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?
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?