The beaches of Sydney’s Royal National Park have been disrupted by a pungent odour. And its source is drawing in more than just seagulls.

A 25-tonne sperm whale is rotting on the rock platform of Era Beach. This spectacular sight is drawing in curious spectators and hungry predators.

The humans are keen for a photo op. The predators are drawn by the potential meal.

The lifeless whale may look inviting – to some. But it might be more dangerous for us humans to get close than you may suspect.

How often do whales wash up on shore?

This particular cetacean is likely to have died at sea some weeks ago. But unfortunately, many more whales are being stranded on rock platforms and beaches across the globe.

Strandings are not rare in Australia or New Zealand. Southeast Australia alone recorded 639 strandings between 1920 and 2002. The rate of whale strandings globally also seems to be climbing as some whale populations are recovering and there are more people out in nature to spot them.

Australia has also seen some of the largest mass strandings on record (it has the unenviable title of being a global hotspot). These include 470 long-finned pilot whales beached at Tasmania’s Macquarie Harbour in 2020.

However, a single large carcass, like the Era Beach sperm whale, is more typical – and the one people are more likely to see.

It’s quite a spectacle

A decomposing whale is quite the spectacle. It’s a fascinating and morbid sight. According to one media report today:

Thin strips of flesh hang down like rotten tinsel, swaying in the wind. Glistening fluid trickles on to the stone where insects buzz.

Unsurprisingly, beached whales draw in curious people involved in both citizen science (when the public collects and analyses data about the world around us) and for the prospect of a grisly social media shot.

But frolicking around a huge dead beast has potential dangers. And in this case, the environment where the whale rests is the most significant factor.

The massive whale is decomposing on a rock shelf next to the ocean, with tides, waves, and swells. Standing on a rock ledge inspecting a whale means you’re not paying attention to your surroundings. This is how you can find yourself unintentionally entering the ocean.

The ocean may appear calm and forgiving when you first step onto that ledge to inspect the whale, but conditions can change rapidly.

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Read more: The ocean can look deceptively calm – until it isn’t. Here’s what ‘hazardous surf’ really means

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Then come the sharks

People aren’t the only ones going for a stickybeak at this whale. Bull, tiger and great white sharks are scavengers. To them, a fresh whale carcass is like an enormous buffet. The blobs of fat floating in the water around the whale are, essentially, canapes.

One study used drones to see how the behaviour of 55 white sharks off the coast of New South Wales changed near a stranded whale. They swam faster. Sharks near a stranded whale also tend to be larger on average – possibly because big sharks muscle smaller ones out the way.

These hazards are why many beaches near the stranded whale have been closed as a precaution. NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service warns people not to enter the water due to increased shark activity.

What is that smell?

A gigantic decaying whale, warmed by the midday sun, and kept moist by sea spray, is basically a huge vat of bacteria.

As microbes break down proteins and fats inside the carcass, they release a cocktail of volatile compounds. These include hydrogen sulfide (the smell of rotten eggs), methanethiol (rotting cabbage) and ammonia. Then there’s the aptly named putrescine and cadaverine, the compounds that give corpses their distinctive stink.

So it’s probably best not follow your nose on this occasion. The smell of a rotting whale carcass can be so bad, it can make you vomit. And as waves wash over the carcass or it bloats and ruptures, tiny aerosols are released into the air. These can carry bacteria and pathogens, along with that putrid smell that can drift far beyond the carcass itself.

Marine animals can also carry zoonotic diseases (illnesses that pass from animals to humans). So it’s important not to touch the carcass.

Watch out! It might explode

And who wants to be near when the ticking time bomb goes off? Yes, whale carcasses can explode.

This happens when there’s the natural build-up of gases as the whale decomposes. This is one reason authorities prefer to send the carcass back to sea, if feasible.

So, a selfie that involves climbing onto a whale carcass is a genuinely bad idea.

Samuel Cornell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

What happens when natural selection, the most powerful process driving change in the living world, shapes artificial intelligence (AI), perhaps the most potent technology humanity has invented to date?

We might be about to find out.

According to a new paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we are entering the era of “evolvable AI” – AI systems that can undergo evolution. In turn, that might give rise to a major transition in evolution.

How major is “major”? Well, in nearly 4 billion years there have only been eight, or perhaps only seven, other major transitions. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

The ingredients for evolution

Evolution doesn’t require DNA, cells or even biological life. It just needs information that can replicate, and a source of variation that affects how successfully the information replicates.

When these conditions exist, evolution happens, whether anybody intended it to or not.

Modern AI systems already meet these conditions. Models can be copied. Their parameters, architectures and training data can vary. And some variants perform in ways that make them more likely to be reused, refined or deployed.

Evolution has long operated outside biology. It shapes languages, technologies and cultures. But AI introduces something different: systems that are both information-rich and can influence their own reproduction.

That combination raises the stakes dramatically.

Two scenarios for ‘evolvable AI’

The authors of the new paper recognise two broad AI evolution scenarios that could influence both how selection happens, and the kinds of consequences that might flow on.

Ecosystem scenario

The ecosystem scenario eventuates when AI variants compete, recombine and propagate with little top-down oversight. The better an AI is at persisting and spreading, the more successful it is.

Science fiction authors, AI pioneers and contemporary AI risk experts have long recognised the dangers of such untrammelled and chaotic Darwinian evolution. The fear of self-replicating AIs is an evolutionary fear, even if it doesn’t name evolution explicitly.

Every new AI model, however different, inadvertently adds to the supply of the fuel consumed by natural selection: variation. And we’re not dealing with a single AI but an ecosystem bustling with various machines and humans.

Breeder scenario

Charles Darwin based his idea of natural selection on how animal and plant breeders deliberately select which individuals to breed from. In the wild, nature does the selecting, hence “natural selection”.

The second evolvable AI scenario recognises the power of breeder-based selection – the force that domesticated so many animals and plants, from dogs and cattle to wheat and rice.

Last year, philosophers Maarten Boudry and Simon Friederich proposed that if AI evolution is directed in a top-down fashion (much like deliberate breeding), AI might remain in human control. Evolution still occurs, but it shapes the AI into tamed beasts of computational burden that serve humanity – or, at least, whoever owns the machine.

Within the framework of these two scenarios, the authors apply a sound and comprehensive analysis of what biology can tell us about AI’s potential evolutionary trajectories.

Evolution upgraded

In biology, variation comes from random genetic mutations. The potential for evolution is constrained by this blind source of variation.

AI need not be constrained in the same way. Indeed, the potential exists for AIs to plot the course of their own evolution. They could find the variation they need to follow that route. It may even exist on the internet.

This is similar to how bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance by copying the genes that other, quite different lineages of bacteria have already evolved. With this horizontal gene transfer there’s no waiting in hope for the right mutations.

AI could potentially do something similar. The authors of the new paper argue that a large language model could predict what functionality it needs to replicate and survive, and then find and incorporate code to achieve just that.

The authors recognise that if we maintain breeder-like control over evolvable AI, it will be less likely to pose catastrophic risks, such as dominating humans or outcompeting them for resources.

But the potential for an evolvable AI to escape and run feral always remains.

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Read more: Nobody wants to talk about AI safety. Instead they cling to 5 comforting myths

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Is it a major transition, though?

One of the paper’s authors, evolutionary biologist Eörs Szathmáry, introduced the idea of “major transitions in evolution” in a landmark 1995 book with the late evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith.

For example, ancient life used to involve RNA, a relatively fragile molecule that functioned as both the genetic information and the protein that did the organism’s work.

A major transition was the evolution of DNA – it made the information more stable and required the production of proteins as a separate act. This fundamentally changed how genetic information is encoded and used, and made possible great increases in the complexity of living things.

At each subsequent transition, the thing doing the evolving became more complicated – from single-celled life to multicelled life and so on.

The new paper argues that some current trends in AI resemble what happens in major transitions. AI systems are scaling up and expanding in complexity. New training and development methods reorganise how AIs process information. And AI agent teams working together are shifting the concept of what a “single” AI even is.

It’s certainly interesting that evolution within the AI ecosystem is following trends seen in the major transitions in biological evolution. But these things also happen, on a smaller scale, during business-as-usual evolution. They should not yet be interpreted as evidence that AI represents a major transition fit to be listed with those that transformed biological life.

There are, however, many ways evolvable AI could effect a major transition in evolution. Generating an entirely new realm of intelligent life would do the trick.

Another possibility is the rise of co-evolving human-machine symbiosis, akin to our relationship with smartphones. That could create a new kind of individual somewhere between biological and artificial life. If such a development took hold, it would definitely constitute a major evolutionary transition.

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Read more: Smaller brains? Fewer friends? An evolutionary biologist asks how AI will change humanity’s future

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Rob Brooks receives funding from the Australian Research Council.