This Irish Elk analogy is actually pretty ignorant in terms of how 
evolution works. There is no such thing as 'wired for extinction'.

If some male Irish elk die because their antlers are too big, they are 
removed from the gene pool and smaller antlers are selected for. There 
is a tension between sexual selection for larger antlers, and survival 
selection for smaller ones. In a stable environment some kind of dynamic 
midpoint is found.

A danger arises to all species when the environment changes very 
rapidly. This is what appears to have pushed the Irish elk into 
extinction, well after the end of the last ice age some 7.7 kya (not 11 
kya as the quoted author seems to think), under a combination of changes 
in vegetation and hunting pressure from human hunters.

There is no evidence to suggest that it went extinct because of its 
antlers. This actually seems improbable. Very few males would need to 
survive in order to fertilise all available females, after all - so even 
a 90% male attrition would have no effect on the survival of the 
species. And the females did not have large antlers.

Chances are the Irish Elk went the way of other Pleistocene megafauna 
such as the straight-tusked elephant, the woolly mammoth, woolly 
rhinoceros, saber-toothed tiger, etc - made vulnerable by climate change 
(but bearing in mind they had already survived numerous glacial cycles) 
and ultimately killed off by human hunters, the essential new factor.

If we are to turn the Irish Elk into a climate change parable, let's at 
least get our facts straight!

Oliver.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Elk

On 04/03/2011 20:48, George Marshall wrote:
> *Maybe no one cares about climate change because we’re wired for extinction*
>
> /This piece was written by George Black
> <http://www.onearth.org/author/george-black>./
>
> In my unending (and thus far, I have to confess, largely fruitless)
> attempts to figure out why Americans aren't more alarmed about climate
> change, one of the more intriguing ideas I've heard recently was put to
> me by a psychologist named Andrew Shatté
> <http://www.ims-online.com/faculty.asp?id=shatteandrew>.
>
> Shatté, a professor at the University of Arizona, is best known for his
> work on resilience
> <http://www.amazon.com/Resilience-Factor-Finding-Strength-Overcoming/dp/0767911911>
> -- the ability of humans to deal with adversity. His thesis on climate
> change, in a nutshell, is that we are hardwired for extinction. He
> compares us to the Irish elk
> <http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/mammal/artio/irishelk.html>, which went
> extinct about 11,000 years ago. The male of that species evolved to grow
> big antlers -- I mean really /gargantuan/ antlers, racks up to 12 feet
> wide, designed for the usual reasons of aggression, defense, and sexual
> display. Over time, the antlers got so big that the elk couldn't consume
> enough calories to sustain their growth, so instead the antlers began to
> feed in auto-parasitic fashion on the calcium in the animals' bones. If
> galloping osteoporosis didn't kill them, they got their antlers
> impossibly tangled up in the overhead branches and starved to death.
>
> So why are we like the Irish elk? The problem is the human brain, Shatté
> says. Our evolutionary development has not yet caught up with the change
> in our circumstances. More specifically, the problem is our brain's fear
> triggers. Our instincts are still paleolithic; our fear reflexes respond
> to all the wrong things. They lie dormant in the face of climate change,
> no matter how ominously scientists predict its probable consequences.
> But we're programmed to pump adrenalin at the sight of spiders, snakes,
> and other mortal threats slithering into our caves. We still run a mile
> from snakes, although they only kill about five or six Americans a year
> <http://ufwildlife.ifas.ufl.edu/venomous_snake_faqs.shtml>. The most
> recent annual figure for fatalities from lightning strikes
> <http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/primer/lightning/ltg_damage.html> is 58, but
> would you go anywhere near a golf course in a storm?
>
> For the past year or so, where climate is concerned, our human fear
> triggers seem to have become even more anesthetized. Some of the reasons
> seem obvious. The global economic crisis has shunted many other fears
> into the background, and the climate deniers have done a scarily
> effective job with all their manufactured "scandals" about the integrity
> of science.
>
> But wait a second: let's not generalize about /human/ fear reflexes.
> What we're talking about mainly is /American/ reflexes and /American/
> deniers. Concern about climate change
> <http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_322_en.pdf> has
> diminished almost everywhere in the past year, in inverse proportion to
> the gravity of the warnings from mainstream scientists. But alarm in the
> United States remains much lower than in any other developed country.
> You can argue about the reasons -- the enduring belief in American
> exceptionalism, a cultural distrust of scientists, Rush Limbaugh,
> whatever. Some people explain the gap by invoking the power of the
> fossil fuel industry. But in that case, why haven't the climate skeptics
> set up shop in Norway, where the oil business accounts for half of the
> country's export earnings?
>
> Another common argument -- and this is implicit in what Shatté says --
> is that we aren't scared by climate change because the threat seems
> remote and abstract. Bangladeshis
> <http://www.onearth.org/article/the-gathering-storm> may worry about
> sea-level rise, and Peruvians
> <http://www.onearth.org/article/life-and-death-in-a-dry-land> may fret
> about melting glaciers, but for Americans, climate change is still
> something that is happening only in a galaxy far, far away.
>
> I don't really buy that. I spend a fair amount of time in the West,
> which is experiencing at least three spectacularly visible impacts of
> global warming: prolonged drought, raging forest fires, and the
> destruction of forests by the mountain pine beetle
> <http://www.nrdc.org/wildlife/whitebark/>. Sit on your front porch in
> Wyoming or Idaho and you can almost see the trees dying in front of your
> eyes -- and then hold your breath to see if they will burst into flames
> come summer. The conundrum, though, is that these states are among the
> reddest in the country, the most likely to distrust the science on
> climate change <http://www.rockymountainclimate.org/action_2.htm> and
> the most hostile to any government effort to reduce carbon emissions.
>
> So what's the problem with Americans? (A question that occupies a good
> amount of bar, pub, and water cooler time in Europe.) In a widely noted
> comment last October, Eileen Claussen
> <http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/10/why-republicans-become-worlds-only-major-political-party-denying-climate-change.php>,
> president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, pointed out that
> while conservative political parties in other countries have small
> pockets of climate deniers, the United States is the only nation in the
> developed world where a major political party is almost uniformly
> hostile to the scientific consensus. There are still a good number of
> skeptics in the U.K., but none of the three major parties there
> questions that climate change is a huge problem that demands an urgent
> response. European conservative leaders like Nicolas Sarkozy in France
> and Angela Merkel in Germany feel the same way.
>
> All of which brings me back to Andrew Shatté's theory of evolution.
> Shatté is a remarkably eloquent guy (his recent TED talk
> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iUs3ZEBDjo> on resilience is worth a
> look). But in the end I wasn't convinced. If he's right about evolution,
> why are Americans so much less fazed by climate change than the rest of
> the world? Isn't evolution supposed to be a uniform process in a
> species? Or does it happen at different rates depending on your
> nationality or the accidents of birth? Were the elk in the peat bogs of
> Killarney more unconcerned about their plight than their cousins in
> Donegal? However, I suppose in the end debating theories about climate
> change and evolution depends a lot on whether you believe in evolution
> in the first place. But let's not go there. After all, this is America.
>
> /This article was //syndicated/
> <http://www.onearth.org/article/humans-with-antlers>/with permission
> from //OnEarth/ <http://www.onearth.org/>.
>
> /OnEarth <http://www.onearth.org/>/ is a magazine and website about the
> environment and its impact on how we live — and vice versa.
>
> *George Marshall,*
>
> *Director of Projects,*
>
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