A warning of the phenomenon of elephant toothless "evolution": reflecting the governance inability of human society

According to reports, a study by a scientific research institution shows that decades of elephant poaching have changed the evolutionary direction of African elephants to some extent - more and more female elephants are born without ivory. The researchers believe that this phenomenon shows that human activities have such a great impact on biological evolution that they can even "change the body structure of animals."

Studies have shown that during the civil war in Mozambique, an African country, during the civil war in Mozambique, an African country, was slaughtered, about 90% of the African elephants living in the area of what is now Gorongosa National Park were slaughtered, and elephants without ivory escaped the disaster. Princeton University evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staten and colleagues estimated from early surveys and imaging that about 18 percent of local female elephants were born toothless before the Civil War; 30 years later, that percentage rose to 50 percent, and two-thirds of the females' offspring were females.

Female elephant tusks, originally intended to protect baby elephants, intimidate other animals or use them in combat. However, with the rampant poaching of elephants for ivory, the mother elephant has to unload its "arming" for safety, resulting in a change in its own biological evolutionary route, which shows what elephants have been forced to become.

This is undoubtedly a shocking scene: biology often has to go through millions of years of species evolution, but in just a few decades, human activity has "made" it come true. However, human beings must not have hallucinations, which does not mean that humans are "creators", on the contrary, such human activities may be a major threat to other species.

Human changes in species are not a new topic, the use of livestock, the domestication of pets and other conscious human behavior, have changed the shape of the species. But situations such as "elephants without teeth" are still worth reflecting on, which is an unexpected species change and a change in an uncontrollable direction. This change obviously reflects the governance inability of human society, which is that human beings cannot control related violations of the law and even criminal acts, resulting in unexpected consequences acting against wild animals.

Obviously, the demand for buying and selling is the source of changes in the original characteristics of this species. But nature will ignore this and will only resist in the most straightforward and decisive way, resulting in a biological cost that human beings cannot afford.

Therefore, for ivory, we should use human vision and scientific concepts to transcend the special connotation of ivory given by previous cultures and cancel the "legitimacy" of ivory within the framework of contemporary culture.

Not only living things, human activities actually have the power to "transform the world", and human beings are often unable to control this force. This year, for example, people feel that extreme weather seems to be more frequent. There is scientific basis for this, and the assessment report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has pointed out that global warming has led to the frequent occurrence and intensity of extreme weather such as heavy rainstorms, floods, droughts, typhoons, high temperature heat waves, cold waves, sandstorms and other extreme weather in some areas.

Moreover, human activity seems to have altered the unit of measurement of history, creating the effect of "historical compression" . Climate change, biological evolution, what used to be a long evolutionary process in nature, now seems to have produced visible changes within a generation.

These phenomena should provoke reflection that the acceleration of the evolution of nature actually means that past experience is inadequate and beyond the historical summary of mankind. We cannot predict and may not be able to bear the consequences of this.

Original title: A warning of the phenomenon of elephant toothless "evolution": reflecting the governance inability of human society