/r/evolution
A community to discuss evolutionary biology
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On the Origin of Species
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/r/evolution
What does the last common ancestor of humans and bees look like?
I'm wonder if say a mass extinction event were to occur, evolution or life, if thought of as a system, have a way to rebuild strategically, by that I mean ... not starting from nothing all over again
for example keeping a repository of DNA carried around in viruses, or bacteria (dk if that's a thing)
a way to modulate the subsequent evolution process to achieve "milestones"
i guess this line of thinking is me attributing to evolution properties like meta-cognition
not in the human high-level intelligence sense but like the automatic workings of our body like for example the way homornes and neurotransmitters modulate the workings of a group of cells to coordinate them,
or immunes system sense, evolution doing something similar as a system when it comes to genetic variation,
I feel like the human body, as a product of evolution might just be a shadow of, if not a more sophisticated form of, some natural aspect of evolution, as a system,
I've asked ChatGPT (I know) and it told me that an animal must produce milk to be considered a mammal. But something doesn't click in my brain, because as far as I know, you can't evolve out of a group. And I can't seem to find any helpful document online to answer this.
If all life on Earth evolved from a single organism (Luca), how did so much genetic diversity arise over time? Shouldn’t there have been a genetic bottleneck at the start, especially if the population began with only one organism?
How did the genetic variation we see today continue to emerge from such a limited genetic pool without a significant reduction in diversity?
The best example I've heard is the different between cats, lions, and tigers. They're also very closely related (I've heard 95% genetic similarity between tigers and cats), and lions and tigers are capable of breeding hybrids. On a microbial scale, most bacterial have one circular chromosome yet there's tons of variations. So this is just out of curiosity: are there any animals with the same number of chromosomes but incredibly different genotypes(greater phylogenetic distance than that of tiger-cat), and the inability to produce hybrid offspring? Is this something that could exist in theory but we've yet to see it in nature? Thank you, I am not a specialist in evolutionary biology
Besides relativity (we're all relatively related / inbred), due to proximity, and even sexual selection, inbreeding is bound to occur in a population over time, especially since that is (dare I say) almost conceivably what speciation / genetic drift is (notice this isn't a qualitative statement, and notice I'm preempted complaints while hypothetically steel manning a likely common misunderstanding we should account for in argumentation; "almost conceivably"), and with the natural occurrence of a connoted "population" (other than humans, no species is so determined to avoid inbreeding as to selectively breed itself away from inbreeding depression or migrate away from its gene pool).
What are some examples of species bearing adaption for or perhaps even from inbreeding? Not expecting much out of the latter (because even in the best case, inbreeding is never as good as heterosis but please include such examples if you can), I'm primarily wondering about the former, as in surely there must be, at least, some adaptation specifically for mitigating the detriments of inbreeding depression. Maybe, known mechanism or not, the extant rate of defects from inbreeding is already an example of this in complex life forms i.e. maybe it would be even worse than the detriments we do observe if evolution hadn't already been forced to solve this high frequency adaptive pressure -- again, not necessarily in humans, we know better unlike other animals.
So might there be e.g. something reminiscent of DNA damage response (DDR) in some organisms prepared to check for mistakes not only of mutation but inbreeding? If this has not yet been observed, can it evolve? Is it at least possible?
PS: Though I meant otherwise, I suppose adaptations to inbreeding can include e.g. instinctive preventative measures. Do we know for certain there exist any innate incest prevention in humans or is all that irk of proximate cause? Considering the popularity of incest porn and the observation of genetic sexual attraction, I assume the answer is no, we have not confirmed any biological mechanisms or instincts for the prevention of human inbreeding but I look forward to being wrong.
🤔🤨🧐
Evolution usually takes a long time to manifest—thousands or even millions of years. But human lifestyles are changing incredibly fast. Over the past 100 years, we've seen radical shifts due to technology, urbanization, and globalization. Some aspects of our modern lives could potentially drive evolutionary change, but these conditions change so quickly that evolution might not have enough time to catch up.
So how does human evolution work in a world where the environment and ways of life are constantly shifting? Are we still undergoing biological evolution, or has culture and technology replaced the need for it?
(This was originally wrote in czech and I used AI to translate, so sorry if there are any mistakes)
We haven’t had any DNA testing up until recently, who discovered the genetic link of dogs to wolves? Was it something we already knew before that? During the Charles Darwin era did people put 2 and 2 together? Or have we known for thousands of years already?
Is it possible we’ve accelerated the evolution of chimpanzees and similar? Meaning they will be smart much sooner than they should. For example I’m aware that crows are using different and new materials because of us and we haven’t “played” with them nearly as much. I’m also thinking whether in the long run it could damage the genetic code or make it unstable. Like a whole species of Stephen Hawkings.
The ancestors of whales used to be land dwelling animals, what environmental pressures pushed them to go back to living in the oceans? Was it food, predators, or something else?
Other places such as the Neotropics may surpass sub-Saharan Africa in total biodiversity, but African ecosystems have high diversity even among the larged animals. Tens of different grazing and herbivorous mammals, tens of mammalian predators of all size classes, extremely diverse birds of prey and also high biodiversity in smaller owls, kingfishers, nightjars and other smaller birds, Reptiles, amphibians and so on. How can all those animals coexist without competition? How many ways are there to graze the Savannah or to fly over the Savannah in order to catch something? Eurasian ecosystems have all those niches filled with far fewer equivalent species for example. Evens the so much celebrated northern Pleistocene megafauna comprised much fewer species.
Every time I think of the Cambrian explosion, the rapid diversification of animal forms, my mind boggles with how these disparate forms could possibly have evolved in such a short time.
For example, all land vertebrates dating back more than 200 million years have very similar embryology. But echinoderms, molluscs, sponges, arthropods have radically different embryology, not just different from mammals but also from each other.
How was it possible for animals with such radically different embryology to breed with each other? How could creatures so genetically similar have such wildly different phenotypes? What would the common ancestor of say hallucinogenia and anomocaris have looked like?
What is the current thinking as to the branching sequence and dates within the Cambrian explosion?
Question!
I know this idea sounds completely dumb and probably impossible, but it's something I've been wondering about. What if all of a sudden, every single human was told to start picking things up with their feet, for millions of years until we have evolved to have opposable big toes. Would something like that be plausible? Or would it be downright out of the question. By the way I have basically no knowledge about evolution other than the basics, so please don't judge me for this even though it sounds ridiculous.
PS: I wasn't sure whether to post this here since it is technically a "what if" scenario, but it is also a genuine question I have about evolution.
i am not even sure if behavior in dogs is genetic driven and thus neo-darwinistic, or maybe is that an example of lamarckism?
Hello all, I've been looking for a book I read in high school for years and I can't find it so I was hoping someone might know something?
It had a green cover, paperback and wasnt too thick, maybe 10 or so chapters? The chapters all detailed a different like quirky bodily action or response and where and why it may have developed from, usually using animals to back up the theories.
A couple memorable examples were why we need to pee when we get cold and it talked about how some frogs get rid of excess water and freeze to survive (something like that). Another talked about why some people need to sneeze when they step out into the sun and it hypothesized that it may be a trait from our cave dwelling ancestors in order to clear the airways when coming out of their homes.
If this isn't the right place for this type of question, sorry. I've also checked the recommended books and didn't see anything like it.
Edit: This was back in 2012-2013 and I was a high-school freshman taking a biology class, it was assigned reading, not a textbook.
I don’t know if this is a dumb question, but I haven’t been able to find an answer. Of course everything is always evolving, but I’m curious if there’s a trait that’s still in the process of being beneficial to the organism. A trait that, in its current state, serves little purpose, but is expected to be vital for the organism’s survival in the future. Could also be a trait that’s phasing out rather than phasing in, but the latter is preferred.
I remember years ago reading about a study postulating a “start date” for oral sex in humans, based on dating a last common ancestor for the gonorrhea bacteria and another one present in the throat (perhaps meningococcal?)
I find studies like this fascinating and have tried to find it many times without success. Does anyone know of this study, and can post a link?
I watched a snippet of a movie called "The Remaining", in which something called "Instant Death Syndrome" is causing children as well as some adults to instantly die in unison.
Even though in the movie it isn't a disease, this made me think of how this would work as if it were a virus.
First, it remains dormant while it spreads to other people. Then, once there's enough time, the person will collapse and die.
What is the first thing humans do when a person nearby collapses? They run over to them. They put their hands on their body and their face to see if they are still alive. This would be VERY effective with parents, as this would be a first instinct seeing their child collapse.
After touching them, the virus would spread.
Would this work- and does something similar to this exist already?
It's been a good year since u/Cubist137 and I joined the r/Evolution mod team, so it feels like a good time to check the pulse of the sub.
Any comments, queries, or concerns? How are you finding the new rules (Low effort, LLMs, spec-evo, or even the larger rules revamp we did a few months back)? Any suggestions for the direction of the sub or its moderation?
And of course because it's been a few months, it seems like a good time to set out our verification policy again.
Verification is available to anyone with a university degree or higher in a relevant field. We take a broad view to this, and welcome verification requests from any form of biologist, scientist, statistician, science teacher, etc etc. Please feel free to contact us if you're unsure whether your experience counts, and we'll be more than happy to have a chat about it.
The easiest way to get flaired is to send an email to evolutionreddit@gmail.com from a verifiable email address, such as a .edu, .ac, or work account with a public-facing profile. I'm happy to verify myself to you if it helps.
The verified flair takes the format :
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We're happy to work out an alternative form of verification, such as being verified through a similar method on another reputable sub, or by sending a picture of a relevant qualification or similar evidence including a date on a piece of paper in shot.
On this sub I’ve seen (and maybe even contributed to) constant criticism of the idea that any species is more or less evolved than another and claiming that all species are equally evolved. This is an understandable response when people are under the false impression there’s some fundamental hierarchy of species with humans at the top. A species that’s more intelligent than another is not inherently more evolved.
That said, evolution is the process of changing genetic material and traits over generations, and that absolutely happens at different rates, and researching the speed of evolution is a genuine scientific inquiry that you can find tons of papers on. If a species of bird on one island had been there for thousands of years and the environment remained stable, it’s pretty likely that they’re going to evolve relatively slowly. If a few of them blew away and started a new population on a new island with a different environment, it’s likely they would rapidly evolve to adapt. This population would be, after a few generations, more changed (ie more evolved) than the parent population. Counter to the intuitions of some people less informed about evolution, this may lead to them being smaller, less intelligent, or lower on the food chain. In fact if we were to take a super broad view the most evolved organism is probably some random bacteria.
How many here have read Darwin’s work?
Like the title says. I can't wrap my head around it. Horseshoe crabs are WAY older than humans, but a horseshoe crab could never even comprehend an iPhone. Same with every other primate. Why are humans, specifically, the ones that evolved to have the brains that let us do stuff like Burj Khalifa and internet?
Other animals similar to us existed before we did, so why was it us and not them? And other animals similar have still existed since we came around, so why haven't they evolved the same way yet? Because you think about it and yeah every animal is intelligent in it's own way, but any other animal wouldn't even be able to conjure the thought process that makes me wonder this in the first place. So why? It doesn't make sense to me. Are we just a very specific occurrence? Like... right place, right time?
I also know that other animals didn't need our advanced cultural organization stuff to survive, but ??? I don't think we did either. Plus animals have plenty of stuff they don't need to survive. So why did other animals get unnecessary features like 'likes to swing on trees' and 'eat bugs off mom' but WE got 'math with letters' and 'went to the moon that one time'? (Jaguars could NEVER get their species to the moon.)
We do NOT need modern civilization to survive, so there's no reason that we evolved to have it. It's very uncanny and feels wrong to try and wrap my head around us being the only ones that 'work smarter not harder'-ed our way into JPEGs.
Have someone debating evolution and natural selection.
My understanding is that evolution is the result of natural selection? They’re not one and the same thing. There are multiple ways for evolution to happen.
He is saying they’re the same. While they are related. They aren’t the same. He is also saying evolution is the process. Not the result.
Just looking for someone way more educated on this to respond… hope this is allowed.
Like take human ancestors from hundreds of millions of years ago. Do we just call them early humans even though they're like little rat-like dudes? Are they technically extinct since there's none of them left since they (we?) look so different today? Everywhere I look there's some "extinct" order (i.e Plesiadapiforms), even though like technically some of these guys actually are the direct ancestors of living creatures today.
Sorry if this is a dumb question I've just been thinking about the technicalities of terminologies for a long time.
It is know that the last common ancestor of dry nosed primates existed roughly near the time that the dinosaurs went extinct, 70 million years according to this study (Pozzi et. al, 2014). If this is true, then what would that ancestral dry nosed primate have looked like? How big would it have been? What would it's niche have been? I know purgatorius exists but that's often classified as more a stem primate or plesiadapiform. Wouldn't this ancestral primate have been somewhere between a monkey and a tarsier? Or would it have had different traits?
My particular spin on Dawkins' Weasel program, because I'm timely like that. I model four types of "mutations" -- point change, duplication, deletion, and transposition. I also give the ability to specify the target string and source alphabet.
I originally wrote this program to address Dembski's criticism that Dawkins' program "locked" letters in place once they matched; Dawkins' program did no such thing and neither does mine, and some sequences find partial matches that later get mutated away. For example, given the target string "This is not a test of the Emergency Broadcast System."
:
Generation Score String
---------- ----- ------
...
1045 2629 This is not a test of the
1743 2604 This is not a test of thh$
...
1771 1606 This is ont a tets;of tttthhhhhhhhhhhho4$
1772 1543 This ms ont e t9ts of ttthhhhhhhhhhhhhho4$
1773 1440 This is ont a test of tttthhhhhhhhhhhhho4e
By generation 1045 we've matched the first half of the target, but generations 1743, 1771, 1772, 1773 etc. are better matches by virtue of being longer, even though some of the correct letters get mutated into something else.
This was as much an exercise in teaching myself some Javascript as anything else, so some of the code likely isn't idiomatic (you can probably see my C and C++ bias in the source).
It's also handy to address the criticism that intermediate generations aren't "meaningful" (as in, not valid English words or phrases). That's not the point of the program; all it does is match arbitrary sequences of characters. The target phrase could be "Trplk grDlphmp.dqsck!"
and the behavior of the program would be exactly the same.
I know it was a jellyfish of somesort.