Month: September 2022

NATURE IS ALWAYS IMPROVING. "In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds." (Darwin). http://www.bartleby.com/11/6004.html View in LinkedIn

NO GREAT BLUEPRINT. "Evolution doesn't have plans, so it doesn't make mistakes. It does neither right things nor wrong things. It merely does things. If it did have intentions, then it would have a very strange sense of humor." https://lnkd.in/d5-KVFK View in LinkedIn

NEEDS ARE NOT SELECTED. "Natural selection has no intentions or senses; it cannot sense what a species or an individual "needs." Natural selection acts on the genetic variation in a population, and this genetic variation is generated by random mutation — a process that is unaffected by what organisms in the population need." https://lnkd.in/dNENRRj View in LinkedIn

PERPETUATION IS SELECTED. "Natural selection has no foresight or intentions. In general, natural selection simply selects among individuals in a population, favoring traits that enable individuals to survive and reproduce, yielding more copies of those individuals' genes in the next generation." Sometimes not. http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq.php View in LinkedIn

MISMATCHED FITNESS. "There are many reasons that natural selection cannot produce "perfectly-engineered" traits. For example, living things are made up of traits resulting from a complicated set of trade-offs — changing one feature for the better may mean changing another for the worse (e.g., a bird with the "perfect" tail plumage to attract mates maybe be particularly vulnerable to predators because of its long tail)." http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq.php View in LinkedIn

DEALT CARDS. "Because organisms have arisen through complex evolutionary histories (not a design process), their future evolution is often constrained by traits they have already evolved. For example, even if it were advantageous for an insect to grow in some way other than molting, this switch simply could not happen because molting is embedded in the genetic makeup of insects at many levels." http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq.php View in LinkedIn

NOT ALL IS ADAPTIVE. "It's easy to assume that all features of organisms must be adaptive in some way — to notice something about an organism and automatically wonder, "Now, what's that for?" While some traits are adaptive, it's important to keep in mind that many traits are not adaptations at all. Some may be the chance results of history." http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq.php View in LinkedIn

"EVOLUTIONARY DEAD ENDS are traits that increase the likelihood of extinction, but become fixed within species because they are thought to initially provide a short-term evolutionary advantage. Some classic hypothesized dead ends include asexuality, selfing, polyploidy, and specialization." https://lnkd.in/dY4khXd View in LinkedIn

ROAD TO EXTINCTION. "The trait (e.g., inbreeding, asexual reproduction) cannot persist as a long-term strategy due to lineages that exhibit it having limited potential for adaptation and speciation, thus eventually going extinct." https://lnkd.in/dk4-FyV View in LinkedIn

NATURE DOES NOT AWAYS IMPROVE. "We agree with the long-espoused view that most polyploid entities likely go extinct shortly after formation, at the scale of small populations, before becoming established as evolutionarily significant entities or receiving taxonomic recognition. In that sense, polyploids are often ‘dead-ends." https://lnkd.in/dggZQc9 View in LinkedIn