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From Vox
MLMs might not be able to get away with their shady promises much longer -
Regulators are weighing a rule change that could be “disastrous” for MLMs. | oxygen/Getty Images
Multilevel marketing schemes promise the world. Soon, the FTC might make them prove it.
Say I’ve got a business selling bananas, and I want you to sell bananas, too. Presumably, you’d want to know some details about this banana business opportunity, such as whether I’ve ever been sued for lying about my business, whether the amount of money I say you would earn is accurate, and what happens if, after selling for a while, you want to quit. Perhaps you’d want to take a week to think about it before signing on.
For most business opportunities in the United States, that’s the legal standard I would have to follow to get you on board. It doesn’t apply to multilevel marketing companies (MLMs), though. They’re exempt — at least for now.
A decade ago, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) put in place the “business opportunity rule,” which basically describes a set of requirements for people trying to get others involved in a business opportunity, such as a work-from-home job (some of which are scams). The rule says that people offering such opportunities have to provide support for any income claims — if I tell you that you can make $1 million a year in my banana business, I have to prove it. They must also disclose whether they’ve been involved in certain legal actions (such as any involving fraud), and list them out if they have; detail their refund and cancellation policy (if they have one); and provide a list of at least 10 other people who have bought in, all seven days before the person they’re recruiting pays any money or signs anything.
There were plenty of people who believed that MLMs should be included in the FTC rule when it was enacted a decade ago, but they were granted an exception following massive pushback from the industry. “That’s the power of lobbying for you,” said Douglas Brooks, an attorney who specializes in MLMs.
That could be about to change. The FTC announced in June that it would review the business opportunity rule as part of a revised 10-year review schedule — and there is hope that, this time around, MLMs might be roped in.
Earlier this year, then-FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra (who was recently confirmed as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau), put out a statement urging that MLMs and gig-economy platforms be included in the rule. Now that Chopra’s at the CFPB, the other commissioners — including FTC Chair Lina Khan, a protégé of Chopra’s, and Noah Phillips, a Republican-appointed commissioner who has criticized MLMs in the past — are expected to take a look at the issue.
MLMs are certain to push back against their inclusion. One lawyer I spoke to, who asked to withhold their name because they have clients in the industry, told me that the rule would be “disastrous” for MLMs and likely “decimate” the industry. Whether the FTC actually makes any changes to the rule is uncertain, and the process could take months or even years. But it’s a start.
MLMs lobbied their way out of regulation a decade ago. It’s not clear whether they’ll be so lucky now.
To back up a bit, multilevel marketing is a business model where sellers derive profits in two ways — by selling a product or service, and by recruiting other people to sell that product or service. Generally, the latter is more lucrative than the former.
It’s a big industry. The Direct Selling Association (DSA), a trade group representing MLMs, says it was worth $40 billion in 2020 and encompasses millions of sellers. It’s also a controversial one: The vast, vast majority of sellers make little, if any, money in MLMs (they often lose money), and consultants and companies have been caught on multiple occasions making misleading claims about earnings potential and product effectiveness. Critics say MLMs are in essence pyramid schemes, where only people at the top make money, and do so by constantly recruiting new members. MLMs reject this characterization, but at the very least, some MLMs have gotten into trouble with regulators for bad behavior, including Amway, AdvoCare, and Herbalife.
MLMs aren’t completely unregulated — the FTC and Securities Exchange Commission, for example, have some purview over them. But it’s hard not to wonder whether there could be more guardrails, including with something like the business opportunity rule, which MLMs have vociferously opposed.
First proposed in 2006 and finalized in 2011, the business opportunity rule is meant to protect consumers from “bogus business opportunities” by laying out some basic requirements about what potential recruits need to be told and when. When the rule was first proposed, the MLM industry went into overdrive to try to make sure it wouldn’t apply to them. As The Verge outlined in 2014, the DSA got over 17,000 people to send comment letters to the FTC opposing the then-forming rule being applied to MLMs. (By comparison, MLM critics sent under 200 letters.) MLMs also boosted lobbying expenditures and got dozens of members of Congress to write to the FTC urging it to let MLMs be.
“They just swamped the FTC with things basically saying, ‘If you do this to us, it’ll destroy the industry,’” Brooks said.
MLMs were successful: The FTC decided that they should be exempted from the rule, determining that it “would have imposed greater burdens on the MLM industry than other types of business opportunity sellers without sufficient countervailing benefits to consumers.” An FTC staff report said that some MLMs do engage in bad practices and are pyramid schemes, but that would better be determined on a case-by-case basis and the “record developed was insufficient as a basis for crafting MLM disclosures that would effectively help consumers make an informed decision about the risks of joining a particular MLM.”
Looking at how MLMs operate, critics have questioned whether the FTC’s decision was the right one — and hope they’ll decide differently now. There’s been increased scrutiny by the public on MLMs in recent years, and regulators have continued to take notice of their practices. The FTC has sent out warning letters to MLMs during the pandemic over their earnings and product claims (companies and sellers have taken advantage of the crisis). The regulator is currently enmeshed in a lawsuit against Neora, which sells skin care and wellness products, over allegations that it is a pyramid scheme.
The public has taken more notice of MLMs and the business model as well. For a long time, many people who were involved in MLMs and failed (which most do) didn’t talk about it — they were embarrassed, or they felt guilty over roping their friends and family into it, too. Former sellers and experts say that MLM culture is one where leaders place blame for failure fully on the shoulders of the individual. Sellers are told that if it doesn’t work out, it’s their fault and their fault alone. But there has been an explosion of growth in anti-MLM communities on the internet, and there seems to be a greater awareness of the drawbacks the business model brings with it.
In other words, the FTC won’t just be flooded with comments from the pro-MLM community this time around, it’s also likely to hear more from the anti-MLM community as well.
“I would expect that there are going to be many comments, and I would expect that the MLM industry will gather its troops,” said Bonnie Patten, executive director of Truth in Advertising, a consumer advocacy nonprofit.
The FTC’s exact timing here is unclear. Patten said she expects action to begin in December, though she acknowledges it’s a bit of an “informed guess.” Even then, there’s a long road ahead, as the FTC will have to solicit public comments, send notices to lawmakers, and could hold arguments regarding changes. “This is a slow and laborious process,” Patten said.
Now that Chopra is at the CFPB, there have been some doubts among MLM critics as to how efforts to include MLMs in the business opportunity rule will proceed at the FTC. Chopra was the commissioner who had explicitly mentioned including MLMs under the rule, and now, the FTC has four commissioners instead of the usual five, so votes could come down to a two-two split. Still, Patten said she’s relatively optimistic. “If we’re focused on MLM, I think of all the deceptive marketing issues in a deck of cards, MLM is the one that it appears all commissioners agree is an issue,” she said.
The FTC declined to comment on the matter, noting that they generally don’t speak publicly about rule-making processes as they are underway.
People should know what they’re getting into with MLMs
When you watch something like the LuLaRoe documentary or listen to a podcast like The Dream, it’s sometimes hard not to land in the same spot: How in the world can this be legal? Or at the very least, why isn’t more being done to look out for people before they get sucked in?
Most people don’t make money; plenty lose money. Some companies make earnings disclosures available, but they’re generally really difficult to read and understand. Even if it’s relatively clear that eight in 10 consultants make less than $10 a month, recruits are sold on the hope that they’ll be one of the lucky few to make $100,000.
Many MLMs don’t really know where their products go once they arrive at the sellers, who are often encouraged to buy in order to stay active in the company and show their commitment. (Their uplines, the people above them, make money when they buy.) Whether sellers are actually offloading those lotions or essential oils or earrings to other people, or just piling them up in their garage, the corporate office often is unaware.
Including MLMs in the business opportunity rule wouldn’t be a panacea, but at the very least, experts say it could be a good start. “All this rule would have required were some pretty basic disclosures and a seven-day cooling-off period, and you’re saying this is going to destroy the industry?” Brooks, the MLM attorney, said. “What’s going on here? Why would that be so destructive?”
A sample disclosure form on the FTC’s website doesn’t look that complex. Yet, Brooks said he expects it to be a “knock-down, drag-out” fight if it looks to the industry like MLMs will get included in the business opportunity rule. “I don’t doubt that they will go to Congress and try to get a law passed that will sort of preempt that effort,” he said. Indeed, there is a direct selling caucus in Washington, DC, with more than three dozen members, Republican and Democrat alike.
In a statement to Vox, Joseph Mariano, president and CEO of the DSA, said the organization “looks forward to a constructive engagement with the FTC on any prospective rule-making that might apply to direct sellers.” He said the DSA “has a long history of encouraging self-regulation and consumer protection as a complement to appropriate and reasonable government regulation” and pointed to the DSA’s code of ethics, which member companies and sellers must abide by, and the DSA’s self-regulatory council.
Brooks thinks efforts to curb MLM activity should go further than the business opportunity rule and other tools currently in the FTC’s toolbox. (Earlier this year, the Supreme Court curbed some of the FTC’s ability to seek monetary relief, which has prompted some of the conversation around the business opportunity rule.) In his view, regulators need to have harder lines around what MLMs can and can’t do in the first place.
“The FTC should prohibit certain types or aspects of MLM compensation plans, because the real problem with these companies is in the compensation plans, it’s the whole structure of the thing,” Brooks said. “People end up spending thousands and tens of thousands of dollars having thought that this was originally a $50 investment.”
So back to my banana business. At the very least, many experts say, I should have to tell you if the banana sellers under me are making $1 or $1 million a month. If I promise you that you’ll be a banana billionaire, I should have proof, and also tell you if there was a banana-related fraud lawsuit in my past, and give you a few days to decide if you want to get in on the bananas — whether I’m an MLM or not.
The harder question — and one the FTC isn’t looking at now, but perhaps should — is whether I should be able to get you in on the banana business at all if I know you’re almost sure to fail. If 99 of 100 sellers are in banana bankruptcy, just how hard can I sell you on the 1 in 100 dream of being a banana billionaire? That’s a question for another day.
The fate of the planet will be negotiated in Glasgow -
A bicyclist crosses the Clyde Arc road bridge by the Scottish Events Centre, which will host the COP26 UN Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland. COP26 will officially begin on October 31 with the procedural opening of negotiations, and end November 12. | Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Here’s what you need to know about COP26, the high-stakes climate conference that starts on October 31.
Almost every country in the world signed the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a monumental accord that aimed to limit global warming. But it was forged on a contradiction: Every signatory agreed that everyone must do something to address the urgent threat of climate change, but no one at the time pledged to do enough.
In the years since the agreement, the emissions that trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere have continued to rise.
The Paris Agreement aimed to limit global warming this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius, compared to temperatures before the industrial revolution, with a more optimistic goal of staying below 1.5°C. Both of these goals would require rapid and radical shifts away from fossil fuels — and eventually, zeroing out emissions of greenhouse gases entirely.
Signatories did agree that they would set more ambitious targets for themselves over time and eventually get on track to meet global climate goals. Whether they will actually do so is about to be tested at COP26, the most important international climate conference in years.
“This is definitely the biggest [climate meeting] since Paris, and it has to be a turning point if we’re going to be successful,” said Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute.
The meeting will take place in Glasgow, Scotland, between October 31 and November 12. More than 100 world leaders, including US President Joe Biden, are expected to attend a portion of the conference.
The world has already failed to meet many earlier targets, drawing the ire of climate activists. “Build back better. Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah, blah, blah. Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah,” Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said in September. “Words that sound great but so far have not led to action.”
Some thorny issues that derailed past meetings, such as payments for developing countries that are living through climate disasters, remain unresolved. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic, which delayed COP26 from its original dates in November 2020, is still claiming thousands of lives per day, leading to national lockdowns and disrupting trade. Even after a year of devastating hurricanes, heat waves, and wildfires, climate change may not be every country’s top priority.
But there’s no time to lose: The window for meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement is closing. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2018 that staying below 1.5°C of warming required the world to roughly halve emissions from current levels by 2030. This year, the IPCC reported that the world is poised to miss this target even in the most optimistic scenarios they studied.
“Scientists tell us that this is the decisive decade,” Biden said in April. “This is the decade we must make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis.”
Some countries, seeing the brightening spotlight of COP26, have begun to announce more aggressive climate goals in the runup to the meeting. This week, the UK put out its road map for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century. But the most scrutiny will fall on the world’s largest emitters — China, the US, and India — and whether they will take tangible steps to curb their pollution. Biden and the US delegation are now counting on Congress to pass a suite of climate policies to strengthen their hand at the negotiating table.
What’s on the agenda for COP26?
The Paris climate agreement aims to solve a global crisis, but its bureaucratic constraints have frustrated the process.
Joining the accord is voluntary, which means any signatory can leave if they want to, as the US did briefly last year. And even the countries that stay in have the freedom to set their own goals for cutting greenhouse gases. If they miss their targets, there is no penalty.
It may seem odd that an agreement to save the world from itself would have so few firm rules. However, the Paris Agreement was the culmination of two decades of stalled diplomacy, and many countries shot down stronger language around binding greenhouse emissions targets, oversight, and punishments.
The Paris Agreement is thus a delicate balancing act, accomplishing its goals mainly with nudges and incentives. It aims to steer everyone — developing countries, oil economies, regional rivals, island states threatened by sea level rise — toward a common objective, and that’s a very tall order.
Here are some of the key items on the agenda for COP26 (officially known as the 26th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).
Getting countries to do more: Under the Paris Agreement, every country is required to publish a climate change target and a route for getting there, or what’s called a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC). The first round of NDCs put forward in 2015 were clearly inadequate, putting the world on course for roughly 2.7°C of warming by the end of the century.
Climate leaders hoped that in the runup to COP26, countries would roll out new commitments for the coming decade, as well as long-term strategies for eliminating emissions by the middle of the century. As of October 21, 114 countries and the European Union have submitted new NDCs. Some major emitters like the US, United Kingdom, and China have proposed or submitted stronger targets. But others, like Russia, Brazil, and Australia, did not meaningfully ramp up their goals. Still others like India have yet to submit a new NDC.
The leaders at COP26 will try to create carrots and sticks to motivate the laggards and holdouts to take more aggressive action. Many countries are now adamant that the limit for warming this century should be 1.5°C, now that many countries have already suffered the tolls of disasters worsened by climate change — a sign that 2°C of warming would be far worse.
According to the IPCC, the difference between 1.5°C and 2°C includes 2 extra inches of sea level rise, putting an extra 10 million people at risk of coastal flooding and related problems. Two degrees of warming would double the number of people exposed to extreme heat at least once every five years. This extra warming would also lead to greater declines in fisheries, crop production, and habitats for vital species like insect pollinators.
“Because of that new science, I think certainly in the climate community, 1.5°C de facto is now what everyone is talking about,” Mountford said.
Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Artists paint a mural on a wall next to the Clydeside Expressway near the Scottish Events Centre, where COP26 will take place.
Technology for cutting carbon out of the economy, like renewable energy, has also improved since the Paris Agreement was signed. Some countries and many activists argue that a tougher target is essential to taking advantage of these improvements and that mitigation needs to begin right away.
This conference has to signal a “shift from making commitments to actually taking action,” said Marcene Mitchell, senior vice president of climate change at the World Wildlife Fund. Countries not only need to make bigger promises, Mitchell added, they need to match them with actual policies.
International carbon markets: One of the ways countries are aiming to meet their climate change goals is by pricing carbon dioxide emissions and creating accounting mechanisms for reducing them. That can take the form of credits or offsets that are traded with other countries. Under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, wealthier countries can compensate for their higher emissions by financing clean energy in developing countries or helping restore carbon-absorbing ecosystems like rainforests.
The trouble is that if these markets are not designed well, they may simply end up as a way for wealthier countries to buy their way out of reducing their own emissions. Without proper verification, the credits may not deliver the carbon reductions they promised. In past climate meetings, countries like the US, Australia, and Brazil pushed for language in these rules that would grant them more flexibility. However, most other countries found these provisions unacceptable because they would weaken the program. This issue forced several previous meetings to go over their allotted times. It remains unresolved and may not be settled at COP26.
Loss and damage: The core injustice of climate change is that the people who contributed least to the problem stand to suffer the most. Though not strictly part of the Paris Agreement, a key part of the discussion at COP26 will be around how to compensate countries facing the impacts of climate change today, from rising sea levels eroding shores to more devastating extreme weather.
Securing this funding is a huge priority for many countries, particularly island countries and those with small economies. However, wealthier countries that have historically emitted the most greenhouse gases have resisted language that would force them to chip in and instead advocated softer language that would make these wealth transfers voluntary. And so far, countries have not made much progress in closing the gap. “It’s a contentious issue, it’s a big issue, it’s a complicated issue,” said Mitchell. “This is my own personal view: I don’t think that will get resolved here at this COP.”
Climate finance: It’s expensive to build resilience to climate change and shift from fossil fuels toward clean energy, particularly for developing countries. The UNFCCC created the Green Climate Fund in 2010 to finance these projects around the world with grants and loans. It includes programs like developing sustainable agriculture in Thailand and building cooling facilities for residents in countries like Bangladesh facing extreme heat.
Governments meeting at COP26 set a target of deploying $100 billion a year in international climate financing through programs like the Green Climate Fund by 2020. But so far, countries haven’t contributed enough to meet the target, falling short by $20 billion in 2018, the most recent estimate available.
More international climate financing would help drive down greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries and motivate them to set more ambitious goals. However, some countries now say that even $100 billion isn’t enough. A negotiator representing African countries, for example, told Reuters that international climate financing should be scaled up to $1.3 trillion by 2030.
All eyes are on the United States
The US has the dubious distinction of being the only country to complete a 360-degree turn on the Paris Agreement. It helped convene the accord in 2015, yet former President Trump withdrew the US in 2020. President Biden signed an executive order in January to rejoin and the US was formally back in the Paris accord in February.
Since the US is the wealthiest country in the world and the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, it plays a prominent role in climate negotiations and has an even greater obligation to act on the crisis. At COP26, the US not only has to make up for lost time, it also has to rebuild trust with other countries and show that it’s willing to be more ambitious.
“There is this sense of exhaustion about how long is it going to take for one of the biggest emitters in the world to do its fair share,” Rachel Cleetus, the clean energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Vox’s Rebecca Leber earlier this month.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
President Joe Biden delivers remarks at a virtual summit on climate at the White House in April. The president pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030.
In April, Biden announced that the US was adopting a new climate goal: cutting emissions within the decade by 50 to 52 percent, compared to the US emissions peak in 2005. That’s a big step up from the previous target, which aimed for 26 to 28 percent reductions by 2025. US emissions have been declining since 2005, with a precipitous drop in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, greenhouse gases are already starting to rebound.
President Biden has already used some of his executive power to drive actions on climate change, like setting targets for electric vehicle production, limiting new oil and gas production on public lands, and pushing financial institutions to incorporate climate risk into their assessments.
But the fate of the largest parts of Biden’s climate agenda is in the hands of Congress, not the White House.
Democrats in Congress have been hurrying to put these plans into action with the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better Act. These bills, as originally written, could reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent over the next decade. With midterm elections looming next year, Democrats may not get another chance for years to advance major climate change legislation.
“If that’s done before COP, I think that would actually give a number of countries quite a bit of reassurance that what the administration is committed to will be delivered,” said Mountford. “If it’s not quite done before COP, I think people will still be viewing them with some skepticism.”
But the US delegation may arrive in Glasgow with a weaker hand than they had hoped for because the legislation is already being whittled down as Democrats are forced to compromise in the Senate. “For [the US] to have credibility and leadership, we need to not just come with a statement and commitment, but actually the money to pay for it,” Mitchell said.
What happens now, first in Congress and then in Glasgow, will help shape the ambitions of countries around the world as they meet the challenge of climate change. It’s not a stretch to say that the future of our planet as we know it is at stake.
Poaching is altering the genetics of wild animals -
Elephants and other species are quickly adapting to human threats. Will that help them survive?
Sometime in the distant past, well before humans walked the Earth, the ancestors of modern-day elephants evolved their iconic tusks. Elephants use their bleach-white incisors — they’re technically giant teeth, like ours but longer— to dig, collect food, and protect themselves.
Then Homo sapiens arrived, and elephant tusks became a liability. Poachers kill the massive animals for their tusks, which are worth about $330 a pound wholesale as of 2017. Hunters slaughter roughly 20,000 elephants a year to supply the global ivory trade, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
But just as tusks evolved because they provide a number of benefits, a striking new study shows that somepopulations of African elephants have rapidly evolved to become tusk–less. Published in the journal Science, the paper’s authors found that many elephants in a park in Mozambique, which were heavily hunted for their ivory during a civil war a few decades ago, have lost their tusks — presumably because tuskless elephants are more likely to survive and pass the trait on to their offspring.
Courtesy of Joyce Poole
A tuskless female elephant in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park.
While scientists have known about this trend for a while — it’s not uncommon to see tuskless elephants in places with lots of poaching — the study provides strong evidence that the trait is rooted in genetics, something previous research failed to do, said Andrew Hendry, an evolutionary biologist at McGill University who was not involved in the research. In other words, the study shows evolution in action.
The results also offer a vivid example of how animals can quickly adapt under human pressures such as poaching and climate change. Past research has shown that creatures can evolve new colors, shapes, and even behaviors to better tolerate the increasingly inhospitable world we’ve created for them. The problem is that even rapid evolution hasits limits — and many species are already on the brink.
How a civil war caused elephants to lose their tusks
Social conflict and the decline of wildlife are often closely linked, the authors of the Science study write. Few locations reveal a clearer picture of this than Gorongosa National Park, a protected area in central Mozambique where Shane Campbell-Staton, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University, led the research.
During a 16-year civil war that began in 1977, poachers on both sides of the conflict slaughtered a huge number of elephants in the park for their ivory, which they sold to finance their efforts, according to the study. Over that period, the number of large herbivores (like elephants) at Gorongosa fell by more than 90 percent.
Courtesy of Shane Campbell-Staton
The researchers have to tranquilize elephants in order to collect their DNA.
That’s not all that changed in the park. Between 1970 and 2000 — a period that encompassed much of the impact of the long-running war — the portion of female elephants without tusks nearlytripled. The researchers’ best guess was that it had something to do with genetics: A trait visible only in females suggests it might be associated with changes to genes on the X chromosome. (Female elephants have two X chromosomes, whereas males have an X and a Y chromosome.)
This study all but proved it. The first bit of evidence was that female calves born from tuskless mothers were often themselves tuskless, indicating that the trait is passed on from one generation to the next. “A heritable trait is pretty strong evidence of a genetic basis,” said Robert Pringle, a biology professor at Princeton and a co-author of the study.
The authors also identified a couple of regions in the animals’ DNA that appear to be associated with a lack of tusks. Sure enough, “There is strong evidence for mutations on a particular region of the X chromosome,” Pringle said. Mutations, or variations in an organism’s DNA, are an important engine of evolution. If they result in traits that are beneficial — such as tusklessness, for certain populations of female elephants — they’re more likely to get passed to the next generation and drive evolution.
Remarkably, one of the genes associated with tusklessness is also present in humans, where it’s linked to a condition that limits the growth of our lateral incisors. These are essentially the same teeth that, in elephants, evolved into tusks millions of years ago.
What makes this study so fascinating is that it offers evidence of rapid evolution in an animal that has a pretty long lifespan— 50 or 60 years — in the wild, saidHendry and Fred Allendorf, a professor emeritus at the University of Montana who was not involved in the research.
Studies of elephants “rarely can say anything about the genetic basis” of tusklessness, Hendry said. For years, researchers assumed that rapid evolution was common only in small species with short life cycles. Given these results, “Nobody can argue that evolution isn’t occurring, even in the biggest and longest-lived species,” he added.
Should all elephants ditch their tusks?
In theory, it’s advantageousto be born without tusks in areas where poachers are active, Hendry said. But tusklessness also has its downsides. Elephants need their tusks to dig, lift objects, and defend themselves. The hulking incisors are not useless appendages.
The genes that seem to make female elephants tuskless also appear to prevent mothers from giving birth to male calves — that’s why all the tuskless elephants in the park are female, Pringle said. (Some mothers did give birth to males with tusks, who likely didn’t inherit the gene.) Over time, a shift in the sex of elephants could have consequences for population growth.
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-
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Two male elephants spar in the Masai Mara grassland in Narok, Kenya.
There are also potential costs to African grasslands, which are among the rarest and most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, the study authors write. By turning over soil in search of food and minerals and gouging trees with their tusks, African savanna elephants prevent forests from growing too denseand help maintain grasslands. That’s why they’re considered “engineers” of the ecosystem. If they lose their tusks, a whole web of plants and animals may feel the impact.
“This evolutionary change could have massive cascading ecological influences,” Hendry said.
How humans are changing animals
Humans have shaped the environment around them for centuries, down to the very genetics of wild plants and animals. The tuskless elephants in this study are just one example in a long list of species that have adapted in response to the pressures we’ve placed on them.
“Human-induced changes are creating conditions for fast biological evolution — so rapid that its effects can be seen in only a few years or even more quickly,” a team of scientists wrote in a landmark intergovernmental biodiversity report in 2019.
iStockphoto via Getty Images
Light and dark forms of the peppered moth.
One of the earliest and most famous examples is the peppered moth in the UK. Before the Industrial Revolution, most of the moths flitting about England were white with speckles of black, which helped them blend in with lichen and tree bark. Then, in the mid- to late-1800s, coal-fired power plants and mills started belching dark soot that blackened trees in parts of the country. White moths stood out against the newly dark background and were more likely to be eaten by birds, whereas the once-rare black ones were camouflaged and survived. In a matter of years, some populations of peppered moths inverted from white to mostly black. The phenomenon was deemed “industrial melanism.”
Scientists have measured similar changes in recent decades. One study from 2003, for example, found that bighorn sheep in Alberta, Canada, evolved smaller horns in roughly 30 years. The reason? Trophy hunters tend to target rams with larger horns. Another study, published in November 2020, suggests that a type of lily found in the mountains of China is evolving less-colorful leaves so it doesn’t stand out in regions where it’s harvested as a traditional herb.
Niu et al./Current Biology
In regions where a kind of lily called Fritillaria delavayi is heavily harvested, the plant has adapted better camouflage (see images C and D).
Rising temperatures from climate change also appear to be making some animals, including birds and mammals, smaller, as I previously reported. Smaller bodies cool off more easily than larger ones, so shrinking could be an adaptive response in warming environments (though it’s not yet clear whether these particular changes are genetic).
Then there are species changing in less conspicuous ways. In Japan, populations of mamushi snakes that are heavily hunted for their perceived medicinal and nutritional benefits seem to be better at evading predators, compared to snakepopulations that hunters have ignored. Many species, including plants and insects, have evolved resistance to pesticides, which is why farmers often use several at once and chemical companies must constantly develop new solutions.
There’s something like hope behind the idea of rapid evolution. Humans are deforesting, polluting, and exploiting the Earth at an alarming pace, yet in some cases, animals are adapting to live another day. There’s even a term for this resilience, Hendry said: “evolutionary rescue.”
Still, this evolution, as fast-tracked as it may be, still often isn’t quick enough to overcome the many threats species face. And because adaptations can also come with drawbacks, there are untold and unpredictable consequences for the ecosystem at large.
Plus, not all species can adapt their way out of crisis. Consider rhinoceroses, which poachers kill for their horns. Three of the five rhino species have been hunted almost to extinction, yet none appear to have evolved hornlessness.
In Gorongosa National Park, the ecosystem has largely recovered from the war, Pringle said. Poaching has subsided, but tusks haven’t bounced back. After the war, the park successfully rebuilt its infrastructure, ramped up law enforcement, and put social development programs into place. The presence of tuskless elephants is now akin to a scar from an injury that’s healed, Pringle said. So while evolution may have helped these creatures survive, the real remedy is putting an end to the underlying forces that triggered it in the first place.
From The Hindu: Sports
Fifth Test between England and India to be played in July - The July 1-5 match will be played at Edgbaston in Birmingham instead of Old Trafford in Manchester
Godsword impresses - Godsword impressed when the horses were exercised here on Friday (Oct. 22) morning.Sand track:600m: 2/y/os Nord (rb), Red Riot (rb) 41. Pair level. Ta
ICC Twenty20 World Cup | Mentors can’t do much, it’s players who have to perform: Gavaskar on MSD impact - Gavaskar pointed out that India’s failure to win knock-out games in global tournaments has been primarily due to faulty team selections
ICC Twenty20 World Cup 2021 | Pandya will be an impact player for India, Rishabh a game-changer: Rahane - India’s World Cup campaign opens with a clash against arch-rivals Pakistan on Sunday
ICC Twenty20 World Cup | Suryakumar Yadav’s batting in post-Powerplay overs can be game-changer, says Wasim Akram - Wasim Akram feels that Suryakumar is a product of the robust domestic structure that BCCI has built in the past decade.
From The Hindu: National News
Britain’s CDC Group invests $70 million in first dedicated climate finance fund - The CDC Group has invested in the Green Growth Equity Fund, the country’s first dedicated climate change fund.
Above-normal rain forecast for in Kerala two weeks - For 7 days from Oct. 14, State receives 124% excess rain
OTT platforms to participate at IFFI - Martin Scorsese and Istvan Szabo to be conferred lifetime achievement awards
CISF apologises to dancer Sudhaa Chandran after she is asked to remove prosthetic limb at Mumbai airport - Ms. Chandran has made an “humble appeal” to PM Narendra Modi to make provision for a certificate or a card that can be displayed by specially-abled people for easy security checks.
India remains steadfast partner in global efforts to combat Covid: PM Modi - Wishes continued to pour in for India from various heads of state and government a day after the cumulative COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in the country surpassed the 100-crore milestone.
From BBC: Europe
How Belarus is helping ‘tourists’ break into the EU - Belarus is accused of taking revenge for EU sanctions by offering migrants tourist visas, and helping them across its border.
France to pay 38m citizens €100 each to ease costs - The one-off payment to lower-income groups is prompted by the spike in fuel and energy prices.
Bernard Haitink: Celebrated classical conductor dies at 92 - Bernard Haitink led the world’s top orchestras in London, Amsterdam, Chicago and Dresden.
Russia’s Covid nightmare driven by vaccine rejection - More than 1,000 people are dying in Russia every day, and in Vologda only one in four is vaccinated.
Halyna Hutchins: Rising star of film industry was ‘an incredible artist’ - Halyna Hutchins, who has died on a film set, had been named an American Cinematographer rising star.
From Ars Technica
MSI Summit E13 Flip Evo review: A flip in the right direction - Decked-out performance, solid port selection make a strong competitor. - link
Rocket Report: South Korea just misses orbit, Ariane 5 to set payload records - “We do not see any meaningful positive catalysts for the stock.” - link
Tom Holland is a dashing young fortune hunter in Uncharted trailer - Director Ruben Fleischer’s film is a prequel and origin story to the video games. - link
Google halves its revenue share of in-app subscriptions on the Play store - It’s the latest in a series of rev-share changes meant to preempt regulation. - link
CDC advisory panel unanimously approves expanded COVID vaccine boosters - CDC hearing came the day after the FDA expanded its authorization for booster shots. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
So a koala bear walks into a brothel. -
He picks out the best looking girl, and heads upstairs with her. While up there, he eats her out like a madman, doing things she’s never even heard of. After about an hour he gets up heads out the door.
The girl stops him and demands payment.
The bear doesn’t understand. She has him look up prostitute in the dictionary.
“a person who trades sex for money.”
Still a little confused, he asks what it says about him.
“koala bear, an Australian native animal that eats bushes and leaves.”
A man walks into a bar and asks the bartender, “If I show you a really good trick, will you give me a free drink?” -
The bartender considers it, then agrees.
The man reaches into his pocket and pulls out a tiny rat.
He reaches into his other pocket and pulls out a tiny piano.
The rat stretches, cracks his knuckles, and proceeds to play the blues.
After the man finished his drink, he asked the bartender, "If I show you an even better trick, will you give me free drinks for the rest of the night,the bartender thinks that nothing could possibly top the first trick so he agrees.
The man reaches into another pocket and pulls out a small bullfrog, who begins to sing along with the rat’s music.
While the man is enjoying his beverages, a stranger confronts him and offers him $100,000.00 for the bullfrog.
“Sorry,” the man replies, “he’s not for sale.”
The stranger increases the offer to $250,000.00 cash up front.
“No,” he insists, “he’s not for sale.”
The stranger again increases the offer, this time to $500,000.00 cash.
The man finally agrees, and turns the frog over to the stranger in exchange for the money.
“Are you insane?” the bartender demanded.
“That frog could have been worth millions to you, and you let him go for a mere $500,000!”
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Niu et al./Current Biology