So, You’re an Exobiologist and You Meet an Organism…

They likely don’t speak your language, but what is your first question?

Whether a microbial (to me) form of life or one the size of Olympus Mons, I’d ask, by observing, “so, are you an autotroph or a heterotroph (is your energy source abiotic or biotic)? And not just because I’d want to know if they might consider me a tasty morsel. I live in an energy-centric world for my nature-centric worldview tells me so. There is energy and matter (or matter-energy) and there are ‘rules of the game’, e.g. what we like to think of as laws or principles that we primates can understand (e.g. second law of thermodynamics, maximum power principle).

So the first question should be a given, baked into the nature of things. But what would be your second question? I’m reminded of Isaac Asimov’s second question, ‘so who was the second greatest scientist?’

There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. ‘If I have seen further than other men,’ said Isaac Newton, ‘it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” ― Isaac Asimov

When scientists dispute among themselves who is the greatest scientist in history, they are actually arguing about who is the second greatest. Writers may dispute who, after Bill Shakespeare, is the greatest writer?

So, organism, what I want to know is, are you reproductively K-selected or r-selected? There are other second questions, but this is what I want to know because I already know that you reproduce and are evolvable, but what is your reproductive strategy?

Do you seek to live as a K-strategist within limits under penalty of extinction if you fail? Or are you an r-strategist maximizer who always tosses as many offspring as possible into the environment, some of whom may have favorable mutations (e.g. sexual reproductives, such as salmon, laying 5k eggs will maximize variation and select for maximum fitness/adaptation to changing conditions each generation)?

If you are K-selected (e.g. an elephant), then you’ll invest in your as many as are enough as often enough offspring to maintain a population of enough to remain within environmental carrying capacity without overshoot and degradation of the biome you depend on.

Being a K-selected (wolves) or r-selected (salmon) is also the reproductive strategy your ancestors going back eons likely had, so your biology is one or the other, even though both have an ability to grow their population exponentially to recover from a depopulation event or to initially colonize a region, e.g. the Polynesian rats (Rattus exulans) the first humans who colonized Rapa Nui Island brought with them as a food source (along with chickens). Human colonization of New Zealand is dated 1320 to 1350 CE, but Polynesian rat’s fossils date from 1280 CE, perhaps brought be explorers looking for new islands who failed to return with news of their discovery, or did with a delay in organizing the migration of 400 Polynesians (archaeogenetic estimate of founding population size).

Polynesian rats often found themselves on islands without predators, and so could have as few as one pup per litter, and litter spacing could be increased to maintain a steady state population. Initially, they can have as many as 6–11 pups per litter to rapidly grow their population. Human can have one baby at a time (9 surviving at once is record), but twins to quadruplets are common in some human populations (5% in parts of West Africa, 3.3 elsewhere).

While Polynesian rats, like pre-expansionist humans, can adjust their fertility to remain within carrying capacity (a general adaptation syndrome response to stress among normal K-selected species, e.g. wild Norway rats), have caused species extinctions on predator-free islands with endemic small birds having no evolved defense against omnivorous Polynesian rats.

For humans to do the same, it takes technology to overcome evolved defenses and ideology to normalize hunting of prey to extinction. With hunting tech from atlatl/Clovis point to guns, all prey species become to humans like the predator-naive birds on islands were to the rats. As a K-selected species the rats lack a K-culture that normalizes not overhunting/overgathering a resource, on not degrading a biome posterity will depend on.

The San are pre-expansionist humans with a K-culture. In some regions of the Kalahari they do not hunt giraffes. When an anthropologist asked the men hunters why, they referred her to one of their observational ecologists. When she was consulted she explained the the giraffe is the ‘midwife of the acacia’. The acacia tree is a keystone species (a nitrogen fixer) needed to maintain the productivity of the desert the San depend upon. The tree depends upon giraffe eating its fruit/seeds and the seeds need the giraffe feces to germinate where it falls far from the parent tree. If giraffe are not abundant in an area, hunting them may reduce the number of acacias and all non-nitrogen fixing plant species (our ecologists know this detail, if not the San who don’t need to). If the outcome of gaining a short-term benefit of a giraffe feast results too few giraffes and degradation of a biome, the San, unto posterity, are harmed. They, their K-culture, have information of how to live properly with their habitat, information lost during 75k years of r-selected development of an invasive form of humans that seeks to maximize short-term self interests. View Earth as a planet for the taking, and taking it has worked for 75k years, but post climax (likely this century), and then what?

Read more: https://www.city-data.com/forum/history/1385252-who-most-towering-intellect-greatest-genius.html

And second greatest? H.T. Odum? Donella Meadows?