Im a highschooler and today i zoned out during math class, and started thinking about how the first cell was created. So im thinking that they started as some kind of compound that needed an element to reach stability. And DNA was some kind of coincidence where phosphate, deoxyribose and Nitrogenous bases got together. And slowly everything came together to make a simple cell that reads instructions. And it evolved from there. But Im highly unsatisfied because the answers online kinda suck. Is there anywhere I can find a good theory about this topic?

How come modern humans, or any sapien with good inteligence haven't branched off and evolved into a diffrent type of human alongside us. Why is it just "Homo sapiens"?, just us...?

i know that goes against how evolution works because usually those organisms die out because of the environmental pressure was against them, making their life harder (thus making them more likely to die), but its still technically possible for them to survive and reproduce even though the environmental pressure is against them, is there an example of that?

edit: i phrased this question incorrectly, check seek_equilibrium's comment because that is what i actually meant to ask

Food plays a role, but I´m too tempted to think it´s the only factor. You could argue that there is no way that a mosquito and a whale have the same genetic capabilities in size but think about pre-birth nutrition in whales. It´s a whole lot, 1% of the stuff that the whale consumes while it´s in utero is enough to compare to the lifetime of food of the mosquito. That 1% is more than the mosquito will ever eat. Dogs can never be as big as whales (apart from being on land so the gravity has an influence) because they can't get the same amount of sheer food that the whale has in utero. This sounds like a dumb post and it is but I want some honest scientific data that I know probably exists but I haven´t encountered it yet.

Like I understand evolution but how does a single cell organism just procreate and make a 2 cell organism. Thats double the size in 1 generation. I dont quite get how life got off its feet and got past the single celled organism stage.

Also side question, does this also mean that TECHNICALLY some random bacteria could evolve over millions/billions of years to become another form of human or animal?

Are new species forming every couple million years due to evolution?

Stone tools and possible butchered Southern Mammoth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammuthus_meridionalis) from Greece in Eastern Europe said to be 2.5~3.32 million years old. This is older than the 1.8 million year old Dmanisi site which also had stone tools and cut marks on bones of Southern Mammoth of the Caucasus in Eastern Europe/West Asia.

Use Google Translate to translate these Greek articles:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100128163043/http://www.ptolemaida.gr/Mousio-2.html

http://www.arxeion-politismou.gr/2020/01/dimos-Eordaias-gia-elefanta-Perdikka.html

Perhaps Homo habilis and early Homo erectus has been hunting these large Southern Mammoths? This would mean the earliest Homo erectus was apex predator, and possibly comparable in intelligence to Modern Humans today, despite the smaller average brain volume. Is it possible though that Southern Mammoth kills by other predators was often available for Homo erectus to scavange?

I was talking to my wife, that is originally from Africa, and she told me that her uvula was cut off when she a young girl because of some belief that uvula causes respiratory diseases.

So we started talking about it and we became curious, what is the evolutionary “purpose” for our uvulas?

How humans acquired a taste for starches

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn0609

Like I get they were prokaryotic cells but like how did those form

In Chapter 8 of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, he references an observation from a paper by Alvarez where a baby swallow was seen discarding magpie egg from the nest. Dawkins expressed skepticism about why a nestling, rather than the parent, would engage in this behavior, as adults are usually more capable of recognizing foreign eggs and acting accordingly. He hyptohesized the behaviour may relate to fratricide among swallows.

Has there been any follow-up research or further explanation for this behavior since then? Was this ever understood as a common or adaptive behavior in swallows, or is it still seen as an unusual occurrence?

My 10 year old daughter is having me identify different types of tree on our walk to school. I threw in the trivia about a neighbour's ginkgo "That kind of tree was around with the Dinosaurs." Discussion about this led to the question "What's the newest kind of tree?"

I have no idea.

Looking at the genus level, what do we think is the most recent type of tree to have evolved in our fossil record? (If it's easier to be specific about "Typical in North American cities" with the question... then that)

Thank you!

What adaptations do Bats have that compensates for their differences with Birds? For example, mammals don't have skeletal pneumaticity which makes birds lighter. So how do they make themselves lighter?

One hypothesis that I've heard for explaining menopause in humans is that it allows women to care for their grandchildren (but, as far as I know, scientists aren't exactly sure why humans have menopause). But why wouldn't this apply to men as well? Men can have kids at any age, even if they are really old.

Also, do any other species have menopause, and if so, is it only in females? Or does it affect the males as well?

Sorry if this is a dumb question. I'm wondering why people tend to die at roughly the same age. The average age that people die at is around 80 (give or take some years; obviously there is a range). But some people get cancer (or one of various other natural diseases) and die when they are like 30, so obviously this isn't true for everyone (still, this is pretty rare, as far as I know, for some reason).

I could understand why it would be bad for people to die before they hit puberty (so before you could reproduce), but as far as I know, as long as you have kids, then natural selection doesn't select against you that much. So why not 40 instead of 80, for example? That's still more than enough time to have kids and raise them (if you start having kids right away once you hit puberty), especially if you're a man since you could have many kids at the same time. Why isn't there much more variation in the age range that people usually die at (as long they survive childhood, historically speaking)?

Also, I'm wondering why if you survive childhood, you're likely to survive adulthood (at least, that's what I heard to explain the low life expectancy in the past). Why were kids historically more likely to die than adults? This is all probably true for other animals, as well, so an explanation regarding any species would be welcome.

Hi all, I'm trying to compose a list of the 15-20 25-30 works that I take to have had the most dramatic and lasting impact on the structure of evolutionary theory since Darwin.

I've added some new ones to the list [noted in square brackets] based on comments made on this post. Will likely add more that have been suggested after I think and read up on them some more.

The working list (chronologically):

[1876 - Alfred Russel Wallace, The Geographical Distribution of Animals]

1893 - Auguste Weismann, The Germ Plasm: A Theory of Heredity

[1908 - G.H. Hardy, “Mendelian proportions in mixed populations”]

1918 - R.A. Fisher, "The correlation between relatives on the supposition of Mendelian inheritance"

1922 - R.A. Fisher, "On the dominance ratio"

1930 - R.A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection

1931 - Sewall Wright, "Evolution in Mendelian populations"

1932 - J.B.S. Haldane, The Causes of Evolution (published serially from 1924-1932)

1937 - T. Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Origin of Species

1942 - Ernst Mayr, Systematics and the Origin of Species

[1943 - Sewall Wright, “Isolation by distance”]

[1944 - G.G. Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution]

1948 - Gustave Malecot, The Mathematics of Heredity

[1954 - Edgar Anderson and G. Ledyard Stebbins, Jr., "Hybridization as an evolutionary stimulus" ]

1957 - C.H. Waddington, The Strategy of the Genes

1964 - W.D. Hamilton, "The genetical evolution of social behaviour"

[1967 - Lynn Sagan (Margulis), “On the origin of mitosing cells”]

1968 - Motoo Kimura, "Evolutionary rate at the molecular level"

[1970 - George Price, “Selection and covariance”]

[1973 - John Maynard Smith and George Price, “The logic of animal conflict”]

[1973 - Tomoko Ohta, "Slightly Deleterious Mutant Substitutions in Evolution"]

[1979 - S.J. Gould and R. Lewontin, “The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm”]

1982 - John Maynard Smith, "Evolution and the theory of games"

[1983 - R. Lande and S. Arnold, "The measurement of selection on correlated characters"]

1983 - Motoo Kimura, The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution

[1989 - Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr, "Patterns of speciation in drosophila" ]

(Before anyone suggests Dawkins... I've already got Hamilton on there, which is where the gene's eye view actually comes from)

i mean like, golde retrievers or hounds, its just a floppy thing that, AFAIK, they cant move (much) and i dont think it works like an amplifier or anything like a cat's ear for example.

is it just a curtain to dampen loud noises? is it just artificial evolution bc we found it cute?

(I know not everyone does, but a lot of people)

I, like a lot of people, have an irrational fear of spiders, despite not living anywhere close to an area with dangerous ones. My limited understanding of evolution is we don't fear anything by default, but our ancestors that happened to be afraid of dangerous things lived longer to reproduce.

By that logic, why aren't we deathly afraid of mosquitoes? I know they don't kill you as fast as a snake bite, hence why our ancestors might not have known how dangerous they are, but even then those who feared mosquitoes must have had a much better chance at reproducing right? More so than those who feared spiders. Especially since we evolved in southern Africa.

Maybe because mosquitoes are pretty much unavoidable? Hence being afraid of them might do more bad than good?

Hey yall, just an undergrad here taking an evolution class right now. As I’m catching up on my lectures, I’m noticing that a lot of my course content, especially things that violate HWCE such as genetic drift, mutations, etc, involve lots of bioinformatics, things like formulas, equations, and large datasets. So now I’m curious if evolution is, or is becoming pretty much applied bioinformatics, in that mathematical relationships are interpreted through a biological lens.

I would love to chat with my prof on this, but unfortunately school is off for a week and curiosity got the best of me lol. I apologize if this is a dumb question, this is just a level III and the only evolution course offered at my school. Cheers!

This might be a bit of a long shot, and I’m hoping what I’m asking for isn’t too niche or specific, but can anyone recommend me some good documentaries about foxes specifically? As well as their evolution across time? For some reason foxes just pull at me in a way most other canids can’t

In 1982, I was working with some biologists who said that peregrine falcons were so afraid of human contact that they would abandon their nests if a human came near it. They were listed as extremely at risk at that time.

Fast forward to today, and peregrine falcons are nesting in cities and no longer listed as endangered. Have they evolved a lesser fear of human contact in the last few decades?

I’ve been watching one narrated by Morgan freeman on Netflix. Our living world I think it is. How do they know the stuff they are saying is correct? Have they found fossils of all the dinosaurs, mammals ect? How do they know when everything happened? Sorry for all the questions. I’m interested in evolution and nature but, I don’t want to finish watching this if it’s not correct, well as correct as it can be without being there. Thank you

How does evolution know how to adapt? For example, if humans needed a horn on their foreheads for whatever reason the new environment demands, and no human beings currently have horns, how does evolution grow the horn and how does evolution know a horn is needed for the environment the species finds itself in?

I don't know how to describe this efficiently.

If we go by the idea that inanimate matter became simple living things at one point, through some natural process of chemistry or whatever it was, then there had to have been a stage of evolution where simple chemistry ensured that more complex structures retained their complexity, and even helped other adjacent forms become similar or something else alike reproduction (I may remember reading that the initial reproduction was self-replication?). (This is the first part of what I want to ask about.)

But then, when we look at existing life now, we observe there exists a drive for reproduction. It is conceptualized almost as a "goal" in evolution.

Now, I am unsure whether this is an issue of our use of language or not, but I am having difficulties explaining to myself how did life go from "chemistry made these life-like constructs absorb nearby matter and then make copies of themselves" to "these life-like constructs are going out of their way to make sure more copies of themselves are created".

I hope my question is clear enough. I would like to learn more about this particular topic. Thank you!

I was looking for it in the internet for quite a long time, but didn't find much in my native language and what \i've found in English were mostly basical informations from which I uderstood only that it was a single-celled organism, but not more. So, then I'd be really glad for more detailed answers of how this organism could look like, what habitat it could live what could it eat and how, how long it could live. Like, anything we can guess with the highest possibility about this organism. I am not too much of an expert of the single celled-organisms and if my questions sound wrong, please correct me. I just really want to know.

Like they haven't had time to evolve to understand that cars are dangerous.

Is it the gust of wind they fly away from, because something like a cat would create that as it ran towards them?

In which case are birds evolved not to fly away from specific predators but actually to fly away from "gusts off wind"?

It would follow that if a cat was streamlined like a mf then it would get the bird even running at it from distance. But also if gusts of wind were the issue then on a windy day you'd expect birds to be shitting themselves at false alarms every 5 minutes.

Thoughts?

Edit - I'm dumb it's movement. Gust of wind.. lmao.

Hello! I am really interested in evolution and paleoanthropology, however, this is not my working field and I don’t have much experience with it. Still I would love to be able to keep up with the community.

I wanted to ask you, what papers/magazines/blogs do you recommend reading to keep up with what’s being discovered/published?

Thank you so much!

in this article they say that natural selection involving things trying to adapt is a misconception:

MISCONCEPTION: Natural selection involves organisms trying to adapt.

CORRECTION: Natural selection leads to the adaptation of species over time, but the process does not involve effort, trying, or wanting. Natural selection naturally results from genetic variation in a population and the fact that some of those variants may be able to leave more offspring in the next generation than other variants. That genetic variation is generated by random mutation — a process that is unaffected by what organisms in the population want or what they are “trying” to do. Either an individual has genes that are good enough to survive and reproduce, or it does not; it can’t get the right genes by “trying.” For example bacteria do not evolve resistance to our antibiotics because they “try” so hard. Instead, resistance evolves because random mutation happens to generate some individuals that are better able to survive the antibiotic, and these individuals can reproduce more than other, leaving behind more resistant bacteria.

this confuses me because what about the extinction event that took out the dinosaurs for example? werent the remaining animals that 'tried' their hardest to survive in that hostile environment the ones who successfully passed on their genes for the following generations?

And if so, which ones?