May 6, 2026
“Tusklessness in elephants due to ivory poaching is evidence of “evolution”?
AMELX or MEP1a Mutation.
Ivory loss in female African elephants is not a lab-verified example of morphological evolution (MDS), but is a function of selection within heredity.
Abstract
The post argues that the rise of tusklessness in female African elephants is not evidence of new beneficial mutations driving macroevolutionary change, but rather an example of selection acting on preexisting hereditary traits already present within the elephant population. The author explains that the AMELX and MEP1a traits associated with tusklessness existed long before modern ivory poaching and may have been present in elephant populations for over a million years. During the civil war in Mozambique, poachers killed roughly 90% of the elephant population, especially males and females with tusks, creating a severe genetic bottleneck. Because tuskless females were less likely to be targeted, they survived and reproduced at much higher rates, rapidly increasing the frequency of the tuskless phenotype in later generations.
The article further emphasizes that tusklessness in male African elephants is effectively lethal, since males rely heavily on tusks for defense and mating, and studies indicate that the AMELX-associated trait is male-lethal. According to the post, this demonstrates that the phenomenon is not an example of advantageous evolutionary innovation, but rather a shift in allele frequencies caused by extreme human-driven selection pressure. The author concludes that the observed changes are best explained by heredity, bottlenecking, and selection acting on existing genetic variation, rather than by newly evolved beneficial mutations.
AMELX or MEP1a Mutation.-311 This is found on the X chromosome with an X-linked locus (AMELX) and one autosomal locus (MEP1a).-311 Tusklessness is associated with at least one X-linked locus in a gene called “AMELX” plus one autosomal locus gene called “MEP1a.” It is known that this AMELX/MEP1a trait in African male elephants is lethal, but appears to be essentially harmless in the female population.-313
Emergence
The tuskless trait has been estimated to have been in the genome of elephants for at least 1.6 million years, based on an elephant fossil graveyard discovered in Florida that contained extinct relatives of modern-day elephants, some of which were tuskless.-314
The Paradigm & Narrative.
Tusklessness in elephants is proclaimed to be a prime example of evolution occurring in real time right before our own eyes. Just do a Google search. According to one article by the Associated Press, “Elephants have evolved to be tuskless because of ivory poaching…” -316 National Geographic added: “Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks.”-312 Science Magazine published “Ivory Poaching and the Rapid Evolution of Tusklessness in African Elephants.”-311 Countless similar articles on the internet herald “evolution” as the mechanism that has caused African elephants to become tuskless. It is believed that the extreme pressure of poaching ivory has caused a genetic mutation (of the gene “AMELX”), which provided the fitness benefit of tusklessness as “evolution.”-312 (All italics are mine).
Is this correct? If not, what mechanism has caused the growing rates of tusklessness in African elephants?
Facts
Shockingly, it is estimated that 35,000 elephants are illegally killed each year due to poaching aimed at illegally selling ivory tusks.-315 U.S. Customs and Border Protection estimates that ivory sells for up to $1,500 per pound.-318 Considering that two male tusks can weigh over 250 pounds, the temptation to poach can become overwhelmingly enticing, especially for those struggling to survive in war-stricken and impoverished countries.-318 This human-based activity remains a direct threat to the elephant population worldwide.
Rampant poaching during the fifteen-year civil war in Mozambique, from 1977 to 1992, wiped out 90% of the African elephant population through illegal poaching.-311
Tusks are essentially elongated molar teeth that grow throughout the elephant’s life.-313 Tusks are used for many purposes, including digging for food, clearing paths, removing tree bark, fighting for mates, and self-defense.-313 Princeton University researchers identified that the MEP1a gene produces dentin, the core mineral in ivory.-313 Tusks are made of ivory, which provides many advantages due to its intrinsic strength, stiffness, hardness, and durability.-313 Such durability, combined with ivory’s beauty, is what has driven the illegal killing of elephants worldwide, especially the African elephant.
The oldest elephants in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park are thought to have “evolved” tusklessness after surviving poaching. Let’s look at the evidence.
The Science
The elephant populations before the civil war were well documented. After the war ended and research resumed, it quickly became apparent that tusklessness in female individuals had increased due to a 500% higher survival rate from not being poached.-311 Data from the 1940s up until the start of the civil war estimated that about 18.5% of the female African elephant population was tuskless.-307 Data collected after the war ended showed that the tuskless population had nearly doubled to about 33%.-307
It is undeniable that the selective killing of elephants due to poaching carried a cascade of adverse effects beyond tusklessness, negatively impacting the entire ecosystem and megafauna of the environment.-311 These effects were magnified because megaherbivores, like elephants, inhabit much larger habitats and live much longer, resulting in much slower generational turnover.-311
Additionally, not all elephant species have high frequencies of tusklessness in females.-313 Forest and savannah elephant species, including the African elephant, tend to express female tusk phenotypes as a recessive trait within their populations.-313 Female Asian elephants typically possess only short protrusions called “tushes.”-313 In Sri Lanka, only about 10% of Asian elephants display tusk phenotypes, even among males.-313
“…once there’s been heavy poaching pressure on a population, then the poachers start to focus on the older females as well…(therefore) with the older age population, you start to get this higher proportion of tuskless females.” -311
It is vitally important to distinguish something that many articles do not make immediately apparent: female African elephants can survive quite comfortably without tusks, but male elephants cannot.-313
For any male African elephant, being tuskless is a death sentence. The male could not effectively fight for self-defense or earn a mate. Geneticists discovered that the AMELX phenotype, when expressed in a male fetus, resulted in certain premature death.-313 The AMELX variant in male African elephants was highly deleterious and deadly.-311 Therefore, to say tusklessness in male African elephants is “rare” is misleading, it is nonexistent.-311
“No record of tuskless male elephants within Gorongosa National Park exists.” -311
National Geographic states failed to mention the deleterious effects of the AMELX phenotype by misleading the facts by writing, “Tusklessness does seem to occur disproportionately among females. It makes sense that tuskless males wouldn’t be able to compete for breeding access to female elephants…but we don’t see that. Tuskless males are scarce in African elephants.” -312
“Extremely rare”? How about nonexistent?-313 Studies indicate that no tuskless adult African elephant has been observed since the 1940s.-311 Male tusklessness in African elephants has never been observed over decades of documentation and studies.-313 Male African elephants simply cannot survive without tusks or with the AMELX trait.-313
“The park has never seen a tuskless male, suggesting the trait related to tusklessness is sex-linked.” -313
The oldest elephants wandering Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park that survived the civil war experienced severe genetic bottlenecking. About 90% of the entire population, mostly males and tusked females, were slaughtered in less than one generation.-307 This resulted in only the surviving individuals, primarily females carrying the tuskless phenotype, reproducing new offspring.-307
Tooth Development
Studies determined that the AMELX genetic trait was deleterious in African male elephants.-311 AMELX and MEP1a have functional interactions within mammalian tooth development, including enamel, dentin, cementum, and periodontium.-311
“Whole-genome scans implicated two candidate genes with known roles in mammalian tooth development (AMELX and MEP1a), including enamel, dentin, cementum, and periodontium formation. One of these loci is associated with an X-linked (AMELX) dominant, male-lethal syndrome in humans that diminishes the growth of maxillary lateral incisors (homologous to elephant tusks).” -311
The maxillary lateral incisors are a pair of upper teeth located laterally from the maxillary central incisors and toward the sides of the mouth. The same AMELX-associated trait exists in human teeth and, when expressed, results in diminished growth of the maxillary lateral incisors.-311 Biologists at Princeton University found that the AMELX gene produces enamel and cementum, minerals used to coat both tusks and teeth.-313 These are positionally the same teeth the African elephant uses for tusks.
The maxillary central incisors are the two teeth located beside your upper front teeth. In humans, about 20% of the population has various missing teeth, with the most common being the lateral incisors due to genetics.-307
“Mutations that delete the equivalent gene in humans can cause an inherited disorder where women lack ‘maxillary lateral incisors’, the teeth that become tusks in elephants.” -313
Summary
The rapid expansion of tusklessness was derived from genetic bottlenecking caused by selective pressures after 90% of the population was killed within less than one generation. This effect on any smaller and isolated population is devastating.
Wild-type gene sequences, as found in the present, are thought to have emerged long ago, although this claim is not lab-verified. The presupposition that these effects of tusklessness manifested due to beneficial germline mutations cannot be substantiated by fossil genetic evidence, which is both rare and fragmented. There are no “pre-wild-type” sequences to verify the claim population-wide.-310
Tusks are essential to male elephants for self-defense, mating, and reproduction. Tuskless male elephants face inevitable death and have never been observed as adults. The AMELX trait is “male-lethal,” but tusklessness does not cause a fitness loss in females.-311
“Poaching resulted in strong selection that favored tusklessness amid a rapid population decline. Survey data revealed tusk-inheritance patterns consistent with an X chromosome–linked dominant, male-lethal trait. -311
In consideration of all the variables, including the sudden death of 90% of an already limited population focused primarily on elephants with tusks, the speed of phenotypic expression was rapid due to genetic bottlenecking.-311 Therefore, the rapid expansion of allele frequencies among newborn females increased because more carriers of the tuskless gene survived to reproduce. This bottlenecking was caused by the extreme selection pressures of illegal poaching that killed females with tusks while allowing tuskless females to survive and reproduce.-311
“Intensive poaching in Africa has been associated with an increase in the frequency of tuskless elephants, exclusively among females.” -311 Emphasis is mine.
As the articles mentioned at the beginning proclaimed, was the loss of tusks in female African elephants evidence of MDS evolution? Did this phenotype shift occur through evolutionary mechanisms driven by beneficial missense mutations? No. This was due to hereditary forces we call “selection.”
Selection carried out by human beings slaughtering elephants for their ivory is undoubtedly an environmental pressure. It was mass killing that wiped out 90% of the population in just fifteen years. After poachers killed the males they could find, they targeted females with tusks, leaving tuskless females alive to reproduce and spread their phenotypes.
The geneticists at Princeton echoed this sentiment writing: “Certainly humans are technically part of nature, but calling this process ‘natural selection’ is vague. The evolution of tuskless elephants is an example of ‘harvesting selection’ or ‘human-driven selection‘.” -313
How about the claim that tusklessness was an example of MDS evolution? According to the study at Princeton, it was not. They found that the phenotype was due to a recessive preexisting wild-type trait that existed long before the civil war began (millions of years before), that was expanded upon by allele frequencies derived by bottlenecking from the 10% surviving female population. -307
Geneticists remarked, “the trait probably isn’t caused by new mutations, but by rare genetic variants that are now more common in the gene pool.” -313 Emphasis is mine.
Therefore, female tusklessness was not due to a new mutation, but to a wild-type allele frequency already present in the population. Princeton biologists suspected that the tuskless trait was linked to AMELX and confirmed that it was lethal if inherited on a male’s lone X chromosome. Females, however, could survive provided they inherited at least one wild-type copy of the gene. Genetic inheritance for the tuskless trait was consistent with the heredity hypothesis.-313
“They have this very compelling genomic data…(but) Scientists are still not sure which changes are causing a loss of tusks in either of the genes…(as) the best and only answer as to why there has been a measurable reduction in the number of female elephants born tusk-less…a bottleneck that strongly favors (the) tusk-less phenotype.” -309 Emphasis is mine.
While the genetic and developmental mechanisms leading to tusklessness and/or male nonviability remain unresolved, we know they preexisted in the population’s allele frequencies.-311
The AMELX trait is a phenotype expressed through heredity. It is not due to any lab-verified beneficial missense mutation, as many articles seem to insinuate. The phenotype rapidly doubled due to genetic bottlenecking.
“Thus, we conclude that the population bottleneck in Gorongosa was accompanied by strong selection favoring the tuskless phenotype.” -311
Genes vary by phenotypes and traits expressed through allele frequencies within a population. These allelic traits are passed to offspring through heredity. Although tusklessness was once relatively rare in African elephants, it became more common through bottlenecking caused by the slaughter of 90% of an already small population due to poaching.-309
306- Lopalco L. CCR5: From Natural Resistance to a New Anti-HIV Strategy. Viruses. 2010 Feb;2(2):574-600. doi: 10.3390/v2020574. Epub 2010 Feb 5. PMID: 21994649; PMCID: PMC3185609. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3185609/
307- https://africa.si.edu/collection/conservation/protect-ivory/
308- http://2-https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/female-elephants-are-evolving-to-go-tuskless-but-may-be-killing-males-180978938/
310- From the vault: Can we really extract ancient DNA from dinosaurs?.
311- Ivory poaching and the rapid evolution of tusklessness in African elephants, SHANE C. CAMPBELL-STATON, BRIAN J. ARNOLD, DOMINIQUE GONÇALVES, PETTER GRANLI, JOYCE POOLE, RYAN A. LONG, AND ROBERT M. PRINGLE; SCIENCE, Oct, 2021; Vol 374, Issue 6566 pp. 483-487 DOI: 10.1126/science.abe7389; https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe7389
312- National Geographic, Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks” ByDina Fine Maron, Nov, 2018; https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-watch-news-tuskless-elephants-behavior-change
313- BBC Science Focus, “More and more elephants are being born without tusks. A geneticist explains why.” JV Chamary, Nov, 2021; https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/has-ivory-poaching-triggered-the-evolution-of-tuskless-elephants
314- Graveyard of Extinct Elephants From 5 Million Years Ago Found in Florida; Published May 26, 2023 at 10:56 AM EDT https://www.newsweek.com/graveyard-extinct-elephants-discovered-florida-1802915#:~:text=Graveyard%20of%20Extinct%20Elephants%20From%205%20Million%20Years%20Ago%20Found%20in%20Florida,-Published%20May%2026&text=Paleontologists%20from%20the%20Florida%20Museum,to%205%20million%20years%20ago.
316- Elephants have evolved to be tuskless because of ivory poaching, a study finds; Oct, 2018 The Associated Press; https://www.npr.org/2021/10/22/1048336907/elephants-tuskless-ivory-poaching-africa#:~:text=with%20other%20elephants.-,But%20during%20episodes%20of%20intense%20ivory%20poaching%2C%20those%20big%20incisors,that%20will%20never%20develop%20tusks.
317- Missing Lateral Incisors? Help Your Smile With Braces! By Appel Orthodontics, Mar, 2022 Orthodontic Technology & Treatment Options; https://appelortho.com/braces-mising-lateral-incisors
318- U.S. Customs and Border Protection; https://www.cbp.gov/frontline/fighting-ivory-trade#:~:text=Staggering%20black%20market%20prices%20in,wealth%2C%20poachers%20can%20be%20ruthless.
