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 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (2 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] 0 points 4 weeks ago

Yes and no.

Ok my last input was a bit lazy hence all the armchair biologists tuning in.

Less and more evolved is definitely a thing when alluding to the complexity of the system and since evolution is incremental time helps.

However you are right that adaptability to the environment is the most important thing when defining the success of your "genetic constitution".

I guess my point is that we are more likely to have, in our DNA, evolved adaptation to them than they are to have adaptation to circumvent our immunity.

That being said, yes there are inherent risks to getting those out there, I'm just saying our propensity for enjoying fictional doom scenarios might make us overstate the probability of those occurences.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 4 weeks 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] 5 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

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

Nothing about the phrase “more evolved” implies a “straight path” of evolution

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks 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 4 weeks ago (1 children)

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] 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

The question is more or less adapted to what? An elephant is more adapted than a mouse to the daily activities of an elephant, and vice-versa. An elephant might be more well adapted for our current environment for elephant tasks than, say, a wooly mammoth, but it could just be that the wooly mammoth was actually the more well adapted animal except for being the only megafauna in an area with humans, eventually leading to extinction by hunting. There's a million and one ways to be adapted to an environment.

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

But in your example, humans are part of the environment. Or at least they are a factor in your ability to survive. Part of being adapted and being able to survive is surviving your predators. Dont you agree?

I dont know if i agree that being adapted to "elephant tasks" is a good marker to measure how adapted elephants are. If an elephant can eat, reproduce, and defend or hide itself from predators or deadly flora or weather, etc, then i would look at the elephant and argue it is well adapted.

Unless you think that predators change things or you dont consider humans as predators because we dont always kill for survival.

I dunno, im kind of just fleshing this out in my head as we speak.