this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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One of reasons why some biologists suggest that one of the most evolutionarily successful animals on the planet is the farm chicken.
At an estimated global population of 35 billion, it's definitely doing a lot better than our 8 billion.
And evolutionarily successful doesn't mean you get to be the best, fastest, strongest and have the best most comfortable life ... evolutionary success just means that there are more of your species creating more generations of your kind everywhere. The hope being that the more there are of your species, the more likely your kind will survive in the future.
I've heard archaeologists suggest that in far future times this will be known as the chicken age, because of the volume and likely preservation of chicken bones.
The Bacock age
I mean that is true about a lot of things. Millions of insect plant pairs where one of the two requires the other to live.
Yes, this is often used as a way to criticize how our society assimilated the concept of evolutionary success, as if it's a great thing by itself, or even the ultimate goal of a species, or whatever in those lines, when evolution actually "doesn't care" at all about how bad the individuals live, but just about the fact that they're reproducing, and that's it.
wait, why cant they survive without us?
i mean, most of them would die without our protection and feeding, but yeah it's very hyperbolical to say that the entire chicken species would die out if we got raptured
Yes, but, there are so many of them that we plant that, even if we suddenly popped out of existence, there would still be enough survivors for the species to continue.
i mean the same is true of many nectarivores and their partner plants, both species are wholly reliant upon each other to survive.
Twice that many chickens are killed a year. It's not what I'd call a roaring success in terms of evolution.
The turnover in generations is all that evolutionary success is. It's the mechanism that's been driving life on earth for three billion years. It doesn't mean that the individual life form is happy or comfortable ... it just means it lived long enough to create another generation.
Can you describe where natural selection occurs in a battery farming process?
They never said natural selection. But that doesn't matter. Evolution happens regardless of whether the selection is natural or artificial. All they were talking about was reproductive success and how that is the driver of selection. They even made it clear that evolution cares not for the quality of life just that the genes are passed down.
Spelling
Then call it reproductive success instead of dishonestly causing it evolutionary success. And I didn't state that evolution requires or doesn't require anything, you brought that up - we're talking about whether it's considered successful, which is a philosophical question.
Artificial selection is not a reflection of a species' ability to survive in the natural world and to me that is not an example of success over the longer, think-billions-of-years, term.
Weirdly enough evolution doesn't care about long term success. It only cares about short term success leading to local maximums. If evolution cared about long term success humans would have optic nerves that faced the right way and no cancer, but that was sacrificed during evolution.
Oh and all of animal evolution had happened in less than a billion years.
You're implying that I'm making a case for evolution achieving some sort of perfection, and linking that to a definition of success, which, again, isn't what I said.
If you can't have an honest conversation about it then I'm not interested. I don't doubt that you understand evolution, you've said enough to demonstrate that, but you certainly do not understand the point I'm making.
And billions was an autocorrect.
Then what is the point you are trying to make? You seem to have an agenda here, but I don't see how it fits into the original conversation.
Sorry for a second comment but, by agenda, are you implying that I'm anti evolution?
The original comment I replied to made a definition of evolutionary success and I made a counter-definition. I'm not sure what conversation that you're referring to before that. There was only one other comment above it in the chain and it had little do with defining the evolutionary success of chickens or what that might entail.
If you're perceiving an agenda where there is none while also not understanding the point being made then, not to be rude, but thats a comprehension issue.
It's possible I'm explaining it poorly, but I've run out of ways to approach this so I can't offer you anything more.
I can, it's in the humans. Survival of the fittest, the humans are smart enough to allow a fuck ton of chickens
Er, yeah, I agree with that. Nothing to do with my point, but you are correct.