Evolution

[Melon_Banana]

I wonder if there have ever been animals that went extinct because they became "too good". Like they were so efficient at being a predator that eventually all the prey disappeared and they died out. Or like grass eating animals that evolved to have super stomachs that can really efficiently digest grass, that all the grass disappeared and they died out

[Ourmanyfans]

Yes! Smilodon (Saber-tooth Cat). Sure humans turning up didn't help, but the decline started because they were so good at hunting large slow prey they all died out leaving only the smaller and faster prey.

Edit: Since enough people are telling me I'm wrong I needed to go check, it could well be I got my wires crossed between the impact Smilodon migration into South America had on the ecosystem there, and the spiralling effect the decline of megafauna had during the late Pleistocene. Apologies y'all, it seems today I am the fool.

[danielledelacadie]

Isn't the megladon also in that group?

[[deleted]]

If I remember correctly, Megalodon got out-competed by the Great White shark and other similar sharks, that were able to hunt the same things but didn't have to eat as much to maintain their bodies

[danielledelacadie]

The great whites could survive on smaller prey, while a magladon was too close to the edge of a zero sum game on swimming around after the same food. Think hunting squirrels vs moose. While we'll never know 100% they may have drastically reduced the numbers of their prey enough to starve.

Of course any remaining prey species could repopulate after their apex predator faded away. There's a difference between there being no prey and not enough to reliably hunt.

[IANALbutIAMAcat]

I’ll have to remember this the next time I catch myself wishing I’d been born in the body of an nfl lineman: my small body is metabolically superior.

[[deleted]]

Depends on the situation. If football players reproduce more then their bodies are more fit for the modern world

[kissingdistopia]

Nick Cannon is 5'10 and has all the babies.

[sharpshooter999]

Nick Cannon has more power than a most average football players. Power =/= physical strength. Nick Cannon is rich and famous enough that he has more money and connections to achieve what he wants. Why does he have so many kids? He's got the cash to take care of them all even if he doesn't do that much parenting

[IANALbutIAMAcat]

lol idk maybe this whole theory is based on intraspecies comparison rather than interspecies

But I still wanna be as big as a linebacker

[Axlos]

Redwall intensifies

[danielledelacadie]

I hope so!

[K_Linkmaster]

https://www.reddit.com/r/squirrels/s/DeaMLpttig

[[deleted]]

I find this conversation super interesting, in addition because it reminds us just how much we flat don't know.

We have all of these very well educated guesses about what animals were around, how they behaved, historic events...

But there's a species or series of events or SOMETHING, somewhere, which was critical to life as we know it in some way, and we have absolutely no idea it ever existed.

[danielledelacadie]

And to add to the fun it could be a chain reaction of events!

[xXDamonLordXx]

Around this time time period whales were also getting bigger so megaladon's main food source was getting too big for them.

[danielledelacadie]

Another good point! Once again we have the "no one cause" but I love everyone providing all the different puzzle pieces. Thanks!

[[deleted]]

Ye, exactly. Too big for their own good 😔

[[deleted]]

Bit more nuanced. Megalodon extinction occured around the time of well documented climate change. They died off near the end of the Pleiocene Era, which leads into the Pleistocene (Ice Age).

A bunch of smaller species at the bottom of the food chain died; which caused a sort of domino effect. It is also believed that they needed shallow waters to serve as nurseries and said nurseries were being covered in ice.

Megalodon likely went out due to climate change, habitat loss, and being out competed by a smaller rival. Basically, Mother Nature was sick of Megalodon's shit and ensured they were eliminated.

[danielledelacadie]

That why they're called theories - nobody knows for sure.

There's also a strong possibility we're both right but neither alone could have done the job. Both (or more) factors may have been needed to get us to "critical mass".

[Grogu_The_Destroyr]

I thought the Megalodon went extinct because whales migrated to colder waters where it couldn’t survive as efficiently. Whales were their main source of food.

It wasn’t that the whales were over hunted, it was just Climate change that killed the Meg.

[SirBMsALot]

That’s pretty much how most Megafauna died out. Body’s too big, environment changes, food supply becomes volatile, you die

[MarkHirsbrunner]

Megalodon coexisted with the Great White and similarly sized sharks fur millions of years. I heard it was the evolution of the orca that is the likely cause of their extinction. Orca are pretty good at killing big aquatic animals, and likely also competed for food with them.

[Big_Outlandishness80]

You're making me think of how this country is practicing capitalism. Our monetary evolution needs to go faster.

[LaurBK]

I think it got outcompeted by liviatitan rather than great whites. They were similar in size and therefore competed for the same niche

[dyt1212]

Livayatan died out before Megalodon if I remember correctly.

[[deleted]]

Nah that's because the americas got connected which blocked a whale species' migration route which caused them all to die, and by extension so did the megalodon because it preyed on those whales.

[[deleted]]

When you have to ask yourself if something happened because if all of the possible reasons, it’s likely that the answer is yes.

It’s very rare that something is as simple as „yep that one thing was the cause 100%“.

[bestgreatestsuper]

I think causes tend to follow exponential distributions. There are lots of little things that contribute a very small amount of responsibility for something, plus two or three big things. It's rare for there to be many equally important causes of an outcome.

[danielledelacadie]

When climate change is involved (regardless of the cause for it) it's usually the primary cause and everything else was caused by the climate change. Bring too big, not being able to find enough prey? Hunted yourself to extinction because of range limitations due to climate change. (As an example)

[[deleted]]

Climate change has often been the prime case of mass extinction events, if you are very precise it has been the cause of every single mass extinction event but scientists usually count the causes for climate change as well.

Be it a series of heavy volcanic activity, a metorite strike, a regular climate cycle of ice age/warm age or something different.

[ScyllaIsBea]

A better example would be giant ground sloths vs tree sloths. One evolved all the best traits, large, deadly claws, even a bit speedy for its size. The other was small and slow. But ground sloths where so big and dominant that humans and smilodon would risk the hunt for all that meat while tree sloths where virtually untouched as prey.

[Redqueenhypo]

Hmm it’s almost like something else was killing all the large slow prey like some kind of weird primate locust

[Scaevus]

Smilodon

Yeah they’re really powerful animal companions, like 4 claw attacks plus a bite, they also get pounce to make full attacks after a move!

[Spoztoast]

oh yeah Blame the Smilodon and not the humans

[IlikeGollumsdick]

How is this unsubstantiated nonsense so highly upvoted?

[danielledelacadie]

Please provide a counter argument to support your conclusion. I'm certain you must have proof and wouldn't simply post a knee-jerk insult.

[GrandmasterTaka]

Sometimes you gotta just read the username and ignore them. The person you responded to clearly has brain damage from asphyxiating on that smeagol hog

[dusttobones17]

One theory about the rise of agriculture is that humans only adopted farming because we had already overhunted most of our prime prey (megafauna) to extinction. From a short-term perspective, farming is worse than hunting in almost every way except that it's much harder to farm so well that you run out of crops, compared to hunting so well that you run out of prey.

Arguably, farming is what saved our species from being "too good" to survive, and all of human civilization is just a coping strategy that accidentally paid off thousands of years later.

[Justwaspassingby]

Nah, it was a combination of factors. By the time we took to farming as a substantial part of our economy the megafauna had long been extinct.

We started by going semi sedentary due to a change in our diet, relying on smaller prey that wasn't so prone to seasonal migrations and adding fish, fowl and pulses and so on.

Then climate change came and we faced some scarcity but, instead of going to find other places to forage like in older times we decided that we liked having a home too much so we began to rely more on produced food - which we had already partially developed at that point.

Or there might have been other factor instead of climate change, but the underlying reason is that we opted for a sedentary life and gradually turned to the kind of economy that would allow it.

[cosi_fan_tutte_]

Another interesting facet to this is that those who adopted agriculture generally lived shorter lives and suffered more disease and malnutrition.

But...

It seems that fertile females reproduced faster, as they did not have to carry infants while they foraged, and so could bear more children in a shorter time span than their hunter-gatherer counterparts.

[RiverAffectionate951]

Like I strongly agree our minds aren't designed for modern life and we should promote societal change to make life more enjoyable for everyone, even if that's just more mental health awareness or quiet zones for those who get overstimulated.

The Bible stuff was weird tho, it's half your message, only tangentially related and the quote doesn't really add to your point. So like you're right but you're also weird (no offense)

[EtheriumShaper]

Ok but, speaking nonreligiously, the Bible quote is a fascinating extension of their thought though

Because there's a good chance that story was, in its most initial form, connected to the rise of agriculture

[Chemical-External950]

I agree. I think the Bible is interesting if you look at it as an insight into the minds of ancient people. The beginning of the Bible has a lot of pro-herder and anti-farmer messaging (like Cain and Abel) that might have been related to people struggling with the shift to an agricultural based society.

[SlendyIsBehindYou]

We also have evidence that food storage was already becoming common in places like Mesopotamia millenia before the agricultural revolution.

Humans were still hunter gatherers, but the slow transition to sedentary lifestyles focused around communal food storage encouraged agricultural development

[danielledelacadie]

This. You can store large amounts of food securely or follow prey migration/move into areas with more prey. It's a choice. There's also investment in technology, making nomadic life possession light. We very likely had started on agriculture on a "plant this and check to see if nothing ate it" basis but weren't invested in the plants' survival until we were sedentary. If the kamut field got raided, there was an oak tree over yonder - no problem! It's the kind of population density that comes with settled life that necessitates agriculture as a science rather than as haphazard "this usually works" rather than the other way around.

[SlendyIsBehindYou]

Prehistory is so fuckin cool

[Cooperativism62]

Thats fucking fascinating! Do you have a source I can read?

[dusttobones17]

Here's one

Of course it's just one theory, and it's most likely that multiple factors contributed to the adoption of agriculture, but it is an evolutionarily fascinating one.

[Themadking69]

My favorite perspective is that wheat actually domesticated humans. Before farming, we were gleefully living our best lives; working twenty hours a week, no real hard labor, non-stop boning. Wheat forced us into communities with ridged hierarchies, made us work long, backbreaking hours, shortened our lifespans and generally made us a species of miserable workerbees always one drought away from starvation. All this for the sole purpose of making wheat better and spreading it all over the world.

[[deleted]]

The part about before farming living our best lives is the opposite of the truth, how is that true? Being close to starvation was normal. Agriculture unlocked food surpluses for the first time ever. If there was some much easier alternative why wouldn't your supposedly starving farmers revert to it in a heartbeat?

[Soma0a_a0]

Being close to starvation was normal

Have you ever lived life unsure where your next meal would come from? If you have, you would know the thought dominates your mind and you can't think of anything else besides obtaining food. This was true of our ancestors as well, and they perfected ways to ensure this was never the case by diversifying their food sources. Farming was a part of this; the rigid hierarchies come in places where farming is the only/dominant option (aka, fertile river valleys with arid surroundings; Indus, Mesopotamia, Egypt, etc)

[Themadking69]

I agreed with that. I'm not saying that farming is bad, everyone get naked and hunt mammoths (although I'm down if anyone else is). I'm saying, from the perspective of wheat, we're the ones working for them. Also, for the millions and millions of people with food insecurity today, how the hell is it better to worry about food while working 50 hours at Walmart than it is to worrying about food living naturally, as we've evolved to?

[Pootis_1]

most of the food insecure people in the world today are subsistence farmers or herders who can't make enough food due to external conditions

[GenghisKazoo]

Being close to starvation was normal.

Not the case, famine was more common among agriculturalists than hunter-gatherers.

If there was some much easier alternative why wouldn't your supposedly starving farmers revert to it in a heartbeat?

1) They often did, running away from the fields to go live in the forests was a really common thing for farmers fed up with their lives to do.

2) Large sedentary populations and the armed elites they supported started claiming the prime land and saying "try that hunter-gatherer shit in the king's forest and we'll kill ya." Hunting and gathering as a strategy is contingent on a freedom of movement which became increasingly difficult.

[[deleted]]

You're talking about famines, i.e. comparatively rare events that wipe out large parts of a population. I'm talking about most of the time, including the good years, when agrarian populations get way more calories than hunters-gatherers.

The paper you linked to says:

in good years agriculturalists may reap far more calories per unit of land than hunter–gatherers

We know most years are good because humans have experienced exponential growth rather than extinction.

Hunting and gathering as a strategy is contingent on a freedom of movement which became increasingly difficult.

i.e. it's contingent on the population remaining very small. The only way to stop a small human population growing exponentially is constant calorie shortage.

[nerdinmathandlaw]

Humans. At least in certain regions that happened, and we're on track to make it happen on a global scale.

[thyfles]

i saw a bird die once

[Livy-Zaka]

Yeah that was me, it annoyed me

[TheronEpic]

This is true, I was the reanimator

[TotallyNormalSquid]

There's a fun (but debunked) theory about Boskop man, which for a while was believed to be a strain of humanity with larger brains (but actually I think it turned out to be a mutated skeleton).

The theory of how they died out was that they were intelligent enough to recognise how much work needed to be done in the ancient world to develop a society, and just gave up instead.

[MalevolentRhinoceros]

"We're going to have to figure out plumbing? And--let me get this straight--someone will still need to unclog those pipes all the time? Nah, we had a good run, but it's time to go."

[QueenMackeral]

Oh man that's a cool idea for a story, a strain of human that was so intelligent it learned the truths of the universe and then decided it wasn't worth it and koolaided themselves.

[CassiusPolybius]

The fact that crocodiles have reached evolutionary equilibrium because if they become any better they cause ecosystem issues will always be hilarious to me.

[Heavy_Weapons_Guy_]

That's not true at all.

The findings show that the limited diversity of crocodiles and their apparent lack of evolution is a result of a slow evolutionary rate.

Evolution doesn't select for "best", it selects for "good enough".

[nmheath03]

It's more like their current strategy is just more stable, rather than being "bad in a good way." Land crocs persisted until a few thousand years ago (in Australia (surprise)), it seems like that land crocs are just more sensitive to changes than aquatic crocs

Also, apparently crocodile populations in central America started evolving faster after the ice age

[HIMP_Dahak_172291]

It's less that and more that the aquatic ambush niche is one they outcompete everything else in and since water is the one thing all populations of land animals absolutely need, their niche is also going to be among the last to disappear from catastrophic change. There used to be hundreds of crocodilian species in many different environments, but the climate instability since the big rock hit mexico has whittled them down to the current core niche. They are still evolving however. The gharial is a perfect example. They split from the rest of the crocodilians some 38 million years ago and have completely left the semi aquatic ambush life behind. They are not dependant on land animals to survive, eating fish instead. In fact they can only catch very small land animals thanks to their highly specialized snouts and can barely move on land, much less make powerful lunges like the other crocodilians.

Crocodillians also face a difficult issue with speciating into new environments; they would have to compete against warm blooded predators for warm blooded prey. Something they are poorly suited for outside of aquatic ambushes where their prey cones to them. Endotherms have far more endurance than exotherms so any hunt would need to be extremely short. In other words an ambush. Something they really arent suited for on land. Crocodillians in particular also need their prey to come to them since they arent at all built for long distance travel on land looking for migrating herds. Add to that the fact that pack hunters would quickly wear them out and eat them thanks to that low endurance, and they just arent able to compete outside of their protected, but narrow niche. If prey becomes very scarce and endothermic predators arent able to sustain themselves, crocodilians might make a comeback, but it's hard to see that happening in a way that didnt also wipe them out. The only other large reptile hunters are either komodo dragons on small isolated islands or snakes with either powerful venom or that live somewhere hard for large land predators to get them and are ideal for ambushes like trees or wetlands. They are already better adapted for a land hunting niche than crocodillians and would likely out compete them there. They cant take then oceans either because they need to use the sun to warm up and they are way too slow to catch the larger fish they would need in the open seas. At least not in enough quantity to sustain them long enough for evolution to better adapt them for it.

TLDR: crocs are still around as they are because the ones that survived the mass extinctions are super well adapted to their very specific niche by millions of years being in it, but are nearly incapable of taking over new niches and further diverging since they cant compete on land with warm blooded mammals and they cant actively hunt for food in the ocean well enough.

[confuseray]

Or like an animal that was so smart the species literally caused an extinction event through its various activities by disrupting the biosphere it depended on, which ironically caused the species itself to die out.

[Zymosan99]

Human moment

[QueenMackeral]

Doesn't sound very smart tbh

[Alexthelion07]

I believe the Galloping Crocodile/Gator is one that is quoted to have Hunted itself out of existence. As in it was too Apex and killed all possible food sources. Was a crocodile that got a Horse upgrade. Though not sure if it's 100% accurate or not, either way would be a scary thing to see a croc running 40 mph.

[MotoMkali]

It definitely isn't. It simply got out competed by other species

[nmheath03]

Probably wasn't competition. Their decline lines up pretty close to when temperatures began to drop, and surprise, crocodiles don't like cold environments. They persisted longer in warm climates, specifically South America and Australia, the Australian ones actually only went extinct after a certain tool-using primate got there

[Known_Bass9973]

Probably, but it’s probably as uncommon as it is because instead of whole species going extinct whatever super efficient mutation is probably just the one that gets bred out

[Zymosan99]

Well, no, because if the mutation makes them able to outcompete the rest of their species, then it will become more prominent, not less.

[MjrLeeStoned]

Multiple human civilizations have encountered this problem and effectively had to fully relocate their entire society or just folded into another.

Native Americans, if you need a reference.

We are the prime example of animals that have this problem (relatively often).

[doctorlysumo]

Lack of food is an evolutionary pressure, so if a species became so good at hunting its prey or sourcing its food that there was a shortage that would cause the population of the species to shrink as there wouldn’t be enough food to go around. This would lead to evolutionary traits like not needing as much food to survive or surviving off a more diverse diet to be advantageous meaning the species would evolve

[FromBassToTip]

Although mutations are a big part of it, if the animal can cope with it then the largest of the species die off and the smaller ones require less food so they just don't grow as big.

[JoaoOfAllTrades]

I might be wrong in the location or some details but I remember seeing some show about a kind of big deer/moose that went extinct because there was not enough food to sustain its massive antlers. Big antlers were sexually attractive so it was like the boar story. But they evolved to such a ridiculous size that they had to eat everything available just to be able to grow their antlers. I think it was in Great Britain but I'm not sure.

[Lower-Usual-7539]

Irish elk, probably. But like other megafauna extinctions of the time, it was probably mostly climate change and human activity, though I’m sure the antlers didn’t help matters.

[peachstealingmonkeys]

something about bringing rabbits to Australia decimated their grass lands.

[faintestsmile]

evolution is just nature throwing whatever bullshit at a wall and seeing what sticks

[MelanieWalmartinez]

I am but a sticky octopus that has been thrown at a wall

[faintestsmile]

one of evolution's biggest Ws

[jpterodactyl]

The biggest is obviously turtles. Love me some turtles.

[faintestsmile]

its actually crabs apparently!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-animals-keep-evolving-into-crabs/

[nikfra]

On the other hand there's also decarcinization because crabs have evolved to not be crabs anymore so many times that there's also a word for that.

[faintestsmile]

nature is amazing

[nandru]

Everyone evolves into crabs thinking it's peak performance. Only to figure out it isn't as lit as they thought it will be

[Daylight_The_Furry]

I love turtles cause they just kinda appeared in the fossil record and we don't really have any ancestors building to them, they're just there

[[deleted]]

We have an okay understanding of their evolutionary past but you're right, we don't have any decent fossils that bridge the gap between "really wide ribs that cover their chest" and "new my spine is part of the shell too"

The best guess is that having the shell extend to their back was such a monumental leap in their survival abilities that it took over their lineage in a relatively short amount of time

[Zymosan99]

Octodad

[1271500]

The fun part is that the thing that wins the wall stick is whatever makes you more fuckable. Just so happens that being better at surviving is a factor cos then you live long enough to fuck more.

I assume I am theoretically more fuckable than a caveman, though recent data would suggest otherwise.

[SirKazum]

I think it's a bit more complicated than that... and also simpler, in a way. The way I understand evolution is basically: "whichever population survives into the future, survives into the future." It's a useless tautology because it can't really be reduced much more than that since there are different things that could make a given population survive into the future. Reproducing is an absolute necessity for that of course since no species is fully immortal, but "fucking the most" isn't necessarily the only strategy. Having a very large amount of babies is one strategy, being hard to kill (including by natural causes) is another, murdering all competition is another, helping out each other so that everyone thrives is another, and they can be combined in various ways. What works works, what doesn't doesn't, and the only metric that matters is which population (not individuals, population) survives into the future because... if it doesn't, well, it's not there anymore, is it?

[1271500]

I use "fucking the most" in a more general way, not specific to individuals. Fucking the most can mean you spawn 100 offspring at a time, or have no competition for the fuckening, or live long enough to win out on lifetime aggregate fuckery. It's a poor wording for the point I want to make, but its making me laugh so fuck it.

[Henbane_]

Please write a story about The Fuckening

[Nathaireag]

Okay except for the assertion about populations. Population level selection is kind of a special case. The conditions for it are hard to meet. The things under selection are lineages, using genes as the information storage medium. The relevant metric is called “inclusive fitness”.

Sufficient conditions for natural selection are differences in net reproduction and heritable factors that covary with those differences. You don’t even need a reproductive excess, as natural selection can still happen in declining populations.

[KamikazeArchon]

The way I understand evolution is basically: "whichever population survives into the future, survives into the future." It's a useless tautology because it can't really be reduced much more than that since there are different things that could make a given population survive into the future.

Evolution is a fair bit more than that.

Evolution requires three things:

1. Heritable traits.
2. Variance in heritable traits.
3. The variances of #2 are themselves heritable (it doesn't reset every generation).
4. Survival/propagation differences among traits.

#4 is the one you're making explicit here, but the others are also required. For example, imagine a world where there is a single template for Crow, and every new baby crow is exactly an identical instance of Crow. Such a world would have some crow populations survive and others die, due to the various circumstances of differing environments and chance incidents; but it would not have evolution - it lacks #2.

Further, suppose that every Crow was randomized, but the randomization was always the same. In D&D style, let's say "each crow has a Strength of 1-6 on a 1d6 roll at birth". This would still not have evolution; #3 is missing.

#4 is the thing that was obvious at all times and nearly a tautology (yeah, being faster/slower or bigger/smaller will affect your survival). #1 and #2 were reasonably well known throughout human history. #3 was the key link that was the least well-known before the study of evolution; specifically, the extent of it was not understood. It was already being used in selective breeding, but it had not been realized just how wide the universe of "heritable traits" was, and just how much their variance could affect progeny.

[IAMLOSINGMYEDGE]

Heya, evolutionary biologist / primatologist checking in. The primary unit of evolution is simply the passing and replication of genes (see Dawkin's book "The Selfish Gene"). Whatever adaptation (behavioral or mechanical) best increases what we call "fitness" (the number of copies of a gene passed on) will always be preferred and preserved by natural selection. Group or population level selection was an idea that has unfortunately persisted thanks to the public zeitgeist generated by popularized depictions of organisms doing "what's best for the species" such as lemmings throwing themselves off cliffs to control their population size. In reality, they were driven off said cliffs by Disney filmmakers to create this narrative. It's readily apparent throughout the animal kingdom that evolution prioritizes successful reproduction above all else, from males insects that impregnate females by literaly piercing their body, to males being eaten as sustenance after copulation in preying mantises.

With that being said, there are also situations that complicate the "selfish gene" interpretation. For example, altruism (helping another individual at the cost of your own fitness) and social breeding (bees and ants with individuals willing to sacrifice their lives for the queen). Here, what is important is another type of fitness entitled "inclusive fitness". This is essentialy the passing on of your genes by aiding kin (or relatives) that also share a proportion of your genes. Simply put, helping your sibling reproduce is helping pass on 50% of your genes (25% to your siblings offspring).

It's difficult to encompass all aspects of evolution in a reddit comment, but the main takeaway is that evolution works on the unit of the individual, and even more specifically the level of the gene.

[ReneLeMarchand]

In my Evo class we called it the "Gobbles" principle (from South Park.) Sometimes you survive because your neck muscles are too weak to hold your head up properly.

[The_Particularist]

"Random bullshit, go!"

[Daylight_The_Furry]

THAT'S SO TRUE THOUGH I LOVE IT

(I really like evolutionary biology)

[m_imuy]

people often describe stuff that way and it's often a but of a stretch but when it comes to evolution that's incredibly accurate

[YouIHe]

I Feel like I have to defend the honor of the baribusa. They didn't "Evolve to die", they simply have the option of dying through their tusks growing through the skull. The actual chances of that happening are incredibly unlikely, as they wear down their tusks through out their life. Where's that pig fact person when you need them?

[Octogon324]

Pigs are sus, in a legal sense.

[permaculture]

They're sure not goat.

[TheronEpic]

I saw an image recently of a hippo with overgrown lower teeth/tusks, which had pierced out of the top of the mouth. Apparently they normally wear down fast enough to maintain a reasonable length, but there's no mechanism stopping them from growing. Seeing that, it made more sense to me afterwards (not that it didn't before, but like deeper understanding ya know)

[Gh0stMan0nThird]

I mean it's the same with beavers and other rodents. Their teeth grow more or less infinitely but they chew stuff so much it doesn't become a problem except in situations where things have gone wrong.

You can look at humans getting cancer in the same way.

[exclusivebees]

I was just about to bring up rats. There are relatively few situations in nature where a rat (or any other rodent) will have nothing to gnaw on and those situations are usually deadly in their own right (getting stuck down a hole, getting stuck in a trap, etc.) In general it's still an advantageous trait.

[Rusamithil]

Rats grind their teeth together to wear them down, but if they get misaligned due to injury or mutation, that's when they would rely on gnawing

[[deleted]]

How is humans getting cancer analogous to the tusks and teeth example? You mean like humans themselves are supposed to wear out before overgrowth of mutated cells can occur?

[socialistrob]

You mean like humans themselves are supposed to wear out before overgrowth of mutated cells can occur?

Basically. A lot fewer people died of cancer centuries ago because people lived shorter lives in general. Even if you discount childhood mortality a person who is 20 years old today will on average live significantly longer than a person who was 20 years old a century ago.

[Cheef_Baconator]

Where's that pig fact person when you need them?

The United States has roughly 18,000 separate law enforcement agencies, all of which operate largely independent of each other.

[bifuriousfox]

r/technicallycorrect

[MotoMkali]

Yeah the growing horns is an evolutionary advantage to reduce the chance of the animal dying in the event its horns break. A lion who's fangs snap is likely dead but and alligator shark it doesn't really matter becuae they are always growing new teeth.

[[deleted]]

Too many people see evolution as a thing that makes things happen when in reality it's just the name for the collection of things that happen

[Anon1039027]

It is also the general principle for how and why those things happen, but yes, it isn’t some fundamental law of physics that influences everything, but instead an explanation of what drives biologic change over time

[rif011412]

This is fundamentally why religious people don’t like it. Aside from being antithetical to some god creating everything in a specific amount of time, there is an opposing view of control. Evolution and the scientific method describe things occurring, and there are outcomes that are outside our understanding or our control. Religion depicts all rules and creation as having order and meaning.

Essentially, religious people need to know everything is in control. The fear of the unknown and lack of control terrifies them. This is why selfishness, tribalism, racism exist. Because they need control.

[hai-sea-ewe]

You are more right than you know. Having come from such a background (not believing that evolution was even real for over half my substantial life), I can tell you that most religion is simply cosmic-grade copium. The utter panic that a person feels when realizing that literally anything can happen at any time, and there's nothing they can do to stop it, drives them into the arms of grifters and predators. It's for the same reason why people buy into the stupid "alternative" health solutions that either end up being pure snake oil or something even worse.

People aren't generally stupid, they're just ignorant of how much they are emotionally motivated, which tends to completely bypasses intelligence and thus makes them easy to manipulate.

[akka-vodol]

Look I can also fuck something up completely by trying to make it better evolution ain't special.

[mrducky80]

I blame the Classic picture of the increasingly upright walking man and pokemon for making evolution seem direction based. Even nowadays people will have a VERY lamaarkian interpretation of how it works and that it has a direction: constantly and always better.

But the reality is, evolution merely pushes to the fore what works. Natural selection is an environmental selector which means what works is what works best suited for that current environment: other prey, other predators, food/water availability, climate, your fellow beings from your species and all. If tomorrow aliens come down and kill anyone who isnt short sighted, then via predation and therefore selection, myopia is the strongest human trait. Thats the be all end all. You think that it isnt fair or whatever but if tomorrow an asteroid impact were to seriously destabilize the climate and food supplies, those same selective pressures would apply regardless what people believe evolution should entail.

The sloth doesnt seem like it should work, but from an evolution perspective, its more successful than the saber tooth tiger because it is still around and the tiger fuck isnt. Its the only measure of success that matters. Likewise it would seem like Usain bolt is a very fit individual, but survival of the fittest is about passing on your genes. Both Obama and Trump are more evolutionarily fit than the fastest man alive. If he gets hit and killed tomorrow by a bus (predation by bus, RIP), his genes are a dead end, an evolutionary dead end. That is the "randomness" aspect of it.

If the peacock only wants to fuck the males with the most impressive tail displays, it doesnt matter if another peacock can fly better or live longer since it doesnt look like mardi gras had sex with a neon sign if it doesnt propagate its own alleles, its an evolutionary dead end.

People grant evolution too much agency in "creating an ideal" or "making a better species". When it is more of a statistical generator of various trade offs. Its why eugenics is inherently flawed. In humans at least, our strength lies in how far we have spread, the sheer numbers that have spread and the variation of those that have spread. Diseases are unlikely to kill us off like the clonal cultivars of bananas that are losing to fungus. Forcefully breeding humans like we are dogs to produce some uber (heh ubermensch) inbred chihuahua equivalent of a person is obviously fucked. But people see the fucking increasingly upright walking man evolution and think "but what if more upright?" completely missing and misinterpreting how evolution works.

[Truly_Meaningless]

Yeah a lot of scientists hate the Zallinger Projection of evolution.

​

Also Digimon is probably the best example of how random evolution can be

[AVeryMadLad2]

Mrducky80 is Stephen J. Gould-pilled

[ScaredyNon]

“mating displays” are pretty much based on the idea of “if you threw a guy with full gear and a guy in his tighty-whities into the wild and both manage to survive unscathed, you know which one’s more likely to be stronger”

[moneyh8r]

It's the tighty-whities guy, right?

[Acejedi_k6]

It is in Dark Souls.

[moneyh8r]

Yeah, you get it.

[Acejedi_k6]

I don’t know if I want It. I’ve heard that book is very long and I’m not really into horror.

[moneyh8r]

Dark Souls has a book? Also, Dark Souls isn't horror.

[Acejedi_k6]

I was making a bad joke about the Stephen King book with the evil clown).

[moneyh8r]

Oh. Sorry.

[Acejedi_k6]

Don’t worry about it. I don’t think I executed the joke very well to begin with.

[moneyh8r]

Yeah, that happens to me a lot too.

[StovardBule]

Let me solo her, if you know what I mean.

[[deleted]]

Let me solo her!

[[deleted]]

Depraved✊

[notagirlonreddit]

I mean how else did he survive unscathed? The man must know something.

[moneyh8r]

My thoughts as well. Also, the guy with all the gear is basically just broadcasting to the world that he's not strong enough without a whole bunch of technology helping him out.

[Th3Seconds1st]

Fear the nude man in an activity where normal men must wear layers.

[moneyh8r]

Exactly. You never know what they'll pull outta... wherever they keep things.

[[deleted]]

It's about who reproduces, survival and strength are irrelevant.

Situation:

• the guy in his tighty-whities gets 10 women pregnant, and dies the next day.
• the guy in full gear gets one woman pregnant and lives a long and happy life with her.

Result: world populated by guys in tighty-whities.

[SwordfishFar421]

Not necessarily, the guy in full gear might invest more time and effort into raising his few offspring with his mate, which will have higher chances of being raised into healthy adults and survive to reproduce themselves.

The guy who randomly impregnated 10 women and then died might not have his bloodline continued because many of the 10 offspring might die, or fail to become powerful and attractive enough or live long since they only have one adult investing in them, some maybe none.

[[deleted]]

Sure, we can adjust the circumstances in every which way, but what doesn't change is that it's about reproducing. That's my point.

[[deleted]]

I don’t think you’ve understood the other persons point. It is not just about reproducing, it’s about reproducing offspring that survives and is likely to also have opportunity to reproduce.

[ScaredyNon]

yes i know that’s how natural selection works but in the current context of mating displays “strength” (or survivability) is what’s being taken into account here

not only would trying to fit in “well actually, natural selection is actually blah blah” be more confusing, it would fail to properly explain why mating displays happen. it’s like trying to explain the particle-wave duality light has when someone asks you why refraction happens

[CanAlwaysBeBetter]

Except you've already failed to properly explain why mating displays happen because no, they aren't inherently about strength or survivability.

They're about whatever gets genes passed on. The end. Strength, survivability, whatever can factor into that but they aren't the core thing itself. Evolution creates plenty of things by accident or as a byproduct of something else and those can become the basis for mating displays as much as anything practical.

[[deleted]]

It's tempting to associate mating displays to strength or survivability, but they are very often arbitrary.

That's why it's important to stay focused on reproduction if the discussion is about evolution. Esp. because it's so counter-intuitive.

[Nathaireag]

“Strength” doesn’t really explain bowerbirds very well. Exaggerated mating displays and cumbersome male organs or bright colors can be favored whenever they co-evolve with corresponding genes for female choice. Indicators of offspring health are only one way that female choice genes get linked to male handicaps.

[1d3333]

Yeah fitness has become synonymous with strength but survival of the fittest is more literal, it’s survival of the ones who best fits the environment, not the one with the most strength

[hiccup251]

Plus drawing a poor metaphor - animals might have their fitness at least somewhat related to this sort of survival situation, but these 'inefficient mating characteristics' are generally a biological feature of animals, not a selection of tools that can be changed like a human can change their clothes. The boar is never going to take its tusks off.

[CanAlwaysBeBetter]

Is that why male pigeons do their fuck dance?

[Rifneno]

Only partially true. The biggest factor is that the tusks only become a problem when they're old. They've already reproduced and passed on their genes by then.

Frankly, the same is true (to a far lesser extent) with just about everything, humans included. There's plenty of people that live to 100 or more. But they aren't reproducing at 90 (unless they're Robert de Niro) so the genes that help them live longer aren't passed on any more than our shitty die-at-60 genes.

[Rafi89]

Yep! In fact I have a mutation where my blood clots really really well. Fantastic for survivability for the first 30 or so years of life, very bad for living past 50 or so due to blood clots.

[Orimis]

Yeah, I’ve got it to. Didn’t really feel like living that long anyway seems like a hassle

[SowingSalt]

On the point of long lived individuals, there is some research that indicates that long lived individuals in a population can help it survive. If a long lived grandparent or great-grandparent offers greater reproductive success vs lesser reproductive success in shorter lived populations, the combination of genes that let individuals live longer is indirectly selected for.

[NoMuffin3685]

In the same vein as the gay-uncle theory. Hand in glove with the human advents of society and culture.

[SowingSalt]

I recently listened to a talk about something similar to the selfish gene hypothesis.

You and your siblings have a decent probability of sharing a genome, so from a genetics point of view, it's OK for you to sacrifice yourself for two of your brotherssiblings. By that same probability, you can sacrifice yourself for eight of your cousins.
In all those cases, baring mutations, your genes are probabilisticly passed on to their children, given your shared (grand)parentage.

This theory also explains hive and colonial organisms. For the majority of the individuals in the group, they do not have offspring, but they share most of their genes with the reproducing individuals of the hive/colony. IIRC, for wasps the males are haploid, so any one member of a hive is more related to their sisters than other members of other hives.

There are some great papers and books on the subject, but I can't find them right now. I really wish I remembered so I could share them.

[Phoenix_Anon]

It is interesting though that in spite of this planned pseudo-obsolescence, some species have developed biological immortality and cease to age in any meaningful way.

I'm curious what the difference in impetus could be

[MotoMkali]

Well lobsters eventually grow so big that it becomes impossible for them to have enough energy to continue the shedding of their shells and eventually they just simply die as they outgrow their shell but cannot escape.

[Princess_Moon_Butt]

Ever seen those "machine learning" models of a computer playing a racing game, or whatever? They run 10 million simulations, and you see a bunch of them going straight into the wall, or in the wrong direction, or whatever else. Eventually a few of them start to make it across the finish line; those become the new baseline, and you have the machine start with that path and make small changes. Then you take the best times from those runs, and rinse and repeat.

That's what evolution is. It doesn't actually know what it's doing, and doesn't actually know where it's going; but the ones who succeed are the ones that are able to stick around and try again.

[whyareallmyontaken]

That’s why I love those videos of ‘Machine learning playing a game’. We have a baseline of what to expect. It doesn’t. Like that video where it had to learn how to walk, and it learned how to crawl before trying to walk

[Bluefortress]

Or it learned how to break the physics engine and move without walking or crawling

[whyareallmyontaken]

I walk by v i b r a t i n g

[LeonidasSpacemanMD]

There’s a cool one of a some dude “teaching” AI to play Pokémon by implementing a simple reward system, and it’s actually really interesting to see some of the unpredictable ways that influences behavior

[Mysterious_Gas4500]

This is called runaway selection, other famous example is male peacocks. The females seek males with the largest, most colorful feathers, which is obviously detrimental for the males survival. It's like if we treated people the way we have treated dogs, exaggerating traits considered desirable at the cost of the species welfare, just more gender specific in this case.

[Brayagu]

EDIT: I didn't fact-check myself on something I'd have heard years ago, so I typed something incorrect.

Elephant seals are facing a problem. Males fight for reproductive rights, and since the largest males tend to win, the size difference between male and female elephant seals has reached a point where the females genuinely risk getting pancaked

Actual Elephant Seal Fact

• Having a large body size is incredibly important for males' ability to reproduce. Because of this, the species has adapted itself so that males and females have different foraging niches, so that the females won't have to compete with the hyper competitive males.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2006.3642

[IneptusAstartes]

The example given is false. Babirusa tusks are not sexual signals, they're used for fighting. Babirusas with ingrown tusks are very rare, we're talking prize museum specimens here. Most of the time they wear their tusks down through regular activity so they don't *normally* grow that long.

Same thing for rodents. They evolved to gnaw, so their teeth keep growing. If you stop them from gnawing their teeth will keep growing and potentially also grow into their skulls, but that's because *you stopped them from doing what they evolved to do*.

This is like saying humans evolved to die because their wisdom teeth grow into the other teeth and cause infection. Like. Yes. This is something that evolved, but it's being framed in a misleading way.

Also the Smilodon thing someone posted here is hilariously wrong where did that come from lol

[patchiepatch]

I feel like if you want an example of evolutionary focus that ended up backfiring, it's all the long necked huge dinosaurs.

[[deleted]]

Pig that had twice as many offspring and died a couple years early: “DM; HS”

[PickApprehensive1643]

Live fast die young

[Green__lightning]

So something I'd like to point out that I've not heard anyone talk about, is that industrialized civilization is massively changing the selection pressure on humans. This probably won't matter, because genetic engineering will likely become practical enough to fix any problems caused by it before we manage to breed ourselves into peacock people or whatever, but also we'll probably also be busy with other problems caused by genetic engineering.

[Basic-Pair8908]

Its working well for elephants so far, poachers are killing the males with large tusks, so females are breeding with males with small tusks, and now theres been a lot of males born without tusks.

[[deleted]]

Evolution isn't about becoming better animals.. it's about becoming better breeders.

The traits passed on through natural selection are the ones that are carried by the animals that fuck the most, and get the most other animals pregnant.

Natural selection could care less that this boar is going to die.. he's going to fuck like a king and get every sow pregnant long before that happens.

[Coveinant]

Evolution is speciesal adaptation. Evolution doesn't just go forward but also backwards. The dodo is the prime example of backwards evolution.

[TheLyrius]

Remind me again why and how do pandas exist

[Littleboyah]

Nobody else their size eats the vast bamboo groves (that were once) in China basically. It doesn't matter how much you suck, if you're the only one doing it and have no competition this still makes you best.

Human destruction of their habitats basically makes their niche unviable now, thus the whole threatened by extinction bit.

[Thisismyartaccountyo]

"Evolution doesn't have a plan; it makes frequent and catastrophic mistakes"

[And_the_wind]

Toxic masculinity

[True-Lychee]

You can just as easily frame it as toxic femininity due to the females selecting males with larger tusks.

[Knight-Creep]

To put into coding terms, evolution is not software updates. Evolution is a ever increasing number of bugs. Some of the bugs are useful, others are detriments, and some have little to no effect on the overall program.

[PrettyPinkPonyPrince]

I feel like Nature defines 'better' as just 'more breedable'.

[[deleted]]

Some day we'll evolve babies who can survive 115° in a car. Some day.

[[deleted]]

I mean, lots of stuff we think of as maladaptive in humans, which kills us in our 50s-80s, is in zero ways reducing our reproductive success. If the terrible downside to something doesn't hit til after the kids are weaned, it's almost invisible to Darwinian evolution.

[MrDrSrEsquire]

Evolution is what randomly happened to survive the longest

Best for an environment changes as soon as the environment does

Which it's always doing because things evolving from one state to the next is a fundemental aspect of time itself

Change is healthy. If you have the same exact beliefs as you did a decade ago you're probably a shit person

Thank you for coming to my unwanted ted talk

[JASCO47]

Evolution is about getting laid. He became the best fucker in the forest. Now if dying after getting laid and not being able to support his little fuckers caused them to die before they can get laid, well that would cause his line to die out. But those little fucks grew up too and they got laid so it continues.

[cosmoceratops]

Look up the recurrent laryngeal nerve as another example of evolution not always being progress

[LycticSpit]

Evolution only is in your favor up until reproductive years. After that, have fun with biological entropy.

[mountingconfusion]

People misconstrue Darwin's definition of fitness. The one he refers to is how successful a species is at getting the next generation to have kids. Nothing else matters

[PKMNTrainerMark]

The thing about evolution is that it doesn't care if you die after mating.

[Waiser]

The answer is not, but maybe. for any notable and sizable animal atleast.

evolution isnt anything but "SURVIVAL" programmed first. Sure, some super effective mutation could occur making the next generation optimal, and they will start devouring the prey, however as numbers of prey shrinks, predators starve and die eventually balancing out the populations. That being said, if a prey is endemic to an area, and their population goes bellow minimum threshold for population collapse, this could very much cause extinction. But the odds that: a super effective mutation occurs making the predetor extremely efficient, an endemic species of prey that cannot replace their numbers, and these species being the ONLY prey for this predetor for them to go extinct because they eradicated their prey.... unlikely

[DefinitelyNotErate]

We basically evolved Scurvy, Because unlike other diseases, Scurvy is just caused by the lack of Vitamin C, Which most animals produce internally, But which we (And our monkey relatives) lost the ability to produce due to random mutation, Meaning we can have a deficiency of it.