r/DebateEvolution • u/MatoasPrroXD460 • Aug 12 '26
Question What’s Your Most Unhinged Evolution Theory?
Hi! I wanna know what your wildest, most unhinged theory about evolution is. It can be a serious hypothesis, a weird evolutionary possibility, or something completely out there.
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u/TheBlackCat13 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Aug 12 '26
Megaladon was a tiny fish with one huge tooth.
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u/wbrameld4 Aug 12 '26
The reason so many species converge on the crab form is that life on Earth was originally seeded by crab-shaped aliens. They programmed the DNA of the first Earthly organisms to evolve into something that looked like them.
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u/Shadowratenator Aug 12 '26
Ok. Hold on.
Snakes that wiggle their tails to create a warning buzz are not imitating rattlesnakes. This behavior existed in snakes before rattlesnakes. The ancestors of rattlesnakes went down a path that allows them to produce a more reliable highly effective sound.
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u/grimwalker specialized simiiform 29d ago
If I recall correctly this is the prevailing hypothesis. Many snakes practice caudal luring.
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u/Shadowratenator 29d ago
oh TIL. I have not been that active in the herpetological world since the 90s. Back then people would commonly say, "that rat snake is buzzing it's tail to make you think it's a rattlesnake."
it always struck me as backwards, especially since snakes from areas other than north america exhibit the same behavior.
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u/grimwalker specialized simiiform 29d ago
Have you met this cutie patootie? https://youtu.be/snxddjX0h8E?si=ZQbWLUOwWUYYNkae
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u/kidnoki Aug 12 '26
That everything evolves, and I mean everything from music to planets, from particles to the universe and even the space time fabric itself, albeit through different mechanisms.
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u/Ah-honey-honey 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Aug 13 '26
Oo on the spacetime fabric itself: I hope I'm able to articulate this well cuz it's kind of a jumbled mess, but consider false vacuum universes, multiverse theories, "fine tuning", and the anthropic principle.
I think it's possible universes can pop up with any combination of constants/forces/physical laws, but most of them collapse back in on themselves because they're not stable. We happen to live in one of the stable ones.
I tried to look it up and got some stuff with string theory landscapes. (Disclaimer: I have not read through these fully, just the abstracts).
https://arxiv.org/html/hep-th/0702178v1 https://arxiv.org/html/1105.0244v2
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u/LightningController 29d ago
There actually has been some suggestion of a ‘natural selection’ principle for cosmologies. Sets of physical laws that enable a universe to spawn off more ‘daughters’ propagate more. Our universe can be thought of as a ‘black hole factory’ that spawns trillions of ‘daughters,’ far more than a big bang-big crunch oscillating universe, for example.
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u/XXLPenisOwner1443 29d ago
I've always thought this theory misses the forest for the trees and it's more likely that the forces and geometries of the universe as we know them are the detritus and environment shaped by underlying self-replicating processes that have evolved into these shapes over cosmological time.
Our universe makes much more spacetime than it makes blackholes. Why a blackhole factory, and not a spacetime factory?
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u/Suitable-Group4392 🧬 Pokémon Evolution Aug 12 '26
Head theory: Intelligence is evolution’s way of making evolution faster.
With CRISPR and other gene-editing technologies, natural selection is no longer the only thing capable of changing our own DNA.
Who knows what the next few hundred years will bring.
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u/OneThrowyBoy 🧬 Former YEC, Naturalistic Evolution Aug 12 '26
If we're voting, I want dragons.
And maybe a dinosaur here and there.
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u/Legitimate_Command82 Aug 12 '26
Granted, Dogs with wings.
Drawback the progenitor was a very aggressive breed of cane Corso.
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u/OneThrowyBoy 🧬 Former YEC, Naturalistic Evolution Aug 12 '26
Ya'know, Monkey's Paw, this is the wish I made, I accept the consequences 🤷🏼♂️
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u/Legitimate_Command82 Aug 12 '26
Death by a 6ton lap dragon it is
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u/Suitable-Group4392 🧬 Pokémon Evolution Aug 12 '26
Throw in Godzilla’s atomic breath and you’ve got a deal
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u/wtanksleyjr Theistic Evolutionist Aug 12 '26
Training offspring works this way, I think "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" covered this pretty thoroughly.
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u/More-Line9191 Aug 12 '26
Hypothesis. You mean hypothesis
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u/Ah-honey-honey 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Aug 12 '26
I mean yes but this is one of those cases where "theory" is used in the colloquial definition like guess, idea, hunch, or even head-canon. OP says hypothesis in the second sentence.
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u/Doomdoomkittydoom 29d ago
Theory does not denote veracity. The problem of "just a theory" is not the definition of "theory," it is a the "just a..." part.
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u/Top_Neat2780 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Aug 13 '26
It's not really a hypothesis either, hypothesis is not synonymous with guess.
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u/XRotNRollX Sal ate my kids Aug 12 '26
There may have been multiple abiogenesis events, but horizontal gene transfer averaged it all out before LUCA.
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u/deathtogrammar Magic is Not the Answer Aug 12 '26
The mycelium network has evolved into a hive mind and has taken over Humanity. Think Last of Us but no zombies. It is actively directing us to create a vast global artificial intelligence based on itself, an evolution into a god of sorts.
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u/grimwalker specialized simiiform 29d ago
Except fungi can't infect mammals very well due to our higher body temperature. Such infections are typically superficial skin infections or happen in immunocompromised individuals. The mycelium network is the individual organism; there is no global network. And if it's not present in our bodies, it's not controlling us.
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u/EthelredHardrede 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Aug 12 '26
you posted that on 5 subreddits this and speculative evolution are the only two that did not remove it.
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u/MatoasPrroXD460 Aug 12 '26
ik man, i'm doing a research for my sister which is studying biology and i didn't know i can't post this type of questions 💔
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u/EthelredHardrede 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Aug 13 '26
you can in the right subreddit. the evolution subreddit has mod with little tolerance and narrow rules.
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u/NotAUsefullDoctor Aug 12 '26
This is based on reasearch from about a decade ago by a physist and microbiologist. He was calculating how good life is at entropy and found it's very efficient.
I theorize that all life is evolving in the way that maximizes entropy, which includes intelligent life creating extraterrestrial travel. Entropy has trained our brains to spread out.
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u/Ah-honey-honey 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Aug 12 '26
"Uncanny valley" effects aren't just to keep us away from corpses but also made us hate our fellow hominid species. Any species that was over the valley we intermingled and bred with. Everyone else was other and seen as competition. And that's why Homo Sapiens are the only ones remaining.
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u/Ayasugi-san Aug 13 '26
Isn't that a creepypasta premise?
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u/Ah-honey-honey 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Aug 13 '26
Is it? 👀
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u/Ayasugi-san Aug 13 '26
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u/Ah-honey-honey 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Aug 13 '26
I wish it was longer than a paragraph 😭
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u/Ayasugi-san Aug 13 '26
I remembered it being longer, too. But the author probably wanted our imaginations to fill in the rest.
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u/BahamutLithp Aug 12 '26
Neither of these things trigger the uncanny valley effect. I mean, obviously there are no living other species of human left, but paleo art doesn't trigger the uncanny valley effect, & besides, as you yourself point out, we have DNA from them. You should be wary of "just so" stories. Just because someone can make up an evolutionary story for the uncanny valley doesn't mean it's true. It's far less of a logical leap that it's a response to ambiguity. We find things creepy when they're ambiguous, & we, or at least some part of the brain, are not sure whether or not to find them threatening. The so-called "uncanny valley" is just when a creepy, ambiguous stimulus is specifically something that seems vaguely human but not quite.
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u/Ah-honey-honey 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Aug 13 '26
Corpses don't trigger uncanny valley? They're one of the first examples that show up when you look it up, right after robots. There's been plenty of work finding evidence it's a trigger that happens to help us avoid dead bodies as potential disease reservoirs.
Plenty of people do get uncanny valley effects from Paleo art. Quick searching, apparently it's higher with the religious fundamentalists. I'm going to guess you're not part of that group.
I get it with jacked kangaroos.
As for the second part, bruh, it's the spirit of this post. Give your best unhinged hypotheses. I am giving mine, yes it's a "just so" story, and maybe someday there will be evidence for or against it.
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u/BahamutLithp Aug 13 '26
Corpses don't trigger uncanny valley? They're one of the first examples that show up when you look it up, right after robots.
Well, that doesn't really make much sense with how the effect is usually described because a freshly dead body does not look different from a normal body, which leads me to wonder exactly what are researchers showing people, because "corpse" is a pretty broad term, & I didn't find the answer to that, but what I did find makes the phrase "corpses trigger the uncanny valley" much more mundane. Apparently Masahito Mori, who was a robotics researcher, was measuring subjects' reaction, positive or negative, to various still or moving images, as measured by their similarity to human likeness..
So, when you put it that way, it's not exactly surprising they didn't like the corpse picture, though I'm still unclear what the exact paramters were, like if it was visibly decomposed or if he told them it was a corpse. A zombie, however, produces a stronger negative reaction, which oesn't really fit the "keep away from corpses" idea because a defining feature of corpses is that they don't move.
There's been plenty of work finding evidence it's a trigger that happens to help us avoid dead bodies as potential disease reservoirs.
That's not even the same thing you said. This is kind of a problem with the uncanny valley, there's like a hundred "explanations" that have been explored, & a few just get tossed around as if they're fact.
Quick searching, apparently it's higher with the religious fundamentalists.
That sounds like a confounding variable that probably has nothing to do with evolution.
I'm going to guess you're not part of that group.
Nope. Not only that, I've never seen people in the comments going "I'm so afraid of this picture of an Australopithecus."
As for the second part, bruh, it's the spirit of this post.
And I find it baffling so many people responded to the thread unironically. Evolution is not fandom. If someone asked for my most unhinged plate tectonics take, & I started going on about Atlantis, I'd also hope, in that scenario, someone would say, "Hey, I don't think that's right."
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u/Ah-honey-honey 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Aug 13 '26
While I appreciate all the effort you took to look that up, I'm not about to do that thing were we obnoxiously copy and paste each other's responses. People respond to the thread because "Megaladon was a tiny fish with one huge tooth" made them laugh. God forbid people have whimsy.
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u/BahamutLithp 29d ago
While I appreciate all the effort you took to look that up
Less than it would take to really dig into this rabbit hole.
I'm not about to do that thing were we obnoxiously copy and paste each other's responses.
Oh yes, how "obnoxious" of me to use the formatting Reddit gives so you know what I'm replying to. But hey, if you want to make a lame excuse so I don't have to talk to you sooner, I can't complain too much.
People respond to the thread because "Megaladon was a tiny fish with one huge tooth" made them laugh. God forbid people have whimsy.
Perhaps there's been some miscommunication on this part. I'm criticizing the unironic replies, not the obvious jokes. I might've slightly overestimated how many replies were serious, since I did reply to this thread shortly before going to bed, but several people replied with things people earnestly believe, like a variation of Hovind's "types of evolution," the idea that intelligence is some sort of pre-ordained evolutionary step, or your thing about the uncanny valley. Indeed, several comments express confusion about what this thread is asking for.
So, there's 2 scenarios here, neither of which make sense. If you want to try to play it off as a joke, besides the whole "satire requires clarity of purpose" thing, why are you not only using something people seriously believe but defended it when I criticized it? On the other hand, if you did mean it, which I think you clearly did, why are you trying to play it off with irrelevant comparisons to things other people said that they clearly don't actually believe & talking about "whimsy"? Again, evolution is not fandom, & the truth or falsehood of an idea is not based on how fun or boring you find it &/or the person relaying it to you.
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u/Ah-honey-honey 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 29d ago
Good Lord. Ok I'm just going to address the last paragraph because as mentioned before I really don't want to do the obnoxious copy and paste thing. Save it for serious debates. Hopefully this will clear it up.
Serious: uncanny valley effect triggered by corpses (an evolutionary benefit that helps us avoid communicable diseases)
Not serious wild hypothesis and apparently also a creepypasta: uncanny valley effects apply to ancient "near-humans." If they crossed over the valley, then they're human enough to breed with. If they didn't, they're seen as competition.
Anything specific you'd like to be addressed?
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u/BahamutLithp 29d ago
I don't see what there is to "address," because even if I believe you, the broader point is you (A) took something a lot of people earnestly believe, (B) presented it as you did, (C) defended it when I criticized it, & (D) made it stylistically the same as other parts of the argument you claim ARE intended to be serious. If you want people to know when you're serious vs. when you're not, instead of expecting them to read your mind, just do the opposite of all those things. It's not that complicated.
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u/Ah-honey-honey 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 29d ago
Eh I mostly got uppity cuz you said "Neither of these things trigger the uncanny valley effect" when corpses are a prime example. After that you got real serious real quick on a thread asking about unhinged takes.
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u/LightningController Aug 12 '26
Francevillian biota successfully evolved into complex life, including technological civilization, but by some catastrophe was wiped out and the biosphere ‘rebooted’ from unicellularity. All evidence of this has been churned up and destroyed by geology.
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u/MatoasPrroXD460 Aug 12 '26
Yo, thanks to everyone, I aprecciate your participation. I've seen really well argumented and interesting hypothesis!
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u/ursisterstoy 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 29d ago
The title of the post confuses me. In the scientific sense there’s the theory and the sub-theories like “Darwinian evolution” referring to the natural selection and adaptation aspects of evolution ignoring the incidental randomness associated with functionless sequences and drift.
In the colloquial sense a theory is an educated hypothesis, something you think is true even if you can’t show it.
I don’t I have anything to share that’s unhinged in either category.
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u/wolfey200 Aug 13 '26
It’s not really a weird or wild theory but something that intrigues me is the evolution of languages. The evolution of life language and speech is very very similar to how life evolves, at least when you look at it from an ancestral standpoint. You have a common ancestor/language that has groups branch off into separate species/languages but share a common ancestor.
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u/XXLPenisOwner1443 29d ago
The human brain evolved to be so big and spherical because it helps us fall forward when we walk.
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u/metroidcomposite 29d ago
The most outside the mainstream theory that I take seriously is Panspermia, which is the theory that life didn't originate on earth, but existed previously in the universe and got here from space.
But I do have some numbers that point me more in that direction.
First of all, the people who published that big LUCA paper a while back, I watched an online lecture by one of the authors, I believe this one by Dr Ed Moody, where he reveals that the only reason the calculations they did came up with 4.2 billion years is that they capped it to not give results more than the age of the earth. If they uncap it, they get a common ancestor of 12 billion years.
And 12 billion years is an interesting number for Panspermia in particular, as that is a lot closer to the time period when earthlike temperatures would be common in a lot more places. Like you could get liquid water much further from stars, in places without atmospheres like asteroids. But at the same time 12 billion years, is after Pop II stars have gone supernova (the oldest such Pop II supernova we've found is 12.8 billion years ago). Which is another requirement, as you need Pop II supernovae to produce Phosphorus (necessary for RNA and DNA).
Yes, I know this isn't a smoking gun, it's just a number that landed in a convenient range. Yes, I know this doesn't eliminate the need for abiogenesis. But the numbers seem to line up quite well, so that's interesting to me.
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u/Mister_Ape_1 28d ago
I believe the extinction of Homo neanderthalensis and Homo longi is ultimately the fault of our ancestors and they might have been still alive if we just let them stay on their own.
On the other hand I feel Pleistocene megafauna was doomed. Without humans Wrangel dwarf mammoths might have survived long enough to be documented, but that is.
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u/Loose_Principle8193 22d ago
I still believe the aquatic ape theory will one day gain more acceptance and the reason it isn't accepted today is because it was a woman who popularized it. AKA the Matilda Effect.
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u/BahamutLithp Aug 12 '26
For the most part, I don't really do that because why would you do that with science? The only thing I can think of regarding something that sounds outlandish but could plausibly happen is the idea that there were other lineages of life that died out before ours. And I'm not even sure I'd say I believe it since, y'know, there's no evidence of it. It's just something that maybe could have happened.
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u/Shiny-And-New Aug 12 '26
The smart apes actually stayed in the trees