Well, for starter if you don’t die after mating you might be able to mate again.
This might—purely hypothetically—lead to a massive boom in octopus population, causing the octopi to eat everything edible, causing mass starvation.
Or it might be that octopi lack any form of parental instinct; that, six months after the babies are born, the parents see them as “food”, severely reducing the probability of there being another generation. (This would even be an advantageous mutation for octopi that die after mating, because it means that a given genetic line will work towards eradicating the children of any other genetic lines, giving their children less competition...)
Either way, until an octopus in the wild develops the “does-not-die-after-mating” mutation on its own (or possibly escapes from the lab, if what those scientists did is inheritable), evolution will do nothing to get rid of it. And once it does turn up in the wild—well, all else being equal, I’d expect that mutation would supplant the previous, “die-after-mating” model eventually… after a few thousand years or so. Evolution is not, by any means, a completed process.
I’m not quite sure; I think it might be because of the claim that one of the possibilities I’d suggested required invoking group selection to work (a claim which I’m not sure is valid, but I’m also not sure enough of my grounds to argue against). That’s the only reason I can think of...
That is true.
This might—purely hypothetically—lead to a massive boom in octopus population, causing the octopi to eat everything edible, causing mass starvation.
Or it might be that octopi lack any form of parental instinct; that, six months after the babies are born, the parents see them as “food”, severely reducing the probability of there being another generation. (This would even be an advantageous mutation for octopi that die after mating, because it means that a given genetic line will work towards eradicating the children of any other genetic lines, giving their children less competition...)
Either way, until an octopus in the wild develops the “does-not-die-after-mating” mutation on its own (or possibly escapes from the lab, if what those scientists did is inheritable), evolution will do nothing to get rid of it. And once it does turn up in the wild—well, all else being equal, I’d expect that mutation would supplant the previous, “die-after-mating” model eventually… after a few thousand years or so. Evolution is not, by any means, a completed process.
This relies on group selection to work.
Why was this down-voted?
I’m not quite sure; I think it might be because of the claim that one of the possibilities I’d suggested required invoking group selection to work (a claim which I’m not sure is valid, but I’m also not sure enough of my grounds to argue against). That’s the only reason I can think of...