Comment on AND THEY DIDN'T STOP EATING
Crankenstein@lemmy.world 18 hours agoNot 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.
We have no clue how threatening they could potentially be.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 17 hours ago
Less evolved as in the product of less evolution. There is such a thing as more and less because more happens over time.
GiveMemes@jlai.lu 17 hours ago
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 wolves evolved from way earlier up the line. This is a common misconception about evolution, so don’t feel bad for getting caught in it.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 6 hours ago
Nothing about the phrase “more evolved” implies a “straight path” of evolution
Crankenstein@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
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.
Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
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.
GiveMemes@jlai.lu 9 hours ago
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.