Extinction of steam locomotives derails assumptions about biological evolution

[Adlington]

I cannot find a thread/forum dealing with steam locomotives and evolution. So may this is the right place?

Bruce Lieberman, professor of ecology & evolutionary biology and senior curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Kansas University Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum, sought to use steam-engine history to test the merits of "competitive exclusion," a long-held idea in paleontology that species can drive other species to extinction through competition.

Lieberman found the fossil record largely lacks the detailed data verifying competitive exclusion found in the history of steam engines: "It's really hard to actually see any evidence that competition does play a big role in evolution," Lieberman said.

Source (phys.org)

Most of the article goes well over my head, but maybe there are some folks here who could make constructive comments on the subject.

 

[DaleCooper]

I think it was published 4 days too early.

 

[AlterEgo]

Sounds like something out of Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner. What a bizarre comparison to make.

Locomotives do not adapt themselves but are subject to outside intervention actively determining their fate. Humans actively decided the end of steam operation and made mostly a binary choice (“should we buy more steam locos or go for a diesel or electric one?”).

The analogy is far more in line with creationism and divine providence than evolution as a theory of selection.

 

[D6130]

This sounds very much like a theory from a Trump supporter!

 

[oldman]

The analogy is far more in line with creationism and divine providence than evolution as a theory of selection.

It looks like the journalist has misunderstood the original paper. The writers are not creationists, just scientists having fun. The issue is how important inter-species competition is in evolution. For them steam locomotive development, which they measure by tracking changes in the mean tractive effort of new locomotives, is a case where competition led to extinction, which is true.

Is this relevant to evolutionary biology? Answer - 'we don't know':

Our results thus cannot, at this time, resolve what role, if any, competition plays in driving extinction at the macroevolutionary scale. They do, however, provide a path forward that may serve to resolve the issue by addressing the existing impasse in identifying causal relationships in fossil time series [9]. There is no doubt that the SL was derailed by its competitors; however, it still remains to be established if biological clades are frequently similarly sidetracked.

This research was supported by the US National Science Foundation Biodiversity on a Changing Planet award 2225011.

Source

 

[Sorcerer]

Even if we accept the analogy given, I do not accept the idea that steam engines were driven to extinction by competitive evolution, because quite simply there was no competition. Aside from the usual teething troubles one might expect of any new technology, there was practically nothing that steam engines could do against a diesel/electric engine which is why little if any developed railway in the world still uses them in regular service.

 

[najaB]

I think someone is aiming for an Ig Nobel Prize...