this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
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Evolution isn't linear. (mander.xyz)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You forgot to put the lion on two feet and to give it boxing gloves

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

Nooooo! Not another fire/fighting starter!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Isn't Chicken the closest living relative but not a descendant of T-Rex?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Yup, the T. rex is just extinct, chickens are the closest thing genetically speaking (or one of the closest, I'm not sure).

Same reason why humans don't actually descend from monkeys, both monkeys and humans descend instead from a common ancestor that no longer exists. This is why, IMO, Digimon could be a better representation of evolution than Pokémon, since one Digimon can evolve into many different forms, so that kitten could become a fridge, but also a dragon or a knight with cannons, depending on the evolutionary line.

Then again, I doubt any of these were intended as a realistic portrayal of anything at all, least of all the theory of evolution.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Chicken is equally close to T. Rex as all other birds. They all go back to the same common bird-ancestor who was a relative of T. Rex.

T. rex is more closely related to birds than to all non-theropod dinosaurs.

T. rex also lived closer to us in time than to Stegosaurus.

Same reason why humans don’t actually descend from monkeys, both monkeys and humans descend instead from a common ancestor that no longer exists

But that ancestor was a monkey! We are monkey, you can't evolve your way out of a clade.

This is why, IMO, Digimon could be a better representation of evolution than Pokémon, since one Digimon can evolve into many different forms, so that kitten could become a fridge, but also a dragon or a knight with cannons

But that is specifically not how evolution works. You can't evolve your way out of a clade, everything a cat would evolve into, would also be a cat. Maybe a weird cat, maybe a whale-cat (like whales are still ungulates, even if they are really weird ones) but still a cat. You can't evolve out of your ancestry.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

I mean, monkeys are an evolutionary group. Technically, we are monkeys, as well as being apes, hominids, mammals, humans, tetrapods, etc.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (3 children)

The discovery of horizontal gene transfer implies that it's more like a web than a tree.

"Biologist Johann Peter Gogarten suggests "the original metaphor of a tree no longer fits the data from recent genome research" therefore "biologists should use the metaphor of a mosaic to describe the different histories combined in individual genomes and use the metaphor of a net to visualize the rich exchange and cooperative effects of HGT among microbes".

I look forward to this dinosaur = chicken colloquialism being inevitably discarded.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

How is horizontal gene transfer between microbes in any way relevant to a discussion about the ancestry of chickens that only reaches back to the dinosauria clade? Chickens are invariably a sub-group of the bigger group dinosaurs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Not just microbes. HGT has been observed in carnivorous plants as well. It could be much more prevalent than we think.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Chickens are dinosaurs in the sense that they're also tetrapods. A dinosaur is an evolutionary group in which all members have a common ancestor population that is distinct from the rest of the evolutionary tree. So too with tetrapods, isopods, primates, arachnids, etc. So anyway, it's true that birds are dinosaurs, but it's not a very useful description.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

It's funny, I remember being 7 years old and thinking two things.

  1. T-rex feet look very similarly to chicken feet, they must be descended from the T-Rex.

  2. I'm 7, there's no way this is true.

I immediately wrote it off as being incorrect. There's no way people actually believe this right?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

My grandpa used to have backyard chickens. I saw a couple of chickens completely brutalize and dismember a field mouse that had made it into their coop. I also have a pet parrot, he's small, but if that little fucker was 6' tall and pissed off, I'd be dead. Even at his size he can mess you up. If dinosaurs were just bigger versions of current chickens, they'd eat us all.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

when I was little, my neighbor had this tiny chicken that acted like a guard dog. It would chase and attack anything that comes near the front gate. All the neighbor kids are traumatized by that little fucker, including me. That's why I have an eternal fear of chicken, even now as a 6"2' male adult.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

We survived the Terror Birds, we can survive the Chicken Army.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I adore the total lack of surprise for the 'fridge with machine gun' in the comments here. We all watched Digimon, apparently.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Hell yeah.

Pokémon: [day one] I wanna be the best Pokémon trainer the world has ever seen! [20 seasons later] Wow I got another gym badge! Pikachu is pretty decent!

Digimon: [day one] Oh this poor kitten, gotta save it from these big jerks! [end of season] Today, we must destroy God.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Digimon: [day one] Oh this poor kitten,

[midseason] kitten evolves into buff lion anthro then dies on you.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Right? It's absolutely perfect and spot-on and I love it

[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 months ago

Needs 3 stages for balance

The chicken will eventually be a crab

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

Technically, it is very much linear. It's just it doesn't always go the way we feel like it should.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Why is this image muted?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Big body = big appetite

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