they said it took thousands of generations of minute changes to populate a beneficial mutation to the stage where you could say it had "evolved." For instance, in 2012, Michigan State University researchers were very happy to demonstrate the evolution of citrate-eating e. coli bacteria after only 56,000 generations. 56,000 generations.You get the idea.
I remember the day I first learned about evolution in elementary school. There was an illustration in the textbook mocking the concept of Lamarkian evolution. Lamark had promoted the idea that giraffes who stretched their necks to reach the leaves on higher branches gave birth to calves with longer necks. "No, no," Darwinians said. "Natural selection is the way it happens, as only long-necked giraffes survive the lean years to give birth to more long-necked calves like themselves." That logic was supposed to have settled the argument.
The reason Darwinian evolutionary theory won out over Lamark's theory of epigenetic trait inheritance was that Lamark's type of evolution requires learning and volitional repetition, whereas Darwin's creatures were either born lucky to have long necks or were doomed to be short-necked losers. Even as a child or ten or so, I recall wondering why, if long necks were so valuable as to have evolved into our familiar, high-nibbling giraffes, then why don't all large grazing animals have long necks?
I happen to prefer the Simple Explanation's theory of evolution. My theory of evolution reinserts learning and choice into the equation and removes the element of dumb luck. Seriously--who would ever look around themselves at the varieties of natural adaptation and believe that dumb luck at the material level accidentally brought it all about? That doesn't even make sense. It defies the basic rule of 52 pickup, i.e.: if you throw a deck of cards up in the air, it never comes down stacked and in order. Never.
Here is Ropp's Simple Explanation of Evolution:
Stipulated: that the basic matrix of our universe is consciousness.
The Simple Explanation's model of evolution is information-driven rather than happenstance-driven as the conventional model would have it. What I mean is that the Darwinian model we've all been taught relies upon the brute force of superior survival mechanisms that allow the superior creature to procreate and thereby pass on their superior genes. And after a tremendous number of such superior generations, the inferior fade into extinction and the superior organism becomes the new normal.
All this time I've been thinking that the Simple Explanation is somehow essentially divergent from Darwin. In the Simple Explanation, there is an ontological pull upward toward more complex aggregations of consciousness. Darwin's model is, on the other hand, a case of the blind simply bumbling, by happenstance, by lucky accident, by dumb luck, to be a superior adaptation from the norm. Where I find it unlikely is that there would a billion such bumblings in the same direction that, by dumb luck, keeps heading in the upward and onward direction.
The Simple Explanation would say the patterns of superiority are few and fractal, so the wheel does not need to be reinvented over and over. The Golden Rule and hierarchical distributions of increasing complexity and responsibility cover much of it. And, due to the transpersonal nature of universal knowledge, basic mechanisms, like hands and eyes, only need to be invented once and then deployed or adopted as needed.
Consciousness is not a by-product of the human brain or even of complex systems of any sort. Consciousness is the ground state. Think of consciousness as the medium upon which is written the formulae of our universe. The Simple Explanation refers to this ground state as the Universal Unit of Consciousness, and it contains every law of the universe as potential expression that manifests when and where appropriate. Smaller, derivative Units of Consciousness are fractals of the originating Unit of Consciousness that express themselves in every single material expression of our universe.
All of our Units of Consciousness started out as stardust
from the original stars that populated the cosmos soon after its inception.
Some Units of Consciousness that became stellar gas may still be inhabiting their original
elemental molecules in the intergalactic backwater of some far flung gaseous
clouds, but most Units of Consciousness have moved on to occupy countless forms in the last 14
billion years.
The most ambitious Units of Consciousness continue to find themselves occupying
larger and more complex physical forms. Those with the strongest wills
eventually find themselves swimming in some primordial soup or another, perhaps
here on planet Earth. Some of the Units of Consciousness that started in Earth’s soup have
remained in the soup, never attaching themselves to anything more complex than
a single-celled organism. The most ambitious little life forms found themselves
returning to slightly more sophisticated organisms with each incarnation.
Lessons learned are carried forward, always incarnating more and more complex
structures and occasionally jumping to a more complex hierarchical level,
driving the evolution of planetary life via memes accrued through karma.
Was Cyd’s Self Unit of Consciousness ever a single-celled organism? Probably
so, beginning about 4.5 billion years ago.
Was Cyd’s Self Unit of Consciousness ever a jellyfish? Good chance it was, as
the toroidal-shaped jellyfish is the oldest multiorgan animal on Earth,
swimming our seas for the past 700 million years.
Was Cyd’s Self Unit of Consciousness ever a dinosaur? Well, maybe, maybe not. I’d imagine
the dinosaur memes and karma informed the development of reptiles and birds,
not Cyd’s line. The first mammals apparently descended from a different
lizard--therapsids.
Was Cyd’s governing Unit of Consciousness ever a lemur? Or a chimpanzee? Or a bonobo? Or an
Australopithecus? Probably, since their proto-human memes and karma would
have informed human development, and the Self Unit of Consciousness is attracted to familiar
patterns.
In the Simple Explanation’s evolutionary model, no meme war
is needed between natural selection and creationism, science and religion. The
Simple Explanation proposes that everything in the cosmos is created
through metaversal principles embodied in all units of consciousness, and that
each governing Unit of Consciousness evolves according to personal inclination and ability,
through established patterns of meme acquisition and adaptation, and the
utterly fair and impartial mechanism of karma.
In the Simple Explanation’s evolutionary schema, Cyd is
currently a human and probably has been for a very long time. Is Cyd,
therefore, more evolved than her dogs? Not really. The family dogs are at the
same level of hierarchical sophistication as the humans. The dogs’ billions of
aggregate Units of Consciousness and their Self Units of Consciousness have all
made decisions every step along the way that steered them into this life as
these two dogs.
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| Franny and Zoey, Cyd's dogs |
Every governing Unit of Consciousness is an integral part of one aggregate or
another, hierarchically upline and downline. Every slot needs to be filled. The
most you could say of Cyd’s state of evolution is that ambitious meme
collectors evolve into ever more complex instantiations, and Cyd’s Unit of Consciousness and those
of her aggregate Units of Consciousness are attached to some highly ambitious collections of
memes. But whether or not this is anything to brag about is debatable.
Back to the elephants-- The Simple Explanation of this ridiculously rapid loss of tusks is that the elephants who were killed for their tusks carried that information into the transpersonal pool of universal consciousness upon their deaths and made that data available to subsequent generations of African elephants. That meme probably reads, "Hey, watch out! Those effers will kill you to get their hands on your beautiful ivory tusks! Don't grow 'em!"
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