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"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COULD-BE-WORSE-PERFECTION. "Nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely perfect; and if some of them be abhorrent to our ideas of fitness...The wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the want of absolute perfection have not been observed." (Darwin). https://lnkd.in/dWKSysJ View in LinkedIn

CONTEXTUAL PERFECTION. "The kind of perfection that Darwin sees in nature is a kind of temporary, fluctuating perfection that exists between different beings and between beings and their environment." https://lnkd.in/dWKSysJ View in LinkedIn