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Man, the anti-wolf
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Published: November 4, 2009
It's a role of predators in nature to thin herds by selecting the least fit for removal from the gene pool, continually making prey species more adaptive and better able to cope with whatever challenges periodic natural calamities toss their way, thus guaranteeing prey for future wolves.
For most of our existence, Man probably played a similar role in upgrading the world's fauna.
But over the last few centuries, the opposite may have become the case. The mechanism in play is not greed or miscalculation so much as recreation linked to a bizarre bent (now fading at last) for decorating our homes with preserved animal cadavers and ornamenting our world with "decorator" critters.
It's hard to imagine anyone who has ever attended a dog or cat show, or the exotic poultry exhibits at the County Fair, failing to credit the Creator with more acumen in selective breeding than mankind.
Charles Darwin -- trained as a Christian minister -- tried to tell us that, only to be branded as a harbinger of secularism by creationists.
The Supreme Being spent eons providing our planet with warm?blooded dinosaur descendents able to incubate penguin chicks in the Antarctic winter, with sea birds able to spend essentially their entire lives on the wing, and with sperm whales able to dive over a mile to snack on giant squid.
Human prowess, in contrast, has appended to His creation dogs with enough skin to contain two animals, hairless cats and striped chickens so conspicuous they could not hide from a one-eyed weasel in a lunar eclipse.
Often old money types can be distinguished from the equally flush new rich by a superior eye for art. God --"nature" to the secular -- is the old money of evolution, the author of-as the country song goes-"things that work." A wise and careful curator has insured the collection via a robust genetic mechanism that's so far got us through several iterations of atmospheric redesign, numerous glaciations, heat waves, climate?driven inundations and at least one cataclysmic asteroid collision.
Not all human forays into faunaforming have involved selective breeding. Some human adventures in directed evolution have been of the slash-and-burn variety-stripping the earth of its mega-fauna from the wooly mammoth and giant deer (one fossil has twelve-foot antlers) to the American bison, just surviving today at the specimen level compared to the original prairie herds.
Pacific Islander Maori peoples, arriving in what's now New Zealand not long before the Europeans, made short work of the flightless 12?foot tall, four-hundred pound moa birds there-beating the British to the punch.
Also "down under," the thylacene or marsupial "Tasmanian tiger" was hunted to extinction in the last century-though wistful remorse still fosters legends that it yet exists. I imagine some proud pioneer, thumbs in suspenders, pointing to a toothy head over his fireplace and claiming to have potted the very last marsupial tiger. Hopefully we've now reached a level of consciousness where such an tragedy wouldn't occasion a boast.
In India, it was the rage during the Raj to bag a tiger. People now living could see the last of these beautiful, terrible creatures cease to be-and lions as well.
We have zero tolerance for menace in nature. Having made North America safe for agriculture, business and recreation by eradicating threats from wolves, black bears, cougars and crocodiles-barely sparing alligators-humans have made themselves top predator in most locales.
By inference, we have inherited the role and the moral responsibility for thinning out the weak in prey populations. Also by inference, it follows that taxidermists should do a brisk business in decking our halls and mantels with the one-eyed, dwarfish, slow-witted specimens that, left to breed, would have lessened the population's odds for survival. But inference and reality don't match up.
I just finished listening to a thought-provoking audio book by ecologist Dr. John Kricher of Wheaton College in Norton, Mass. His explanations and alarming insights moved me to write this column.
Dr. Kricher describes a perverse reverse culling effect over just a few generations on the size and presumed adaptability of big horn sheep. They're smaller now as a result of selective human competition to display the biggest big horns' big horns above their fire places. In just a few decades, the literally "targeted" removal of the largest, fittest, big horn sheep from gene pools has visibly made the animals smaller and probably weaker.
In a world-class instance of the law of unintended consequences, the dawn of taxidermy over the last few hundred years may have ushered in "decorator evolution," creating a human subculture which, in pursuing competitive decoration, culls the strongest from animal populations, leaving the least fit to breed in their stead.
Man may have become -- for evolutionary purposes -- "the anti-wolf."
(Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com)
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