The title says it all.

I have wondered for a while now, why do humans go through menopause and how did we start going through it? Its a really unique feature that very few animals have.

(Just found this out today)

One of the few venomous mammals, and the only venomous primate, the Slow Loris evolved to produce venom through modified sweat glands unlike most other venomous (Vertebrate) animals which have modified salivary glands.

They lick their armpits where the sweat glands are and coat their teeth with it.

The balance organ in the inner ear consists of three semicircular canals. This structure is remarkably strongly preserved all the way from sharks to humans, so must have a strong survival value. When did it evolve? (And how?)

Why would animals like camels, penguins, or any complex lifeform adapt as they have to live in such hostile environments (e.g. adapting to thrive on little water for the camel and extra layers of fat for the penguin). Especially since the world was more connected with Pangea, why and how did this natural selection occur instead of migration to more habitable environs?

If you could explain like I'm five, that would be great. I grew up in YEC circles and am trying to learn about evolution (as opposed to the creationist strawman version) for the first time. Thanks!

Im learning about Ediacaran fauna right now and I just wanted to ask if my assumption that the evolution of eyes in bilaterals is the cause of the Cambrian explosion. Seems like Cambrian explosion is mostly about animals. Maybe new animals created new niches for plants or whatever, but I’m not really seeing an explosion in the Cambrian of flora much. So was it sight that caused the explosion?

In my mind, after reading and watching a bunch of material about this, it seems like some worm about 540 million years ago got a pair of eyes, and that animal is the cause of the Cambrian explosion and also became the common ancestor of all vertebrates, anthropods and cephalopods. What am I missing?

It seems like a high % of mothers today are unable to, due to problems latching, milk supply, pain, etc.

Has evolution optimized for breastfeeding? It would seem to be as basic of a survival need as drinking water, eating, sleeping, etc.

I am an adult and challenging my biology 30 diploma in Alberta. I understand how to do the equations, I have come across a specific type of question few times, I’m not sure how to answer,sometime the way I do it is right and then sometime wrong. Maybe I am making assumptions in the question that I shouldn’t. If it’s just my mistake on a wording issue it should be an easy fix.

The question type: In a population of velociraptors that assumes hardy-Weinberg principles.

brown skin is homozygous dominant and grey homozygous recessive. If the percentage of brown skin velociraptors is 64% what is the % of velociraptors that are heterozygous.

What are they asking me? 2pq (this I agree with)

What did they give me? This is where I disagree. They claim p^2. I think it’s p^2+2pq- as it just says the velociraptor has brown skin. And that brown skin is dominant.

So they have- p^2=.64 p=0.8 q=0.2 2pq=0.32 32%

I have find the recessive first by 1-0.64=0.36 q^2= 0.36 q= 0.6

1-0.6= 0.4 (p+q=1) p=0.4 p^2=.16

2pq-0.48 (so 48% is how many heterozygous velociraptors there are)

So am I to ignore that heterozygous would have brown skin. Or they didn’t specify so I shouldn’t assume? This is also an online question and comments are turned off.

I know fruits came from flowers which appeared in the Cretaceous, so I understand the driver for fruit to attract pollinators. But why did vegetables develop their nutritious goodness underground?

For example, the common ancestor of my first cousins is literally my grandparents (2 generations above), and we are the same generation so not removed.

Our common ancestor with chimps lived ~8 million years ago. Assuming 15 years between generations, that sets them as our 500,000th cousin probably 100,000 times removed.

What about with dogs? Spiders? Plants? Mushrooms??

Hi. I have been mostly randomly looking at evolutionary biology stuff for the last 3 months and find that I am immensely passionate in this particular field of science. I come from a 90% creationist country, but when I delved in the theory of evolution, it struck me as exciting, genuine and the correct explanation of life on Earth.

Anyways, I was thinking of spreading the knowledge and science of evolution in my country, to educate people and kids through digestible and curated content/videos, mostly in my native language, as a side hobby. I like teaching, used to be an IELTS teacher. I also like content making. The content will be focused at people who barely understand evolution or never heard of it. It will be rather simple without going into intricate details, unlike the in-depth epic content that guys like Forrest Valkai present.

So, what I need help with is, how do I educate myself on the topic first? I need a thorough and solid understanding of the mechanisms of Evolution. What books would you recommend me for the basics? Keep in mind that my work field is not science anymore but I did take some biology classes during my bachelors in Law. So, I need books/sources that are easy for me to get on track. I can get into the more complicated stuff after I have a strong grasp of the basic shit.

Any books suggestions are welcome that you think is fit for me.

there is a hypothesis on insect wing origin that says that early insects reused the gene for abdominal gills and used it on their backs. the gills already had joints, so i thought that the abdominal gills could be the equivalent of the crustacean pleopods. mayfly nymphs have these side gills, and jumping bristletails have abdominal styli, both of which bear similarity to pleopods. but mayflies have 8 pairs of abdominal gills and the bristletails have 6 pairs of styli. i checked google and it says crustaceans have 11 abdominal segments, which is the same amount of segments as in an insect. but many pictures show 8 thoracic and 7 abdominal segments. the last 5 segments are probably part of the abdomen of crustaceans because google says that crustaceans have 11 abdominal segments. so the maxillipeds are probably the insect legs.

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please tell me if i am wrong and the correct answer so i can know

The whole post is in the title, really.

I've never heard this matter bought up before and that is not okay!! We MUST discuss this!!!!

Other ape noses [Gorillas, Chimpanzees] are fashionably flat. WHY CAN'T WE HAVE THAT? When were our pointy beak noses naturally selected for!?? I'm fed up with always glimpsing that ugly thing in my line of sight. 🤥

But we get pleasure from a lot of things. Activities that from an evolutionary perspective only will distract us from surviving. Many hobbies also waste a lot of energy. Why aren't we like snakes? In their dead time when they don't do any survival-like activities, they just stay dead as still for days burning close to no energy. This sounds like a much more beneficial feature than the way we humans waste energy doing all these unnecessary things. The humans that just enjoyed resting when not doing chores, would maybe statistically survive more and dominate the population. So why aren't we boring like snakes just wanting stay still and rest most of the time?

We were talking about this in my bio class and I vaguely knew about it before but the more I think about it the more I can’t stop.

The genes that encode the proteins that replicate dna are contained in DNA. This means that the process of replication itself can change and evolve over time. Is this how we got stuff like dominant/recessive genes, or sexual reproduction, etc? This seems like an absurdly powerful tool of evolution. It’s like, evolution itself can evolve and become better at maximizing fitness. Am I wrong for thinking this is extremely significant?

On a side note it also seems like it would make abiogenesis a very very unlikely event to occur, because you need both the dna encoding of replication proteins and the replication proteins to form around the same time. Perhaps this is an explanation for the Fermi paradox?

What do you think?

I happened upon this community and figured I'd join since I'm a bit obsessed with evolution and will be studying it soon! Hello all.

To start, I am really excited about going back to school to pursue a career as a paleontologist. I had a bit of a rough start in adulthood, tried to go to college twice and flunked or dropped due to severe mental health issues. I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was in high school but was told by my mother that I "wasn't smart enough" so I just gave up on that dream. Currently, I'm 27, in about halfway through cosmetology school, but I decided that once I'm done I'm going to go back to school with the intention of eventually getting a master's in paleontology. Since I've been in cos school, I've realized that I'm actually quite smart. I did very well on my chemistry exam (we have to learn a LOT of science in order to do hair, facials, and nails) and I actually almost failed chem in high school. I'll still do hair in the meantime and might still do it on and off but I really just can't see myself wanting to be doing hair when I'm older.

Anyway, anyone here in the field of paleontology/archaeology/geology and have any advice?

What is a great mini series about the evolution of Humans and about where we come from.

I would expect like a human and a dog to share 50% of dna not a human and banana.

We have an understanding of how the eye evolved, and how the other senses evolved independently, but do we know how they evolved in relation to each other? Any good papers or books or scientific articles recommended on this topic?

Intro

I want to understand where I've failed, so I can learn. I'm referencing this (now marked controversial) comment of mine, but you don't need to see it. Here I'll be as clear as I can be:

I'm also making this post because my comment didn't even generate a discussion (as of writing this).

Defining life

NASA's definition of life excludes viruses, and defining viruses is most difficult.

I like to imagine a plant seed in a vial in space. How different is that from a virus waiting for its environment? (Apart from the different life cycles of course.)

Likewise what is "us" or any animal, plant, etc., without this planet? Is a seed in a vial on Mars alive?

I'm a proponent of the selfish gene (lower case, but also the book), or gene-centered view of evolution, and it's going strong in the literature, and has great explanatory power, and also captures the imagination, but here's my dilemma:

My dilemma w/ differential survival

This zooming in on the gene, and the differential survival thereof, doesn't explain the reproductive aspect of life (I'll explain). Life isn't at the gene level, and isn't simply emergent from it either, because that ignores the environment.

You might say "a gene presupposes there's an environment", great, but I'll counter (and here's my dilemma) that adapting to a different environment (short hand for evolution with all its impressive facets) clearly makes "genes for reproduction" not fixed, because a new environment will select different alleles.

I hope I have gotten my dilemma across more clearly, especially in the previous paragraph, and I sincerely appreciate your forthcoming insights. (I'm here to learn; even better if it's from mistakes; also I don't mind if there're still things to be discovered; I understand how science works, and I love it.)

Hello. I was reading about how people can now resurrect extinct animals. For example people have succeeded in making a Mammoth meatball...
(https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-massive-meatball-was-made-with-woolly-mammoth-dna-180981908/)

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And so that made me wonder about resurrecting the human races that died out some time ago:

Homo erectus fossils dated at 40 thousand to 60-70 thousand years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambungmacan\_crania#Paleoecology)

Homo neanderthalensis said to have died out around 40 thousand years ago

Denisovan (Homo longi?) finger bone from Denisova cave dated at 76,200–51,600 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisovan#Discovery)

Homo floresiensis fossils dated at 60 thousand years ago and stone tools dated 50 thousand years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo\_floresiensis#Extinction)

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Would that be going against evolution, where the fittest survive? Did we, Modern humans, win against all these other races of humans and so would we be bringing back an inferior race of humans?

I was wondering about why we are the lone surviving race of human. I was thinking maybe it wasn't that we were more intelligent, but that Modern humans, or a strain of Modern humans became super colonies like how Fire ants became super colonies when Fire ants become invasive. And that allowed collective intelligence to develop technologies that are maintained and passed on from generation to generation, such as agriculture which produces food abundantly that allows for large populations such as nations to form.

So I was thinking if this were the case that we became super colonies, that these other Archaic humans may have been just as intelligent individually or innately, but that the super colony ability was too much for the archaic humans to compete with.

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However there are some archaic humans that had small brains such as Homo floresiensis, which makes me wonder they were inferior or whether they were even human. Homo floresiensis had a brain the size of a Chimpanzee, and are called the Hobbit because they were very small at 3'6'' to 3'7''.

But I am reading that for Homo floresiensis:

"Smaller size does not appear to have affected mental faculties, as Brodmann area 10 on the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with cognition, is about the same size as that of modern humans.[44] H. floresiensis is also associated with evidence for advanced behaviours, such as the use of fire, butchering, and stone tool manufacturing." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo\_floresiensis#Brain)

I understand how we date fossils with Radiometric dating but what I don’t know is how we know how much of that radioisotope is present when the rock is formed.

I‘m sorry if this is a stupid question, but I have asked this myself for some time now:

I think I have a pretty good basic understanding of how evolution works,

but what makes life ‚want‘ to survive and procreate??

AFAIK thats a fundamental part on why evolution works.

Since the point of abiosynthesis, from what I understand any lifeform always had the instinct to procreate and survive, multicellular life from the point of its existence had a ‚will‘ to survive, right? Or is just by chance? I have a hard time putting this into words.

Is it just that an almost dead early Earth multicellular organism didn‘t want to survive and did so by chance? And then more valuable random mutations had a higher survival chance etc. and only after that developed instinctual survival mechanisms?

Hi all, wasn't sure where to ask but figured I could start here. I am looking for a paper discussing physical attributes associated with dominant and subordinate behavior in social mammals ( I would even take non mammals at this point)

Any suggestions on search terms? I feel like I have tried everything. (dominance phenotype, physical dominance, dominance traits, etc)