Seeing a large palm caterpillar seemingly OK at one moment, turning your head, and looking back to see it completely deflated as if a baloon, black goo oozing out, with upwards of 40 larvae anchored to it and spinning their heads around as they create cocoons is seriously eye opening.
Perhaps the most hyper-diverse group of animals in the world are the chalcid or jewel wasps. They don't sting, they lay their eggs in others, including others eggs (some eggs of things so small they were only recently proven to be the hosts), as parasitoids (things that kill their hosts). They are everywhere, it's trivial to catch them on any front lawn with the right techniques, yet the vast majority of people would never know they are there. The broader lineage include some species smaller than the largest amoebas.
If you want to see ecology in a nutshell look at fig wasps, absolutely insane, soldier-like males, blind, wingless, ant-like males of other species, variable length ovipositors that let them exploit all different micro-micro areas of a fig. Multiple inter-dependent species on one species of Fig? Sure, why not. It goes on ad-nauseam.
On my worst days I like to think "Well, at least I'm not a cockroach being eaten alive from the inside out, with my vital organs specifically spared long enough so I can survive as food for the thing eating me, by a parasitic wasp."
And, quite seriously, the existence of this type of horrific parasitism precludes the existence of any sort of benevolent god in my mind. It's easy to imagine a million different universes where this sort of abysmal torture doesn't exist, and it only makes sense in the view of "uncaring" evolution.
This seems silly to me. Where is the line? Would a benevolent god prevent all parasitism? What about predation? Disease? Even if He were to do all of the above, horrific deaths would still be possible through injury, hunger, etc. Would a benevolent god prevent death and heterotrophy as well?
If you were to ascend to the heavens and obtain dominion over all of the universe, would you spend your time meandering around the cosmos, exterminating species whose lifecycles struck you as "horrific"? Would this behavior make you more moral than a god who simply permitted nature to take its course?
> Would this behavior make you more moral than a god who simply permitted nature to take its course?
This makes no sense to me. Doesn't pretty much every major religion believe God created nature in the first place? Yes, if I were God, I would create a nature in which the horrific torture of innocent, sentient creatures was not possible. On the contrary, currently nature requires this horrific torture for creatures (the parasites) to simply survive in the first place.
These are all bad straw men and your "slippery slope" arguments are unconvincing. It's easy for rational people to disagree on the potential benefits of certain hardships. I for one would certainly want my own death (eventually), and as I get older I have less against the process of aging than I did in my youth.
But that's why the torture of this parasitoidism is so clear cut. I can't imagine any sane person thinking that this kind of torture is anything but pain and evil. Fry's example is a great one "The world has it in insects whose whole life cycle is to borrow into the eyes of children and make them blind that eat outwards from the eyes. Why? Why would you do that to us? You could have easily have made a creation which that didn't exist." If any person created that kind of torture device we'd consider them to be one of the evil-personified villains in a comic book novel. But yet we come up with all these ridiculous explanations about how a benevolent god created that, just for shits and giggles?
The fig symbiosism with wasps goes even further than that, since nematodes are also involved, and that they too are bespoke for their fig hosts. AFAIK, the nematodes help mediate wasp reproduction.
There's a free documentary on Youtube called "The Queen of Trees" which goes over the lifecycle of an African Sycamore Fig Tree and follows the crazy amount of life that it supports over a year, including the lifecycle of the sycamore fig wasp. It's unbelievable, and deserves a watch by all who are interested in ecology.
>Living inside some of these small wasps was another even tinier, rarer parasite, a “hyperparasitoid” wasp known as Mesochorus cf. stigmaticus. It kills the parasitic wasp around the same time as the wasp kills the caterpillar, and emerges 10 days later from the caterpillar’s carcass.
I would be that parastitic wasp, I would be afraid and even tinier one is ready to kill me right after I also kill the bigger one. How do you know which one is the last!
We don't, and I don't bring up the following to excuse humanity for our destruction of other species, but it's still just an interesting philosophical point to consider. We're as much a part of the circle of life and evolution as all the organisms that came before us. I mean, you think we're bad for other species, just think about cyanobacteria, which in their thirst for energy polluted the atmosphere with an extremely toxic gas that caused one of Earth's major extinction events.
Of course, that gas was molecular oxygen, and eventually other organisms evolved aerobic respiration, and that toxic gas is now required by many of Earth's organisms to survive. Now, that change took a billion years or so, as opposed to humans doubling CO2 concentrations in a couple hundred years, but it's still interesting to think about the crazy history of life on Earth.
I completely agree with you. We can mess it up, but at geological time scale, life will regenerate. Evolution is very robust.
Although, we live at human timescale. It will be a pity for our sons and daughters…
My grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting was outlawed --- I worry that my children will live in a time when commercial fishing is outlawed.
That we are part of some circle of whatever does not make the consequences of our actions, and therefore our actions, any better. The cyanobacteria were bad; we have more of a choice.
Also, if we release gasses that kill and impoverish large portions of us, it won't help that it's 'natural'; it will make no difference at all.
GP's point was that cyanobacteria were NOT "bad". They're a part of nature, how can that be bad? Good and bad are strictly human constructs, relating to human (primarily social) behaviour.
GP clearly mentioned in their first paragraph that they aren't defending it by pointing out that it is natural. Assuming that they are is committing the is/ought fallacy.
No, but they said it's an interesting philosophical point to consider, because some bacteria did more damage than us. This isn't true (it's not an interesting point), because we're arguably the only species that know we're causing damage, and can choose not to do it.
I don't think that's the interesting philosophical point. The interesting part is that out of such a devastating event emerged a much more diverse ecosystem that couldn't have existed otherwise.
The timescale is important though. It happened slowly enough that other forms of life could evolve and thrive. We're changing things and killing off species too quickly for evolution. If we screw up geoengineering it could be so fast that we wipe out everything (including ourselves). Maybe some extremophiles will survive at least.
> It happened slowly enough that other forms of life could evolve and thrive. We're changing things and killing off species too quickly for evolution.
That is quite definitely not how evolution works:
1. Other individual forms of life don't "evolve". Evolution only works by killing off large numbers of creatures, and only ones that have genes that differ by chance, and are more fit in whatever the new environment is, exist to pass their genes to the next generation.
2. There have been a number of significant extinction events that happened in the past that were much faster than whatever humans are doing now. I'm pretty sure the meteor that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs happened pretty quickly.
Of course they do. Populations can evolve with successive generations without ever killing off large numbers of creatures. They simply do it slowly as conditions change and those with certain genes become advantaged over others and become more common. It's the "passing their genes to the next generation" which becomes a huge problem when everyone in the current generation dies or any creature that is born dies before it can reproduce.
> There have been a number of significant extinction events that happened in the past that were much faster than whatever humans are doing now.
But not faster than what we're capable of doing if we start geoengineering and it all goes wrong. The dinosaur killing meteor took a long time to kill off everything that it did (on a human timescale). How long exactly is uncertain but likely thousands of years to tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. Time enough for a whole lot of generations. We might not have that long if we poison our atmosphere, destroy the ozone layer, or kill everything in the oceans.
> How long exactly is uncertain but likely thousands of years to tens if not hundreds of thousands of years.
I don't know where you're getting this from. Everything I've read was that the large dinosaurs were killed off due to the effects of reduced sunlight in a few years. Here is an article that says it took 15 years: https://phys.org/news/2023-10-asteroid-year-winter-dinosaurs...
While the great oxidation event happened over a prolonged period of time, evidence points to a significant decrease in the size of the earth's biosphere over that time [1]. It's hard to say exactly what happened that early in the earth's history, but if we look at mass extinctions, they are by definition a rapid decrease in biodiversity where evolution fails to keep pace with extinction. If you graph the number of species over time, you see these periodic cliffs when mass extinctions occur [2].
The problem with climate change is not that humans will destroy life on this planet - it will recover from us, eventually - but we can make it much harder for us to live here and cause a lot of suffering and harm, and maybe even cause our own extinction.
I think it’s an interesting philosophical point to consider. In fact, I remember finding researching and writing a paper on this general question fascinating as a philosophy undergrad.
Do "we" really have a choice? As individuals, granted. But as a species, there is no mechanism to actually arrive at a decision which would result in a particular choice being made.
> as a species, there is no mechanism to actually arrive at a decision which would result in a particular choice being made.
We make choices like that regularly, in fact. We're a social species and organize ourselves, make rules, make large scale decisions through government.
People love to indulge this odd fantasy of powerlessness - it's very convenient for those who want to make the decisions for everyone else.
* We can go to general, world wide conventional war. Just the amount of oil and environmental damage spent, producing machines (eg, airplanes, tanks, missiles, ships) would be astronomical
* Nuclear war would likely break out at some point, when someone is backed into a corner
* Biological warfare will likely be a component of any large scale future war. Naturally, mistakes will be made, and one favourite is destroying an enemy's food supplies.
So imagine crops or food animals targeted by disease, and it spreads to other lifeforms
My point is, I have been wondering that when things get very very visibly bad, when no one can rationalize away what is happening, when everything is falling apart due to global migration, land loss, loss of crop land, etc etc...
Will war then occur, with "pro environmental" nations working to prevent environmental damage of others? And then, of course, causing waaay more damage due to the war?
You should write some dystopian books. You can see that, through democratic governance, we have managed many problems and crises. The problem is when people undermine democracy - either to grab power, or to act out on frustration and hopelessness.
Nothing is stopping us from solving these problems, except hopelessness.
Aside from the absurdity of morally judging bacteria, they were arguably good.
While they genocided existing (almost exclusively single cell) organisms, by producing oxygen, they prepared conditions for orders of magnitude richer and more complex life than was possible before.
Very true. I guess the challenge is to balance, if it's at all possible, the needs of humans and/or other species with that of the overall ecosystem. For example, in India there is a massive program underway to connect the various rivers across the country to alleviate drinking water shortages and increase the use of inland waterways for transportation. However, the net ecological impact of the program is not known. I doubt it is possible to really calculate, in advance, the impact of such programs.
We know perfectly well what we are doing. We are just in a system that tends to be dominated by emergent behavior. So.. we just can't predict the outcomes with any level of accuracy.
Haha. I can read your comment as a joke, and if spoken in conversation in response, I think it would go down well :)
But since I have a minute, it’s also fun, perhaps, to play around with the idea that you thought "we don't know what we're doing" wasn’t - but it is! - another way of stating the same thing that you say: that we don't understand the consequences of our actions.
It’s interesting, because your rephrasing highlights the nuances of language, and the difference between literal and idiomatic, or perhaps more metaphorical interpretations. And even the differences between languages.
It's likely to be very different in other languages, such as German, or Japanese, perhaps.
But in English, the phrase, “you don't know what you're doing”, is most commonly used to mean: you do not understand the consequences of your actions; These will produce unintended effects, that will likely be different to your intended effects.
In other words, the phrase I used, in English, almost always includes the situation that you describe, rather than the seemingly more literal interpretation of “You are not aware of, nor comprehend the very actions themselves, which you take or plan to take, regarding this thing”.
It is fascinating to flip it around and see that idiomatic phrase through that more literal interpretation, that I’m assuming you made, whether for comic phrasing or not, mind!
And curious to wonder how we came to have one meaning pointed to by the sign for the other.
Although, due to the nuances of language, I can’t even be sure that it is to this more literal interpretation that you in fact are actually referring! It could be an even further far afield interpretation that has eluded me, and all the other commenters here thus far.
The endless Fascinations of language! that’s probably why we rely on idiom. But no disparagement to you for, whether knowingly or not, trying something a little different. Haha! :)
"Emergent behavior" is just a fancy term for "too complicated for us to understand". Things you consider obvious would be considered "emergent" to somebody a bit dumber than you, and things you consider "emergent" would be considered obvious to somebody a bit smarter than you.
It's a specific term with specific understanding, which you are attempting to redefine to fit your argument. This does not have anything to do with the intelligence of the beholder.
For example, writing software, you can have two working parts of the system, that when operating in concert, produce incorrect results. It may be that you just failed to predict the invariant, or you misunderstood the timing, or changed some other small thing. In almost all cases, you can work backwards to discover the source of the behavior. This is what a "case study" is, and they're quite popular on this site.
The danger with your mentality, I feel, is that telling someone "you don't know what you're doing" is very unlikely to alter their behavior. It's entirely ignorant of human nature. It's much more useful to explain to them why you believe they will fail in terms that don't belittle their intelligence.
Sure, it's less of an edge for you to sharpen your wit against, but considering the subject matter, is this really the appropriate subject for scoring your own points?
Not really. Emergent behavior is when the system's behavioral patterns are seemingly disconnected, not obviously derived from the fundamental rules. Emergent behavior is on a different "level" than the originally described actions and participants. Emergent behavior is crowd behavior vs individual psychology, biology and physics to chemistry.
I agree on the part that these "levels" are not actually separated. It's just how us humans happen to think about things - one could say, it's an emergent behavior in itself that comes from how humans form abstract thought. But nevertheless emergence is a useful concept.
And I also agree that we don't know what the fuck is going on. To be honest, I think that we can't know, that no human being ever can achieve complete understanding. And thus, we cannot really say that we're going to do something, and this and this will happen. We don't actually know, but we do manage.
"We know perfectly well what we are doing"...? Whether meant literally or sarcastically, this is hubristic. We have imperfect knowledge of a complex system. We cannot know perfectly well what we are doing, even if "what we are doing" is a few serving their own interests.
It's meant to be taken in concert with the rest of the statement. It would be absolutely foolish to do anything if you can't predict the outcomes, regardless of how well versed and skilled you are in whatever art it is you are practicing.
And yes.. you can know perfectly what you are doing. I'm sitting in a chair typing a comment. Are you suggesting that this is actually gnostic hubris on my part?
> And yes.. you can know perfectly what you are doing. I'm sitting in a chair typing a comment. Are you suggesting that this is actually gnostic hubris on my part?
I think you have inadvertently helped validate GP's point. They are clearly not talking about the level like that of sitting in a chair typing a comment. They are talking about the actual impact of what you are doing versus the intended impact. For example, I assume the intended impact of your sitting in a chair typing a comment, was to successfully influence the conversation by making a strong argument. However, things are a lot more complex than most humans can predict, therefore our actions can often have unintended consequences.
Nature doesn't know what she is doing either. It's a system that evolved based on random events that were beneficial for some species and bad for others.
That's an interesting perspective. Worthy of more thought that can be reasonably alotted in reply to an internet comment. Thank you for your contribution! :)
Indeed. Our intentional ecosystem engineering is probably dwarfed by our unintentional transportation of invasive species and infectious diseases, going back centuries. And about zero of that seems to have led to a net increase in biodiversity--in short, we're stumbling about spreading destruction whereever we go.
>But the tiny parasitic wasp H. horticola appears to have been able to fly or at least to be lifted by strong winds to move between islands on the Åland archipelago
When I did agronomy work in Kansas, there were some pests like aphids (and fungal diseases) that are normally unable to overwinter.
Somehow they get blown up high into the air and moved around by jet streams to be dropped hundreds of miles north, where they can become an economic pest but not technically able to complete their life cycle into the next year.
This especially works well with aphids, as part of their lifecycle is making clones of themselves, so just one is needed to cause a local infestation. Often these carry viruses, and the initial effect is random spots of disease showing up in the middle of a field. For pests that migrate under wing power, they tend to initially establish on field edges first and slowly move in.
“Charles Darwin found the example of the Ichneumonidae so troubling that it contributed to his increasing doubts about the nature and existence of a Creator”
“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” - Darwin
I've never understood this argument. Abrahamic god is pretty clearly okay with suffering and torture and murder. He was pretty clear to certain tribes of jews that they should murder certain other tribes of jews, and if you are islamic, he is very clear you should kill nonbelievers, to the point of full scale war. God also gave mankind "dominion" over animals, up to and including murdering them for food, so killing something for food has significant "Okay" precedent.
God does not limit suffering people or animals experience. He has the utmost ability to do exactly that if he wanted, but seemingly he has taken a hands off approach, at least since about the 1600s. I guess he's not that bothered by immense suffering.
And why should he be? He made us in his image, whatever that's supposed to mean, but we also are not meant to understand his ways. Why would such a supernatural being care about the suffering of some toy creatures he made? Do you feel bad when you play action figures and one of them drowns?
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
The Vermin only teaze and pinch
Their Foes superior by an Inch.
So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller yet to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum:
Thus ev'ry [Poster], in his Kind
Is bit by him that comes behind.
Interesting. From what I remember, the parasites that evolved in Tierra resembled viruses. Tierra had a downward-pressure on organism size (the bigger you are, the longer it takes to make a copy of yourself), so organisms evolved that jettisoned their own replication mechanism and relied on pirating the mechanism of another. I wonder what the advantage of being a parasite of a parasite is in that environment.
The hyperparasites in Tierra are strictly speaking not parasites of parasites, rather they’re host "species" that evolved a resistance against some parasite types and, critically, a trick that causes the parasite to actually make a copy of its host when it tries to copy itself using the host’s replication code. So essentially the hyperparasite steals the parasite’s CPU time and still has its own timeslice left to replicate itself.
The whole thing relies on the fact that the Tierra "organisms" live in a flat memory space where you can jump anywhere, including into the middle of other individuals, and just merrily keep executing code from that point. I wonder if something like that was possible in the (hypothetical) RNA world, before cell membranes developed, but I don’t think cell-based life can have a precise equivalent of Tierra hyperparasites. The closest analogue is probably mutualistic relationships that have evolved from parasitic ones.
A simple explanation is that these wasps and microwasps were originally the same species, but due to variation (e.g. size or digestion), the larger ones evolved to bite their host, while the smaller ones for some reasons could not feed on the host, so they left with the only option to cannibalize on their former relatives.
Now we speed up the simulation, and after millions of time steps they will become agents of a different species.
BTW: are there any foundational ABM[1] models that explain how free-living species become symbiotic, parasitic, or ectoparasitic?
> Wolbachia pipientis increases the susceptibility of the parasitic wasp to being taken over by the tiny parasitic wasp M. stigmaticus, which can only live on the H. horticola wasp
Parasitic wasps are horrible nightmare creatures. I don’t know what to think about parasitic wasps that prey on other parasitic wasps. I think in this case the enemy of my enemy is still disgusting.
I saw a youtube video the other day about how a wasp sting infects the caterpillar with a virus to modify its behaviour and stop it from turning into a butterfly.
I'm going to turn this around and suggest introducing a species without its parasites is not a good idea. That's how you get invasive species that spread out of control. Then you have to go find those parasites and pathogens and deliberately introduce them.
Perhaps the most hyper-diverse group of animals in the world are the chalcid or jewel wasps. They don't sting, they lay their eggs in others, including others eggs (some eggs of things so small they were only recently proven to be the hosts), as parasitoids (things that kill their hosts). They are everywhere, it's trivial to catch them on any front lawn with the right techniques, yet the vast majority of people would never know they are there. The broader lineage include some species smaller than the largest amoebas.
If you want to see ecology in a nutshell look at fig wasps, absolutely insane, soldier-like males, blind, wingless, ant-like males of other species, variable length ovipositors that let them exploit all different micro-micro areas of a fig. Multiple inter-dependent species on one species of Fig? Sure, why not. It goes on ad-nauseam.
https://chalcid.org/ for a classic picture in our field.