
Giant ape went extinct 100,000 years ago, due to its inability to adapt - diodorus
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160104080854.htm
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sravfeyn
I find evolution terminology funny.

Aren't the terms 'something going extinct' and 'inability to adapt'
essentially same. They are symmetrically causal to one another. It has
inability to adapt, hence it went extinct; it went extinct hence we say it
didn't have the ability to adapt. What new unit of knowledge do we gain by
saying something like the OP's title?

In short, the 'ability to adopt' is itself measured in terms of whether
'something is extinct or not'

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pizza
They mention that the ape was mainly restricted to forests - wouldn't a
metabolically-imposed habitat restriction limit the species' exposure to _ex
situ_ adaptations?

Which is to say, we gain insight into how metabolism, specialization and
extinction play together. Although, perhaps this is what you meant by
correlating extinction and inability to adapt?

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Someone
Copy-pasted summary, with emphasis added:

"The demise of the giant ape Gigantopithecus has been the focus of recent
study, where researchers have reached the conclusion that the presumably
largest apes in geological history died due to their _insufficient
adaptability_. Analyses of fossil tooth enamel show that _the primates were
restricted to forested habitats_."

So, the forest turned into savannah faster than they could adapt. Similar
things happened and happens to zillions of species.

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dredmorbius
Interesting adjunct of the Red Queen hypothesis: species survival
probabilities are largely constant over time, or conversely, species don't get
_better_ at surviving simply by surviving longer.

"Leigh Van Valen proposed the hypothesis to explain the "Law of
Extinction",[1] showing that in many populations the probability of extinction
does not depend on the lifetime of this population, instead being constant
over millions of years for a given population."

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_queen_hypothesis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_queen_hypothesis)

This strikes me as fascinating, and makes me wonder about where similar rules
do or don't apply (e.g., business, organisational, or national longevity,
hardware failure rates, etc.).

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pizza
Very interesting. I'm hardly a bio/ecologist but I think that I have some
links you may find pertinent:

* The Lindy effect [0] is a theory of the life expectancy of non-perishable things that posits for a certain class of nonperishables, like a technology or an idea, every additional day may imply a longer (remaining) life expectancy:[1] the mortality rate decreases with time. This contrasts with living creatures and mechanical things, which instead follow a bathtub curve, where every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy (though longer overall life expectancy, due to surviving this far): after childhood, the mortality rate increases with time.

* Correlations, Risk and Crisis: From Physiology to Finance [1] - "in crisis, typically, even before obvious symptoms of crisis appear, correlation increases, and, at the same time, variance (and volatility) increases too."

* Liebig's Law [2] - growth is constrained by the minimum resource, not the total of resources

* Metabolic theory of ecology [3] - the metabolic rate of an organism governs observed ecological patterns

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect)

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.0129](http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.0129)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_theory_of_ecology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_theory_of_ecology)

~~~
dredmorbius
Likewise, interesting. I'm quite familiar with Liebig's Law, and the Metabolic
Theory sounds an awful lot like Geoffrey West's work on scale effects (of
pretty much everything: mammals, forests, cities, economies). Lindy Effect and
Risk/Crisis correlations I need to look at.

Appreciate the references.

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sandworm101
Has any species ever died out for anything other than "inability to adapt"? If
they were able to adapt, wouldn't they still be here?

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InclinedPlane
In a way, yes, mass extinctions.

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danieltillett
Even this is a failure to adapt.

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hussong
Are there species that can adapt in time to survive asteroid impact, volcanic
eruptions or other catastrophic events?

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martiuk
Humans could, if we (as a species) could all work towards survival, the most
powerful feature we have evolved is the intelligence to adapt rapidly within
lifetimes rather than over millennia.

I'd like to think most countries would band together to be able to survive a
sudden event as all of their survival is dependant on it.

I'd say most species couldn't adapt before a sudden event (how would they
know?) but can adapt to the after effects of such event.

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tw04
You're assuming they'd stop looking out for #1 and stop fighting over whatever
limited resources were left. I'd like to believe it would happen, but history
doesn't really reflect that.

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bcook
Am I wrong in thinking that a majority of extinct species are gone for exactly
the same reason (insufficient adaptability)?

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JoeAltmaier
Or extinction events

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nwatson
E.g. competition with people.

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goldenkey
Same thing happened between populations. Competition of hunter gatherers with
farmers. People suck :-/

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evincarofautumn
Well, totalitarian farmers. Humans cultivated crops for a long time here and
there before we got the bright idea to put the entire world under the plough.

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danieltillett
Well the choice was let your children die of starvation or farm more land. I
know which one I would have taken.

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evincarofautumn
Yeah, but unfortunately we didn’t account for the fundamental rule of ecology:
more food, more population.

The world population grows every year because we produce more food every year.
Food is what the new people are made of. Somewhat counterintuitively, this is
perfectly compatible with the continued existence of starving people.

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JoeAltmaier
That's nonsense. Feeding people doesn't make them have children. IT keeps them
from dying of starvation.

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goldenkey
Increasing food production causes increases in population. It causes more
people to starve because it is ultimately unsustainable.

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cm2187
One can use this headline as is for so many large companies.

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opop1
coming soon to a cinema near you thanks to Disney.

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wonderlust
If its the Ancestor of orangutan, then how is it extinct?

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m0llusk
Most primates are adapted to very specific environments and diets and because
of that are quite vulnerable to change. There are only two species of primates
that are known to thrive when their environments are completely changed, the
so called "weed apes". These are humans and rhesus which both form social
structures that enable adaptation.

