Asklemmy

43826 readers

863 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

I was just listening to eons in my car and specifically the episode about armored fish, and the thought occurred to me: isn't evolution ultimately selecting for adaptability? (m.youtube.com)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It would seem the design that can survive the most extinctions would be the clear winner in the end.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (3 children)

There are some species which haven't changed all that much for millions of years

Like... crocodiles?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

The biggest one (aside from obvious examples like sponges and jellyfish) has got to be dragonflies. The original dragonfly was as big three-dimensionally as a footlong sub from Subway, though it was a breathing machine (like us, so let this be a true fable for us to learn from) as it needed oxygen that wasn't in large enough supply. So it simply shrunk in size to adapt once all the air ran out and there was no Druidia to restore it, and ever since then, we've had the same tiny dragonfly model ever since, for almost a billion years.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

And conifers

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Conifers don't have a bite force of 20,000 newtons and stomach acid that can disolve bone.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

crocodiles

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.