Extravagant Results of Nature’s Arms Race

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt5HniNUN_Y&feature=player_embedded

Key Ideas:

• Douglas J. Emlen, a biologist at the University of Montana, has assembled ideas on evolutionary forces that have made animal weapons so diverse.
• Darwin proposed both armaments and ornaments are shaped by competition for mates (struggle between males and females): sexual selection.
• The cost of developing and carrying weapons was outweighed by the greater access to females gained by owning some prized possession.
• Weapons started out small and then grew, but the bigger the weapons, the less they seem to cause the loss of life–acquired a “signaling” role in some species.
• Humans have small physical weapons (teeth and claws), but that is because we manufacture weapons.

Reflection

It’s amazing that humans have so much in common with dung beetles. We all seem to want to find a mate who can take care of us and/or give us what we want. The article talks about how organisms, usually males, have developed weapons to gain something like food and to impress the opposite gender. The other creatures only develop physical attributes that they can use as weapons. And as humans, we create weapons. We have evolved into developing weapons that could destroy the whole many times over. Let’s hope that we don’t use our weapons for that purpose, and only use them to impress the other gender. The article seems to imply that we just have them for posturing, but who can really be sure about how far we will go? This course helped me to understand this topic because we studied evolution and the evolutionary arms race between species.

MLA: Wade, Nicholas. "Extravagant Results of Nature's Arms Race." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. 23 Mar. 2009. Web. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/science/24armo.html.