this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2024
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Science Memes

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AND THEY DIDN'T STOP EATING (mander.xyz)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Not less evolved. Just evolved differently for alternative environmental circumstances.

There is no hierarchy of evolutionary traits. Just an amalgamation of traits that are or are not useful in the current environment. What genetic makeup is effective in one place and time is useless in another, and what was once useless may now be beneficial.

We have no clue how threatening they could potentially be.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Less evolved as in the product of less evolution. There is such a thing as more and less because more happens over time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

To have "more or less" of something implies the effectiveness of the product is directly caused by the metric being measured.

The amount of time a genotype took to evolve has no bearing on the effectiveness.

There is no such thing as "more/less evolved". There is no gradient. Something either is evolved to adapt to its environment or it isn't.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 minutes ago

I'm not disagreeing with you here, but wouldn't it be fair to say there is a gradient, but it is dynamic and defined by the current environment and what it takes to survive it?

Maybe the goal posta keep moving but we are talking about a very large time scale, so long that, for at least a couple of million years, what could be defined as more or less evolved might seem or be descibed as pretty solid.

Although i suppose its not fair to say more or less evolved and might be more accurate to say more or less well adapted.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Ok, but evolution doesn't follow a straight path. The ancestors of whales looked like wolves, while whales look, act, and function much more like fish, which those wolf-like pre-whales evolved from way earlier up the line. This is a common misconception about evolution, so don't feel bad for getting caught in it.