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To all those who want a society based on "Survival of the

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Unless you're breeding your population into horseshoe crabs you're doing it wrong.
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>>54195264
Horseshoe crabs ARE pretty cool though...
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>>54195264
Did something speak without being spoken to?
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I basically did this in a dawn of worlds game once.
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>>54195320
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>>54195264

That's dumb. Turning your people into horseshoe crabs would cause your population to lose fitness long before you saw any gains.
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>>54195264
>Not breeding population into water bears
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>>54195264
Aiight, premise accepted. But what then?
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>>54195341
Horseshoe crabs have outlasted you by several orders of magnitude through three extinction events pocky.
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>>54195264
I honestly want to run a campaign that's basically All Tomorrows, Evo thread, and Spore all thrown into a blender and then streamlined, but really don't want to use GURPS for it, which is the only system I can imagine would run it well.
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>>54195264
Blue blood is the secret
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>>54195546
Truely they are the most noble.
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>>54195264
99.9% of fictional and even real societies that proclaimed this ideal lack a basic understanding of what fitness actually means.

Shih tzus are in general much fitter than Gray wolves.
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>>54195616
Domestic dogs have pretty much won at evolution. They trade most of their reproductive freedom for near guaranteed survival to adulthood, protection from almost all potential predators and have created a demand for the most powerful species on the planet to actively perpetuate their existence.
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BOW DOWN BEFORE THE MASTER RACE HUMAN MUCUS!
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>my character is an asshole to everyone because muh survival of the fittest!
>He wants to be the strongest and the bestest and he will fuck up everyone standing on his way!
>wait guys why am i being murdered help


Daily reminder that meme social darwinism is dumb.
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>>54195750
>tfw undead sponges in dwarf fortress
Truly a nightmare made manifest.
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>>54195264
Horseshoe Crabs are cool, but as for survival of the fittest societies, it just doesn't work.

The Spartans had that whole thing going, but when they conquered Athens and tried to turn it into another Sparta, the native population simply wouldn't take to the idea. The problem is that you're eventually going to get to a point where you will need to negotiate instead of trying to fuck shit up. When words become the weapon of choice instead of brute force, the idea of who is the 'strongest' begins to change.
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Get on my level
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>>54195264
Horsehoe Crabs are fucking awesome. In my top 3 favorite animals.

There was a song I heard on the radio called Horsehoe crab, it was part of a live set the band was doing. I really liked the whole set, but that song especially. The band was promoting their new album which I looked up and immediately bought when I got home. It became my new favorite album over the next week, which is insane since my favorite album hadn't changed in nearly 10 years. There's not really a point to this annecdote, other than Horseshoe Crabs are really fucking cool man.
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>>54196029
>In my top 3 favorite animals.
The best animals are the Giant Anteater, Pangolin and Cuttlefish.

In that order, no exceptions. I will fight you on this subject.
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>>54196232
>cuttlefish
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>>54195729
>Domestic dogs have pretty much won at evolution.
Except for all the crippling defects we've bred into them, sure.
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>>54196232
>not having Ants as #1
When the Ants take over they'll see your internet history, they'll know who's really loyal
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>>54196411
Which are completely irrelevant to their ability to survive to reproduce. Evolution doesn't actually give a shit about making things "better", the most fit organism is the one most likely to reproduce and for its offspring to also reproduce. This is why "Darwinist" ideologies are retarded, they fundamentally misunderstand what it actually means to be fit.
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I don't know about yall, but I'd fuck up a horseshoe crab in a fight, I have empathy and I know maths.

Definitely not the best species.
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>>54196513
If you need the support of another species to reproduce, you're not terribly fit on your own.

If I had a team of genetics and reproductive health specialists on retainer at all times, AND if I were able to shunt my offspring off to whoever would take them, I could be the most reproductively succesful human being in the history of the world.

That doesn't say anything about MY fitness.
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>>54196657
>If you need the support of another species to reproduce, you're not terribly fit on your own.
Tell it to all the parasites in the world, they are thriving. And then you consider social parasites
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>>54196657
Except it totally does.

Evolution is not a moral maxim, it's very much a "whatever works, no matter how ugly or humiliating" sort of affair.
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>>54196437
Bugs are just cool in general.

This thread turned out to be a lot less shit than I thought it would be.
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Horseshoe crabs only breed one place on earth.
HOW IS THAT SURVIVAL ETHICS?!
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>>54196657
>If you need the support of another species to reproduce, you're not terribly fit on your own.

Laughing parasites.jpg
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>>54196657
>That doesn't say anything about MY fitness.
Yes it does.

The term Fitness in regard to evolutionary biology literally (and I really mean literally) refers to individual reproductive success in a particular environment.

If your environment includes another species which will manage the reproduction of your species and your genotype/phenotype has features that makes them more likely to select you for reproduction than others you are by definition more fit than others.

Fitness has nothing at all to do with what you personally think good or bad traits are, is entirely dependent on environment and is relative to other organisms. Bigger, stronger or smarter organisms are not more fit than others, the sole factor is reproductive success.
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>>54196721
No? They breed on beaches everywhere, all over the earth
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>>54196762
Hey you're right.. then, what the fuck sea crustacean am I thinking of.
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>>54195264
>how many extinction level events have you survived?
>oh I dunno, 3, maybe 4
>you are like little baby. watch this
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>>54196782
Dunno.

They do only breed once a year though. They have this big mating season where they all come to shore to fuck and often die.

I remember one time, when I was pretty young, 10 or 11, something around there. I was out on Kitty Hawk in the outer banks, the place with the Wright Brothers and that. The weekend I was there happened to be just after horseshoe crab mating season. There were dead horsehoecrab shells everywhere on the beach, just everywhere. It was kinda cool, but also kinda grim. Very striking imagery, it's really stuck with me.
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Are horseshoe crabs known for being particularly fit?
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>>54196946
Well they lug that huge shell around everywhere they go so they must be pretty fit. Also they've got a lot of legs so they could do a lot of squats.
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>>54196657
good luck surviving for very long with no bacteria in your body.
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>>54197011
Also recall that multicellular organisms are colonies by definition.
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>>54196976
Okay but how much can a horseshoe crab deadlift?
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>>54196757
So... how exactly have domestic dogs 'won' at evolution, instead of humans?

We let pretty much every human reproduce, but we (mostly) select the dogs we allow to breed.

We literally gas dogs that become inconvenient, regardless of whether or not they've had a chance to breed. How is that fitness?
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>>54197207
Fitness is defined at the species level. Not the individual. The subspecies of Domestic Dog is extremely fit, being extremely widespread and numerous.
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>>54195729
Doggos co-evolved with humans. They quite literally are our best friends
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>>54195264
>>54196802
>litteraly ones of the least evolved species
>fit
>>54196703
this
>>54196703
parasites are degenerate so it's still wrong.
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>>54198737
Turns out evolution was generally a mistake after you got to the ultra-survivors.
Anyone evolved after that fails the test of time.
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>>54196029
was that band Hop Along?
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>>54196802
It looks like it's made of wet cardboard.
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>>54198853
Nah. Slothrust. I'm listening to Hop Along's Horeshoe Crabs now though, it's a good song.

This is the one I heard though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yStQqyvyJNQ
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>>54196940
And then you grew up to make a horror game to surpass Silent Hill, eh?
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>>54195264
It should be noted that despite their reputation as living fossils, no particular genus of horseshoe crab is actually particularly old. This also goes for the average lifespan of fossil genuses. It's just that every horseshoe crab ever looks indistinguishable from one another unless you've got a major in invertebrate biology/paleontology.
Compare to triops, which have species that have been around since the Triassic!
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>>54195264
I have a PC in my group who plays an evil wizard who believes in the very core of that dogma. The player is a nice guy but everyone else at the table agrees, behind his back, that the character is utterly insufferable.
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>>54198888
It can also survive boiling, hard vacuum, radiation and close to absolute zero temperatures. We've shot the little fuckers into space in an unshielded capsule, and more than half of the ones survived the trip and re-entry.
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>>54195969
It's also worth noting that Spartans were pretty shitty at reproducing. They married late, didn't spend a lot of time fucking and it wasn't too hard to get thrown out of spartan society because honour and shit.
Not to mention that at their height they spent so much time fighting that they couldn't replace the dead fast enough.

Being a proud warrior race is good for getting a couple centuries of political power but complete shit for long term survival.
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>>54199428
>>54195969
Sparta's major problem is, quite frankly, they were unfit to survive as a society. They hated commerce and used heavy iron slabs as the defacto currency. Their main form of legal tender rusted and was hard to carry, two things counter to what money is actually supposed to be.

They actively killed any child that looked sickly and weak, this is counter productive as a significant portion of supposedly weak babies develop into functional adults.

They kept slaves in such a state of cruelty that their greatest fear when going to battle was that the slaves would take their weapons and rise against them, not that the enemy would ambush them.

The men spent so much time away from home that during on campaign the women of sparta assumed their husbands had been lost in battle and bred with slaves. On their return the spartan men expelled the slave bred sons. This created a truly fantastic amount of bandits and informants on spartan weaknesses over night.

Eventually technology out stripped their methods of warfare and they refused to change and became a backwater.

strength is useless unless its backed with societal and intellectual support.
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Pleasantly surprised by the quality of this thread.

Perhaps tangential, but it makes me wonder about evolutionary success in relation to immortal species.

I remember first being puzzled by it reading Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series (which weirdly enough is more sci-fi than fantasy,) in which the firewyrms(?) from which dragons are genetically engineered are apparently immortal. Like they can still be killed, but can't die from old age. How do they not overrun the planet? Do they simply self-regulate population control by starving to death when food supply becomes scarce from over-predation? Can ancient firewyrms still reproduce with younger ones, or have their genes mutated to the point where they become different species within the same "generation?"

Also, elves. In a lot of lore they are immortal but rarely reproduce, leading to static or even dwindling population count. Is their immortality a marker of evolutionary success, or evolutionary failure, or evolutionary zero-sum-game? In LotR part of the reason Men are becoming dominant is because they die quickly and reproduce quickly, constantly making way for new generations, making the species as a whole highly flexible and adaptable. But then I don't think evolutionary progress (I know that's a loaded word, I mostly just mean mutation/adaptation) equates to evolutionary success, at least not necessarily.

tl;dr how does immortality fit in with darwinism/evolutionary-success/"survival of the fittest?"
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>>54200023
In regards to the dragons, in nature on Earth population regulation is carried out by predation, disease, and parasites. Since I don't think anything eats dragons, that means there must be some pretty gnarly diseases and parasites out there adapted to dragons.
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>>54195474
Make one
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>>54200023
Re: elves--if they die out, they clearly failed.

In LOTR though, they're something like immortal spirits with a flesh body in our world. They don't die out, they all just fuck off to their ancestral paradise island which is closed to humans until the end of time. So I guess they're outside of the system of natural selection as we understand it in the real world.

Re: the dragons
All interesting questions that were not answered by the book.

Perhaps they reproduce very slowly, or only under special circumstances. Despite biological immortality, they might still evolve over vast timescales. For example, if there's a great dieback from a disease, only the creatures who are resistant will pass on their genes.
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>>54200023
I might be wrong about this, but I think turtles and some other reptiles just grow older and larger until something kills them. I assume that means with immortality you live until the environment can't support you or something else figures out the trick to killing you, i.e. flying you really high up and dropping you onto a rock.
So the same thing with dragons, I guess? Either you get so large that feeding on the peasants' sheep isn't enough to sustain you or some uppity knight gets lucky and slays you.
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>>54202520
Galapagos tortoises can live a very long time (more than a century), but they do eventually die of old age. And they're an endangered species confined to a single island, so it doesn't seem to have done much for them.

But there is this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii
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>>54202587
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii
>in nature, most Turritopsis are likely to succumb to predation or disease in the medusa stage
Huh. Well that answers the question. Dragon Flu.
I wonder how deadly it'd be to humans.
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>>54196657
Every living thing needs the support of other species to reproduce. You think you'd live to reproductive age without eating something?
Fitness is about the ability to establish and maintain a niche. I might be that bird that eats parasites and carrion in hippo mouths, but if the hippo is a huge population endemic on every landmass in the world and actively engaged in protecting and enhancing my survival, if my species cannot be killed off unless you first kill off a goddamn force of nature that reshapes the entire biosphere, yeah, I'm in pretty good shape.

Not water bear shape, but much better than almost any other species. Including the hippo, since they'll die out before I do.
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this is a good ass thread
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>>54195264
I don't think anyone could breed something to out-compete horseshoe crabs. Let them have their niche, and we'll eke out our own.
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>>54202520
Suddenly the survival game Don't Starve seems more significant and aptly named
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>not combining the DNA of all creatures to create the ultimate lifeform
And you call yourself a mad scientist.
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>>54204241
Faker? I think you're the fake ultimate lifeform here! You're comparing yourself to ME? Ha! You're not even good enough to be my fake!
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>>54198603

I wonder how we will take dogs with us to space.
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>>54196605
Are you happy?
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>>54202959
Greater immunity to pollution that naturally occurring crabs?

http://www.medicaldaily.com/horseshoe-crab-populations-steadily-decrease-their-indespensable-medical-use-threatened-280728
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>>54204509
Like this, but with space helmets on
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>>54204509
friendly reminder that there were dogs in space before humans in space
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>>54198737
No need to fix what aint broke.
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>>54198603
>Hey, I'm an endurance-based pack hunter with a great sense of smell, a high running speed, and complex social systems!
>Hey, I'm ALSO an endurance-based pack hunter! My sense of smell isn't so good, but I can throw things better than any other primate, harness the unstoppable power of fire, and say words like gneurshk! Also, I'll let you eat my garbage if you don't kill me!
>Wanna be friends?
>Sure!

>And so the unholy alliance was formed
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>>54205067
and then somewhere along the lines, the local top apex predator decided to get in on that action too.
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>>54199141
what a bunch of faggots, behind his back? jesus, you are the cancer you fear
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>>54196029
Why do horseshoe crabs look so pissed off all the time?
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>>54196513
Dogs are extremely unfit. They haven't existed for very long, are full of defects that make it impossible for them to take care of themselves, and their protector is a fairly new species that could possibly destroy itself at anytime. Short success, huge gamble.
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>>54195264
>classic spear+shield combo
>attractive, immediately recognisable and striking shape, perfect for heraldry for instance
>literally have blue blood
Are they the most patrician animal?
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>>54198973
Reminds me a bit of His Name Is Alive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRjbnOXz638

>>54199101
Triops are fuckin cute cus they're like tiny translucent horseshoe crabs. I had some for a while when I was a kid.
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>>54195750
BITCH, PLEASE. STROMATOLITE MASTER RACE!
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>>54195264
>Horseshoe crabs having any chance of leaving the Solar System and surviving the Sun becoming a red giant

Checkmate, crabfags.
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>>54208290
>any species having a chance of surviving the heat death of everything
Checkmate, Life.
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I think OP seems to get the same thing wrong as this guy >>54195768 and this one >>54196802 and a whole load of others. The logic with which you consider a water bear or a horseshoe crab to be fit for survival has the same problem as taking out a loan to pay off your debt, rather than to pay it off. It's short-sighted. While simple creatures like the ones above can maintain an illusion of being fit for survival in the immediate sense, a species also needs to have the intellectual capacity to rise above animalistic drives for senseless self-preservation and discover the long-term necessity of eugenics. Only then, such a species is truly fit for survival, because it will breed itself consciously to improve on it's capacity to develop more and more advanced tech, until it is capable of either leaving the planet in a vessel equipped with all they need to live without a sun, or to leave the solar system with the planet.

TLDR: Horseshoe crabs can't build spaceships. Only humans can and that doesn't include most currently live hominids either.
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>cockroaches are superior to elves because numbers
Nice logic humies.
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>>54199141
Yeah wtf just be normal and make the bants public.
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>he thinks eugenics means killing everybody that isn't fit for reproduction
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>>54208381
I know!
Eugenics means increasing reproduction between fit people while increasing stability and use of contraceptives in those that aren't
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>>54208338
>Horseshoe crabs can't build spaceships
I'm calling bullshit. Show proofs
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>>54208406
gelding is the most reliable contraceptive
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>>54208349
Horseshoe Crabs>Humans>Orks>Dwarves>Cockroaches>>>Shit>>>>>>Kenders>>>>>Elves>>>>>>Yourwaifu
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At least we have learned to harness their ultimate power
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>>54208502
>Dairy Crab's Life.jpg
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>>54208265
>Other animals can't eat you if they think you are a weird rock
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>>54208454
Jokes on you my waifu is a horseshoe crab
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>>54195264
"Cull the weak" ideology is the stupid way of doing it.
It's better to "Encourage the strong" and have only those interested in dominance fight for it while leaving the "weak" be and do something useful as they are.
If you just go purging what those already in power consider weak, you lose a lot of potential. Being "the Fittest" should be encouraged but not mandatory, while the rest shouldn't be attacked or disdained unless they actively cause regression (Criminals, for example)
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>>54208575
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>>54208657
I'd tap that.
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>>54195341
I sincerely thought that was Darkseid for a moment.
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>>54208575
Great, now you've retroactively made horseshoe crabs shit.
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>>54204029
>>54202520
>>54202587

Some sharks don't become sexually mature until they hit 60 - oldest sharks are estimated to be pushing 300 years old without noticeable problems due to "age".

No one's entirely sure Blue Whales can die of old age yet.

>>54208627
"encourage the strong" almost seems like a good idea, but it's always posited by balding four eye motherfuckers and they can never identify what traits are genetically "strong" and what are social (like height and physical condition), and thus end up in the process merely identifying a load of traits that shouldn't be allowed to breed, and then Cull the Weak seems easier and everyone just gets bored and does that instead.

Which then hits the problem that intelligent people know this happens so know that "encourage the strong" inevitably leads to "cull the weak" and so they want nothing to do with it.
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>>54207101
it would be incredibly hard to wipe out humans and thus dogs completely, even if civilization collapsed you would still have humans running around just at a lower tech level
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>>54208762
The volcano under Yellowstone would drive humanity to extinction and is a few thousand years overdue to explode, assuming some idiots don't get bored and nuke ourselves to death first, or kill our environment, heavily disrupt our food chain, or anything else we're already two steps into doing.
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>>54208737
Trying to define "genetically strong" by physical prowess is stupid. Societies aren't made to produce the most muscular men and the most attractive women. Societies, and by extent, people exist to perpetuate that existence. As such, the "strong" that should be encouraged are those that help society at large by being successful in it. The only things to be culled from a society are those that are disruptive, and genetic diseases. The more genes in the pool in general, the better as long as those that come on top do it naturally and trying to get to the top is encouraged. The less genes obviously detrimental to physical integrity, the better.
Survival of the fittest should mean competition between those aspiring to be the apex, not the eradication of those who don't.
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>>54208797
Billions of people die, quality of life across the globe takes a nosedive but unless you can make the entire earth inhospitable to humans, humanity will survive
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>>54208694
That's fine. I call him Darkseid all the time. And when I google images of Apocalype, I look up Apokalips.
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>>54208797
We can't make ourselves extinct yet, that's a dumb meme repeated so often that people think it's true. MAD is just a psychological tactic between countries, not a true possibility. There weren't enough nukes to wipe us out during the Cold War and there are even less now. The worst thing that would happen is we make the longass nuclear winter and collapse CIVILIZATION, humans would keep living and adapting. Same with Yellowstone, except southern countries would keep intact.
Humans survived the Toba with less than 10000 humans left from the event, we can do it again and better.
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>>54208809
except to humans, "being on top" is owning the best QUALITY land, consumables, possessions, and mates
unlike almost every other animal species, those on the top are actually likely to have LESS sexual partners and children than "lower quality" individuals.
what could possibly fix that issue?
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>>54208875
>. MAD is just a psychological tactic between countries, not a true possibility.
it would destroy the COUNTRIES engaged in combat, not every human in them.
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>>54208991
More doesn't always mean better, if they have few children and educate them to continue with the business that put them "on top", that's still worth it. If those "in the bottom" have more and less apt children to fuel the ambitions of those on top, then both found a way to exist and thrive in civilization.
Humans aren't flies nor crocodiles that pump babies and let them swim or drown, humans have in general few children and nurture them in order to keep a stable population, only producing more if they aren't apt and must try to outbreed those who are.
Ideally, we would develop a way to archive the DNA mapping of every person and keep a track record of how we develop and who is on top at what time. Kinda like a genetic leaderboard.
>>54209022
Exactly. An all out nuclear war would only destroy society, but wouldn't make us extinct like everyone parrots every time the nuclear subject is touched. We would just regress into a less advanced age with a lot of misplaced technology that people won't know how to repair nor maintain, reverting quickly to tribalism and later feudalism with corresponding technology. It would be a fun setting though, especially when the Roman Empire Redux finds a nuclear bunker open 10000 years after the great war and finds the ancient technology of AK-47s.
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>>54208797
No, No it wouldn't. The Yellowstone caldera going off would kill most of the people in North America, Europe and Asia would suffer, but it would hardly kill of everyone. Also, It's getting less and less likely that the cadera will erupt due to the weakening of the mantle plume that heats the magma chamber. Source: Am Geologist.
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>>54195264
Competition by its very nature causes the effect we call "Survival of the fittest". No, not with humans so much since spare time is really all you need to make more kids, but if you have a bunch of wolves and a few are bigger, stronger and smarter, those are the ones that will get to breed more. Survival Of The Fittest is a grossly oversimplified term for a complex process.
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>>54209022

So you're saying the US's vast store of feral dog packs would survive?
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>>54196437
Antman get out.
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>>54197207
>How is that fitness?
Dogs are still around so they're currently winning at evolution.
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>>54205067
>Hey, I'm ALSO an endurance-based pack hunter! My sense of smell isn't so good, but I can throw things better than any other primate, harness the unstoppable power of fire, and say words like gneurshk! Also, I'll let you eat my garbage if you don't kill me!
Reminded me of the wolf scene from the last episode of Downward Dog
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>>54196232
You have outstanding taste in fauna
>>
>>54208502
Fuck China.
>>
>>54195729
I think you mean cats, the species that evolved so close to our ideal of cute people have actively sought them out and traded them despite them offering little practical use.
>>
>>54215872
>fuck that one country
>not condemning the system that promotes this behaviour
it's capitalism
>>
>>54208502
What are they even harvesting here? And for what purpose?
>>
>>54216032
Their blood. It has many extremely beneficial medical applications particularly in the field of developing vaccinations
>>
>>54197207
It's fitness as in "fitting" in, not in the /fit/ sense.
>>
>>54205187
Felines a shit.
>>
>>54216032
Their blood is used to test if there is bacterial contamination in medicine etc.
>>
>>54215895
>them offering little practical use
enjoy your grain reserves overcome with rats:
https://youtu.be/zWVw-j8eYSk?t=29s
>>
>>54215895
>eat rodents who like grains
>don't eat grain.
You want them in your grain reserves dude.
>>
>>54216324
>>54216287
>small solitary crepuscular predator with a wide range
>effectively controlling rat population
>>
>>54195729
I've kind of thought of this myself, but from a different perspective.

When I ponder all the different dog breeds, I question how anyone could doubt the validity of natural selection and evolution. In just the last hundred years, how many new breeds of dog have we created? And we did it by being the biggest evolutionary pressure Canis lupis familiaris will ever see.
>>
>>54216399

>Solitary by nature
>Bred to tolerate each others presence
>2017 BCE, Not being a crazy cat lady who runs the grain silo
>>
>>54196946
they can sort of be considered to have "won" at survival of the fitest, being unchanged for 450 million years and surviving all 5 major extinction events
>>
>>54217731
I'd feel kinda bad if we would up wiping them out, if they'd survived all that.
>>
>>54216551
> I question how anyone could doubt the validity of natural selection and evolution
See, the thing convinced me was shit like how germs and bugs build up resistances to antibiotics and pesticides. I didn't even think of the dog breeding thing.

That's a lot easier to explain to people than the germ thing.
>>
>>54197011
>>54196657

or plants producing oxygen or insects pollinating plants or other insects eating the predators of the pollinating insects or bacteria and fungi keeping each other at bay so tht the other can't destroy all the plants that we need to survive, and so on.
>>
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>>54217368

I guess you could call that a Crazy Cat Grainy
>>
>>54218487
7.5/10
close but need some more work
>>
>>54209115
>misplaced technology that people won't know how to repair nor maintain
This is another idiotic meme about nuclear war. You may not know how a firearm works offhand but that sure doesn't stop everyone who does from making more.

Same with cars, you might not know how an engine works but plenty of people do; and they can easily make more by skipping the computerized parts.

Guns are not hard to make, Khyber Pass is an example of people just making more from scrap metal and basic machinery.
>>
>>54215895
So cats basically run on no power, are self charging and emits purrs. Also wide range of facial expression and colour coats. Get yours today.

Sounds like a winner.
>>
>>54195264

>thinks horseshoe crabs will survive the Earth engulfing the sun
>>
>>54221584

*being engulfed by

Fuck sake, I am too tired.
>>
>>54221584
Neighter will humans. And I'm willing to bet things like horseshoe crabs, triops, and tardigrades will outlive us by far.

I too would like to think we can use our brains and opposable thumbs to get off this planet and colonize the stars, doing the one thing no other living thing on Earth can and outlive our planet, but it doesn't look like it'll ever happen. Even if it could be done, it seems that we're doomed to waste our time bickering over pointless things untill we burn in our own fire.
>>
>>54221598
>>54221584
>and this is how horseshoe crabs colonized the sun
>>
>>54196703
>>54196708
>>54196722
>>54196757
>>54196703
>you need an ecosystem to survive haha how unfit
>>
>>54220483
Part of a problem is most modern workers know how the build the modern tools which require modern facilities.
They could undoubtedly figure it out eventually but we'll still be thrown several decades or centuries backwards until we can get everything functioning again. Plus the population and machinery loss means we don't have that backup of necessary materials.
>>
>>54196411
If Humans magically went extinct today, most dogs would also die off, but a good portion of them would simply cross-breed with wolves and Coyotes and keep on living.
>>
>>54196232
>pangolin
My fucking nigger
Pangolins are 10/10
>>
>>54215949
Before checking the spoiler inb4 muh capitalism like every other form of government wouldn't need to exploit just as many (if not more) natural resources because it would run on the spirit of the people and the economy of kidness grown from the hearth
[spoilers]commie scum get out ree
>>
>>54222589
CTRL+S
>>
Because fitness is always relative to environment, survival of the fittest is inevitable, practically a tautology. Basing a society on survival of the fittest is like basing a society on gravity. You can't make survival of the fittest any more or less true; you can only alter the selective pressures in the environment that define what fitness is in a patticular time and place.
>>
>>54223478
Survival of the fittest is abo tier, eugenics for the sake of aesthetics is where it at.
>>
>>54217991
Theres also bacteria that can eat nylon.

A chemical that didn't exist until we invented it a few decades ago.
>>
>>54195341
Reminder that Mohawk storm is best storm
>>
>>54216551
Except it was one, guided, and two, clearly despite the absolutely extreme differences they are all still the same species capable of freely breeding with each other, no new species have arisen. In fact it's a huge argument against evolution since it shows adaptation does have limits and CAN'T make new species, just reshape a species pretty far until a breaking point is finally achieved.
>>
>>54225583
Nah its definitely proof of evolution.

Yes its guided but thats totally irrelevant, we jjst happen to be the source of selection pressures in this case. But yes dogs are now diverse senough that they can be considered multiple species. We just don't use the terminology because of tradition. But a chihuahua isn't capable of breeding with a great dane. Being a different species isn't about genetic compatibility, its simply about being able to reproduce (or nor) at all unaided.

It does serve as an example of how nature isn't rrally conveniently grouped up and things can get blurry, like in ring species.
>>
>>54208437
Anime seems pretty effective as well.
>>
>>54198603
Doggos a best.
>>
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>>54222178
No. A. the tools and machines you need to make guns are common and simple enough that they're going to be everywhere.

Even if you didn't have a proper machine, you can pound and reforge steel into a functional firearm easily. The only way we stop making guns is if we cease to have access to any and all metal; and that's not happening.
>>
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>>54225909
>a chihuahua isn't capable of breeding with a great dane
>implying
>>
>>54226070
B. The guns that exist aren't going to turn to rust any time soon; generations have come and gone but the AK that shortens them remains. Even the STG-44 is still being used in Syria and god knows how badly they've been maintained because AKs are so much easier to find.

C. You can take away a hundred years of innovation but there's no going beyond bolt action. The mauser action alone is out there in the world millions of times over, and even if you have to scrap everything else nothing is stopping you from taking that action and barrel and slapping whatever crude furniture you want on it.

D. There are so many fucking guns everyone on the planet can be as as well armed as Ted Nugent. The civilian market has tones upon tones of weapons; but thats nothing compared to stockpiles of reserves, obsolete guns forgotten in storage, and the weapons that will inevitably be made immediately after the catastrophe,

We didn't lose swords when Rome fell so why the fuck would we lose guns when the Apocalypse happens? If anything, the fall of civilization is going to make everyone a gun wielder if not a gun smith.

Tl;DR No, Fallout 4 and Thunderdome lied to you.
>>
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>>54204241
>>54204396
>So called "ultimate" lifeforms
>Don't even eat vampires
>>
>>54226111
Isn't capable of breeding unaided.
Unaided is the key word.
>>
>>54208326
Well maybe if some bitches accepted being a magical girl, we wouldn't have this problem
>>
>>54226206
>Great Dane bitch lays down
>Chihuahua dog fucks her
>???
>Mix is born

Seems pretty unaided to me. It's not like reproduction requires cervix-depth penetration.
>>
>>54209115
There's actually a species of fly that will stand guard over its eggs and fight off predators that would eat them. Once the eggs hatch into maggots the fly will herd them around between food sources and keep protecting them until they're grown flies.
Those flies will go up against assasin bugs and spiders and either scare them off or outright win the fight.
>>
>>54226256
They tried that it didn't work. They had to anaesthetise the dane and build a ladder for the chihuahua. Plus the puppies had to be hand reared since the mother couldn't feed them cos her nipples were to big and she didn't recognize them as hers.
>>
>>54226111
>not a shoop
>>
>>54195915
>>
>>54195768
I've always liked the non-retarded version of this. "If I fuck up I die and so be it. If I'm an asshole to the wrong guy and die that's how it should be. But logically as long as I"m still standing and the other guy is either convinced to my side or under the ground it's all good."

The drow style shit don't really work unless you are like a legit god .
>>
>>54226174
>We didn't lose swords when Rome fell
But we did lose the ability to build Roman-stly bridges and concrete. In fact, we never rediscovered the way Romans made their concrete; the stuff we use today is similar but not quite the same, and apparently the Roman version is actually a little better (its more resistant to water).
>>
>>54195616
>99.9% of fictional and even real societies that proclaimed this ideal lack a basic understanding of what fitness actually means.
This. The whole problem is not with society based around survival of the fittest: the problem is that people are dumb and don't understand what the actual notion of "evolutionary fitness" actually entails. For an example: In the long run, the BY FAR biggest factor of human fitness in long run is his capacity for complex cooperation. If you have that capacity and further act in a way that also encourages and rewards similar capacity for cooperation around you, then you can be a wheel-chair bounded cripple and your fitness is still higher than that of a muscular Apollo-type guy with extremely low agreeableness participating in a society of uncooperative fucks.
The factors that establish individual's fitness are really fucking crazy complex. And they also happen to be almost entirely contextual and fluid.
The whole complete fuck-ups with attempts to apply Darwinism to social politics just come from our inability to fully comprehend the notion of fitness: not from mistaking it's role or importance.

>>54225909
Nah, for species-classifications, you actually need genetic compatibility. Physiological traits making breeding more inconvenient do not really matter. Dogs are still one species. That said, without human interventions, it's possible that great dane and chihuahua would separate into different species very soon due to their inability to mate efficiently.

>and she didn't recognize them as hers.
I would believe the rest of that story, but this is utter bullshit, or at least it was completely unrelated to the subspecies the father of the pups belong to. What the bitch recognizes as a pup is not even slightly genetically determined. Give her a lion cub and she'll think it's her pup, actually. We know this, we use dogs as foster parents all the bloody time in zoos.
>>
>>54229147
Good news anon, we just figured out Roman Concrete.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40494248
>>
>>54226111
Is...issat a real doggo? I think I need a great chihuahua in my life. Maybe a chidanedane?
>>
>>54221571
Pretty much, you can tell a region or people's cat preferences based on the proliferation of breeds along their trade routes. For example: orange cats were spread almost exclusively by Vikings.
>>
>>54221664
>Neighter will humans
O YE OF LITTLE FAITH
We will become an intergalactic society and continue to survive long after the sun swallows the earth. By then we won't even care, the Earth and the Sun will be myths a billion light years away from any relevance.
>>
>>54215895
>I think you mean cats, the species that evolved so close to our ideal of cute people have actively sought them out and traded them despite them offering little practical use.
>Cats offering little practical use
Dude, do you have ANY FUCKING CLUE how insanely useful cats are for controlling pest populations? Did you not actually know that cats were kept to hunt mice first and foremost? They are INVALUABLE if mice are a major threat to your fucking grain supply.

Fun fact: There is a theory that claims that the reason why cat's are so frequently associated with mystical or sacred powers is because they were first kept by temple and shrine keepers of settled agrarian societies, which was caused by the fact that in MOST settled agrarian societies, shrines and temples evolved from grain storages, and cat seemed to be kept in those for obvious reasons.
>>
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>>54196232
That's some real good ass taste you've got there friendo.
>>
>>54196657

>laughingEcoli.jpg
>>
>>54208338

Your entire argument dismissed with 3 letters:

>yet
>>
>>54215895
>>offering little practical use
>They eat vermin, clean themselves and detect cancer

Retard.
>>
>>54229147

If that interests you, we also lost the ability to built mosaics as the romans did, which makes repairing them fucking difficult
>>
>>54229147
Quite a bit better, really. The US highway system is going to the dogs after barely sixty years, Roman shit's lasted thirty times as long in better shape
>>
>>54229851
TWO LEGS
TWO LEGS
>>
>>54195264
Now I'm going to make a BBEG with this goal in mind. He is literally going to turn people into horseshoe crabs as a result of his social Darwinist ideology.
>>
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>>54229851
Pangolins are great, and this is coming from somebody who generally views terrestrial mammals as a terrible dissapointment and unfit to hold the mantle of the archosaurs.

Still, my favourite animals are all reptiles, cephalopods, and fish, particularly deep sea fish such as this glorious specimen here. Truly, we can learn much from such a noble creature.
>>
>>54231425
The US highway system gets used much harder than old roman buildings, though. Thousands of cars a day are harder on concrete than hundreds of tourists.
>>
>>54216287
Wow that must fucking sucks
>>
>>54233262
and now imagine that this could happen every year

it's probably why cats were holy animals in egypt. They could decide whether you survive or not
>>
>>54233180
There actually are some Roman bridges that are used for car traffic. They just laid new pavement over the ancient bridge.

The main reason Roman concrete structures have lasted so long is probably because by modern standards they tend to be overengineered as fuck. Romans didn't have steel reinforcements (rebar) that handles tensile stresses in concrete (concrete tensile strength is around 10 % of its compressive strength), so they had to use a lot more concrete in order to prevent tensile failure, which meant the structures were hugely overdesigned when it came to compressive forces. Also, as modern concrete structures are designed with the assumption that the reinforcement will carry part of the load, corrosion of the reinforcement may render the structure unstable, while Roman concrete structures don't have the problem since they didn't have any reinforcements in the first place.
Had they used rebars in their construction, pretty much all Roman concrete structures would have cumbled long time ago due to the steel being corroded and the concrete being left unable to bear the stresses alone.
>>
>>54232644
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykWPyaqbebo
>>
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>>54196513
>>54196657
>>54196703
>>54196708
>>54196757
>>54209115
>>54209526
>>54217731
>>54223478
>>54229589
Fitness is a complicated concept in evolutionary biology. My favorite short discussion of the topic is in Van Valen's "Energy and Evolution" (Van Valen, 1976):

>Fitness is the central concept in population genetics. But there is widely felt to be a worm in the apple barrel, or perhaps the barrel has no foundation at all.

>Among evolutionary processes, fitness is nonrandomly associated only with natural selection. It is therefore reasonable to consider fitness as what natural selection maximizes, and this is indeed a common view. But what does natural selection maximize? Here we find a whole can of worms.

>All else equal, natural selection maximizes viability. All else equal, it maximizes fecundity. And mating success, and trophic efficiency, and development rate, and escape from predators, and much else, at many time scales together. How, in actual fact, is the resultant of these mutually conflicting components determined in nature? Population genetics says that natural selection maximizes the number of individuals, usually in the next generation. Lewontin (1961) thought it maximizes the lowest probability of survival after any one generation; later (1968) he thought it maximizes stability. Mac Arthur (1962) and Slobodkin (1972) thought it maximizes efficiency, although their meanings of efficiency were quite different. Thoday (1953) thought it maximizes the probability of any descendants after a long period of time. Carson (1961) thought it maximizes biomass. Claringbold and Barker (1961) and perhaps Darwin (1859, pp. 336-337) thought it maximizes the actual rate of increase in the number of individuals in a population. Levins (1970) thought what it maximizes depends on specific circumstances, although he seemed to assume some unspecified sort of survival of descendants.
>>
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>>54233822
>Lotka (1922) thought it maximizes the total energy flux through all organisms jointly. These statements merely sample the diversity of views available, which are on so basic a topic as to determine the nature of the theories in which they are embedded. One can't use standard equations to answer the question, because the equations already have built-in assumptions that determine the outcome. Ones[sic] assumptions must be true and complete for this method to work. The question is one of fact and can only be answered by the examination of actual processes.

Here I should point out that fitness is very much identifiable in specific cases, even though we have trouble saying what it is in a general, absolute sense. The practical difficulty (well, one of them) is that natural selection has no foresight, and what improves fitness in the short run may decrease it in the long run.

People who do inclusive fitness models define fitness in terms of an increase in the absolute number of copies of a gene at some point in time, but there are a lot of cases where this definition isn't very useful.

>>54199101
>every horseshoe crab ever looks indistinguishable from one another unless you've got a major in invertebrate biology/paleontology.
Why hello there anon. (Working on my PhD.)

Xiphosurans (horseshoe crabs) do change a fair bit over time. It'd be very surprising if they didn't. The interesting thing about living fossils is that they don't change very much relative to other taxa.
>>
>>54233822
Well, the funny problem the piece of text you provided is that it actually shows traces of still-existing teleological perception of evolution. Lewontin, Mac Arthur and Slobdkin argued about what natural selection is supposed to maximise, but I think it may be a general problem to assume that evolution maximises something specific, because that IS a teleological bias: it assumes that purpose of evolution is to do SOMETHING. While in reality: that itself is clearly a projection.

Now: teleological bias is almost impossible to actually remove entirely. It's because humans are naturally programmed to percieve and think in teleological way, because that has been for the longest part key element of our evolutionary advantage. And we can illustrate that fact if we look at the previous sentence (programmed, advantage - those are themselves TELEOLOGICAL notions). But still we should be aware of this problem:
Evolution is not mechanic with function or purpose. It's simply a name for a complex pattern that exists through out history of existence of complex organic molecules. And when we discuss what is it trying to "maximize", we are just really only saying "we assume or propose particular patterns (or aspects of a pattern) existing within this process as reasonably regular. And we do that based on past evidence. But really, the teleologial bias also mistakenly makes us believe that these patterns should persist through out all time and into the future, because we falsely tend to attribute them with functional dimension.

I think Levin's attitude is closest to helpful understanding of the problem on broad perspective. It's actually unreasonable to assume that evolution maximises anything: at best we can claim that prevailence of certain patterns within evolutionary processes in the past has been proven.
>>
>>54233941
>Here I should point out that fitness is very much identifiable in specific cases,
In wake of this: >>54234138 I think it's much more correct to say that we can impose a fairly arbitrary (but useful) notion of "fitness" within a confines of our own very limited and arbitrarily deliminated pace of study. We can study say: certain patterns of change among demographics of members within certain species over arbitrarily chosen period of time and we can identify that certain qualities have been proving themselves more prevailent or more stable within that period. And we can identify those qualities as "fitness" of those individuals based on that.

But it is all very, very wonky: it is arbitrary and purely a heuristic category. We chose the sample size and type, we chose to identify certain trait as "increase in fitness". Fine for scientific work, but shit goes south very quickly when people forget that such a notion of fitness is merely an arbitrary value we decided to focus on and instead start to treat it as a universal dimension, a functional aspect of evolution itself. We had seen the results of such tunnel-vision approach being often catastrophic in the past.
>>
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>>54216551
>>54225583
It's a lousy "argument against evolution." Darwin drew on animal breeding heavily in "On the Origin of Species", arguing that— in heavily abridged form— (1)the fact that all species increase in number exponentially in the absence of constraints on their populations, coupled with the observation that the Earth is not a ball of bacteria expanding at the speed of light, implies that these constraints operate continuously and ruthlessly in nature; (2) we know, from animal breeding, that the form of animals is highly mutable and can be altered via differential reproductive success; and (3) variation of form in nature leads to differential reproductive success.

I have heard that creationist veterinarians exist. Although I strain to grant these people— if they exist— some measure of respect, I have to say that I think they are some painfully stupid motherfuckers.

BTW, the journal featuring the Van Valen paper I quoted, Evolutionary Theory, is freely available online: http://leighvanvalen.com/evolutionary-theory/

>>54232644
This is an awesome motivation for a mad scientist BBEG, especially if you pair it with the classic stupid rhetoric about "the ultimate life-form!" (Why does this psuedo-mystical bullshit plague anime? WHY?!)

>No, you fools! My true goal was always to advance humanity to the next stage of its evolution! To transform our species into the ultimate life-form! Now, behold the transformation effected by my superior evo-virus!
>it's a fucking horseshoe crab

In more directly /tg/-related stuff, pic related is my favorite Magic card. (Is there an image of this somewhere that's not riddled with JPEG artifacts?) I have every marine invertebrate WotC has ever printed. I also suck at Magic in part because I refuse to play decks that don't have cool creatures in them, especially thallids.
>>
>>54199045
Considering Silent Hill wasn't fit enough... Not gonna be hard.
>>
>>54200023
Dragons in DnD in general raise this question. Generally, the setting answers it by basically saying, "They all hate each other to a degree that keeps them from really breeding that often, if at all".

Pern, though, it's got a problem.
>>
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>>54234138
>>54234206
Well, Van Valen goes on to pose his own idea of what natural selection maximizes, of course: an increase in fitness is an increase in the share of trophic energy available to a given genotype. This definition has some interesting consequences: for example, we have to regard growth as an increase in fitness.

This isn't the same thing as saying that evolution is directional; fitness, by whatever measure we use, has to increase over time in order for the idea of adaptation to make any sense. The question of whether there exists a universal measure or definition of fitness is distinct from the question of whether evolution possesses any (long-term?) directionality. In fact, Van Valen's most famous paper, "A New Evolutionary Law" (1973), formulated the Red Queen view of adaptation, in which the effective environment of every species within a given adaptive zone decays because all the species within an adaptive zone are locked in zero-sum competition with each other; in the Red Queen view of evolution, an increase in fitness on the part of any species within an adaptive zone is equivalent to a decrease in fitness on the part of all the others. The upshot of this is that no net adaptation happens. This idea was spurred by the observation that extinction rates appear to be constant over time in particular taxonomic groups (e.g., nautiloids).

I'd post an issue of Dragon which statted some of the Burgess Shale "weird wonders," but it exceeds /tg/'s maximum file size. It's number 204, if anyone's interested.

I don't want to take over the thread, particularly if I don't have anything obviously /tg/-related to say about it, so I'll back off a bit now.
>>
>>54208697
>scan the QR code
>Box is blank
>>
>>54234770
>I'd post an issue of Dragon which statted some of the Burgess Shale "weird wonders," but it exceeds /tg/'s maximum file size. It's number 204, if anyone's interested.

https://smallpdf.com/compress-pdf
>>
>>54221664
To be honest, when it becomes an issue that is nearly immediate, mankind will probably kick it into high gear, get off the damn planet, and then resume bickering pointlessly as soon as the species isn't in danger of extinction. It's just how humans do things.
>>
>>54226181
>IQ 400
>Still got beat by a man with no plan
>>
>>54235215
>If we don't know what we are doing then neither does the enemy
>>
>>54235466
MURICA
>>
>>54233357
>overengineered
Unless we're talking about machines, there is no such thing. A house that can take ten mortar shells and still stand isn't an overengineered house, it's a damn good house. The only reason why modern roads and houses aren't built to better standards is because everyone's looking to spend the least and work the least to produce something, which ends up in a shoddy product, and also because planned obsolence and keynesian economics are becoming more and more prevalent. The people footing the bill/using the product get the raw deal, because the products get worse and need repaired more often(or more likely it's more expensive to repair the product than buy a new one and the consumer moves on to a different company to replace the product) meanwhile the company that sold the shoddy product is basing their business model on "customer loyalty", which is almost completely antithetical to common sense and the basic tenets of capitalism.
>>
>>54205067
Humans actually have a pretty good sense of smell and can actually be trained to track using smell.
>>
>>54229616
Fuck yes.
>>
>>54231425
there's a survivor ship bias there.

roman architecture that has survived to today is the exceptionally strong or well built examples, average roman structures have long since vanishes.

if you compare their best to our average then of course theirs looks better.
>>
>>54237562
Also, there is no 800 old american bridges to compare here.
>>
>>54208437
The problem with castration, is that even if you are literally retarded: Your DNA is most likely fine, because specific stacks of chance needs to happen to even be retarded.
>>
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>>54211248
>>54222404
nigga, if your dog is medium sized he will likely be ok if he suddenly gets loosed in the wild(pic related is one of the remains of A BISON, killed by romanian feral dogs).
In fact, i once cross-referenced the list of dommesticated animals, and if we went away right now, most of our animals would become wild fast:
-cats are so OP in the wild, they fuck up half the ecosystem;
-pigs become hogs, with all the boar features, if left A MONTH feral;
-cattle and other bovines seem to resort to wild behaviour you seem in african bovines, if west euro island pops and romanian danubian ferals are any indication;
-horses go wild easily(see mustangs and romanian danube horses);
-donkey don't give a shit;
-goats have successfully integrated themselves in the wild throughout Europe, to such an extent that varieties like the Kri-kri were mistaken for a long time as being ancient wild goats;
-sheep are likely the same(see Soay sheep);
-chickens seem to revert to the behaviour of their sumatran ancestors(small flocks, running a lot, hiding and sleeping in trees);
-turkeys have been expanding across the American forests just fine for the past centuries, so they are ok;
-domestics ducks have been breeding with New Zealand wild ones quite thoroughly, so they will do pretty ok;
-camels are doing the wild thing just fine right now, even on their own;
-rodents(rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, etc.) will resume their role as the fast breeding herbivores and main snacks of the food chain(rabbits were actually an iberian animal that the romans spread throughout Europe);
-pigeons won't have any issues;
-parrots have been escaping and settling across a ton of temperate cities and their parks, so they will likely survive, adapting to cracking local nuts and developing a more subdued plummage;

So human-less earth will be less "domestic animals dying and staving in droves" and more "global Florida", where everyone's abandoned pets have adapted to the local conditions.
>>
>>54237707
>global Florida
how horrifying
>>
>>54237707
Oh yeah, and bees have been going feral from time to time, and their wild ancestors are still around, so no problem there;

Really, the only domesticated animal that will likely go extinct is the silkworm, and that's only because the chinese, and the euros that stole them, have been making them incapable of surviving in the wild, and dependent on human care(but i think even that could be reversed with a decent breeding back program)
>>
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>>54237912
Wait, i'm wrong even about that.
Wild silkmoths still exist.
So, if we don't totally destroy the environment, all of our escaped pets will likely do just fine.
>>
>caring about survival of the fittest
>not just making yourself the fittest so no one, moralfag or otherwise, can contest you
Just hit up that triple interlaced diamond cellular wall my friend.
>>
>>54237979
>not just making yourself the fittest
fuck everything?
>>
>>54237993
The greatest lifeform is one so perfect it need not reproduce because it is already the final form of existence itself.
>>
>>54238085
>The greatest lifeform is one so perfect it need not reproduce because it is already the final form of existence itself.
the actually greatest lifeform is one that doesn't need to procreate, because everything is its descendant and his descendants make up 100%
>>
>>54196232
>>54213924
>>54222569
>>54229851
>>54232797
It is funny that the Pangolin was brought up, as it recently was brought to my attention by one of my players that they would like their character to find a pangolin and tame it.

I've always loved them, and I like makin' mah players satisfied, so I am happy to oblige.
>>
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>>54205067
>We evolved to be able to use the Words of Death.
>>
>>54196437
>He wants anteater food as the best animal
>>
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>>54195264
> oh look, a snack!
Crocodilians are excellent candidates for survival of the fittest. In their world you aren't even safe as an adult unless you get fuckhuge.
>>
>>54195474

Microscope could work, a system built to fuck around with a timeline and can be used to actually create a setting to play in. I haven't played, but I've heard a good deal about it.
>>
>>54243724
Fuckhuge animals die fast of starvations, being big enought to eat rats and not be eaten by them is the apex predator.
>>
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>>54243864
Crocodiles can go a year between meals.
>>
>>54243864
What >>54244319 said. Not only can they go for a year without food, they can and will happily chow down on rancid carrion courtesy of monstrously strong stomach acids and a blood stream packed with powerful natural antibiotics. This is, of course, assuming that the croc in question isn't a salty or Nile and doesn't just decide to say fuck it and float around in the ocean snacking on fish, sea turtles, and sharks as they hope between island chains. Then you've got the fact that a croc can have entire limbs torn free off and keep on trucking. If you'd like further examples of how tanky the big bastards are then I'd encourage you to look up Gustave.
>>
>>54200023
>they can still be killed, but can't die from old age
There's an animal that's actually like that.
>>
>>54246055
There are several, including lobsters
>>
>>54246055
if memory serves these immortal jellyfishes are incredibly weak to illness and overall weak as fuck
>>
>>54247340
Yeah. Actual "celling" of animal life does not matter much, and the more likely they are to die randomly and rely on numbers rather than individuals, the less their natural spawn of life matters.

Fun fact: Elephants and coala's have natural life-span possibly up to twice their actual recorded longest survival. Both of those animals die of hunger eventually, NEVER old age. In both cases, it's related to how their teeth work.

My personal favorite video about coalas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNqQL-1gZF8
>>
>>54247381
I'd kill every koala on the planet if it gave elephants adamantium teeth
>>
>>54200023
Fire lizards are stupid little fucks, they often lay eggs too close to the water.

Also thread culls a lot of animals.
>>
>>54246364
Lobsters aren't biologically immortal, growing a new shell eventually kills them by way of exhaustion.
>>
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>>54208502
>Horseshoe Crab Bad End.
>>
>>54247381
Apharently every herbivore in yellowstone eventually dies of starvation because the silica content in the soil from volcanic activity destroys their teeth. Also the mammals that fuck around with drinking water near the geysers and eating plants near them die years early from chemicals in the water.
>>
>>54247381
>ze frank
my nigga
>>
bump for this Thread's fitness
>>
>>54197043
Those bastarda can't beat Eddie.
>Horse crab
>The Beast
Not even competition.
Thread posts: 239
Thread images: 42


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