this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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I think your probably right on all counts (supported by the highly scientific diagram, 10/10), but also deer are just really stupid, which I can say from having lived in their habitat half my life lol. I think it's mostly likely that intelligence was just never evolutionarily very useful to deer, it almost never is as it takes a lot of energy and doesn't generally support reproduction. The strategy deer have adopted seems to involve shitting out a bunch of babies each year and hope for the best. Which works great when the best isn't 2-5 tons of metal with a bunch of kinetic energy.
You are making a basic framing error here which has been deeply ingrained into us as a narrative justification for hyper individualism and late stage capitalism, prey aren't at war with predators.
Ever watch a whitetail deer spook and dash away into the underbrush? They flip their tail up to expose a bright white target on their rump.
Why?
Because predators overwhelming target sick and vulnerable prey, predators stabilize prey population swings and keep them from catastrophically exploding. Prey in turn sustain predators.
Whitetail deer display the signal to demonstrate they are healthy. I wouldn't call it symbiosis, but I also think it is a serious categorical error to conceptualize it as an existential war or arms race. If whitetail deer suddenly evolved to become so fast predators could never catch them even if they counter-evolved to be a bit faster it would either lead to extinction of deer or the extinction of deer and the ecosystems around them, those are the only to possible end states neither of which is good for deer.
The reason I am saying this is that unlike predators, cars have no consistent genetic forcing on deer, car deerkills are essentially random and thus only function to lower the signal-to-noise ratio on other genetic forcings that continously shape deer into well adapted positive contributors to the ecosystems around them. How can you expect a species to adapt to a process of violence that is so chaotic and disconnected from the surrounding ecosystem that it is evolutionarily invisible except as a force of degradation?