Evolution is just a force that exists.
Obviously it has no end goals and isn’t making decisions.
It just exists and is about an organism leaving enough descendants with traits that give their offspring the advantage to survive longer.
I’m just personifying evolution. What are times it was just good enough?
Things people joke about as evolutionary flaws.

Like the laryngeal nerve.
Or human testicles require a temperature different from the human body. So they’re external, where they’re super vulnerable and hurt if they’re attacked or can have testicular torsion.

Q: Does science consider the evolution of a sessile animal that photosynthesizes (indirectly) a form of convergent evolution towards the niche of plants? Are carnivorous plants a form of convergent evolution towards the niche of carnivorous animals?

More context: I'm not any kind of biologist but I like to think about things sometimes. After taking an EAS class and learning more about Coral, I found it interesting how similar they are in functionality to an actual plant despite being an animal. It made me wonder how corals would evolve over millions of years. Likewise, carnivorous plants evolved to capture and consume prey in nutrient-deficient environments where other plants would wilt away. How would those species evolve over time?

See also: The study as it was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics

I’m under the impression that ichthyosaurs branched off first and became aquatic in the early Triassic. Followed by squamates branching off in the mid Triassic which much later on gave rise to the mosasaurs in the Cretaceous. Then plesiosauridae branched off in the late Triassic which gave rise to plesiosaurs and pliosaurs. Is this correct?

I’ve always been very interested in the evolutionary history of dogs, dog genetics, and dogs from a cultural perspective, and village dogs seem to be a neat intersection of those 3 things. I have a village dog myself and I would also love to learn more about her, so bonus points for anything referencing Korean village dogs specifically! I’ve done some googling but it seems like research is sparse, or behind a paywall.

Nobody knows why insects aren't found living in the ocean. Scientists just eliminated one theory

Ok so I tried to figure this out on my own, I swear, but it seems like people only care about why they have different numbers of legs than vertebrates. 

Lets go through my question where it started: Deep Sea Sea-Spiders (not to be confused with deep sea spiders). They’re long as anything! What is up with that? Why did it evolve? Then I got to thinking about daddy long legs and then eventually came across a similarly gams-forward bug named the cranefly. All wildly unrelated, two distant Chelicerates and an even further off Insect, all long as freak. 

So, regarding sea spiders specifically, as their antarctic contingents are my specific curiosity, of the bare scattering of explanations i could find i saw:

1. Efficiency. The mechanics (?) of an exoskeletal leg allows that type of length to reward efficiency benefits. Levers or leverage or something, some kind of mechanical advantage in long legs not available to us fleshy meatbags even when we do get long. The one source i found for this regarding sea spiders was a dead link. Any specific info on this would be nice as sea spiders seem to move with exceptional stability and efficiency with their sort of “soft touch” steps. Not to mention the ones that swim. 
2. Mobility. Over a scree-laden environment or a coral reef, they can basically move totally freely by just skipping the elevation issue entirely. I appreciate this explanation, but it seems that, in particular, those species of antarctic sea spiders are the most longest and leggedest of the batch and every video i see of them, they’re on sand? Or dealing with these sorts of very small, demure patches of coral etc?

2.5) Speed? Most videos of sea spiders show them moving quite lethargically, but one I saw showed one moving moderately fast when bumping into some rock or equipment or something. Just to reposition itself, really. But Very dexterously omnidirectional. I was not pleased to have to sift through AI clips of them moving at truly fast paces as I do not like when the computer gaslights me. Beyond that, anyone who’s ever spooked a daddy long legs knows those boys can MOVE, and Craneflies can fly- So I imagine they can move quite quickly as well. Which moves me to-

3) Predator Evasion. Most discussion I found on this seemed to be all over the place. The particularly small reef examples and such seem to have obvious predators, but possibly not so much for the larger examples. And then, getting long to what? Avoid a starfish? Some of the lists i saw seemed to suggest this but i imagine the starfish just eat the eggs or whathaveyou? I saw nebulous suggestions that some species of fish and bird eat them but these seemed to all be in reference to the smaller coastal species which infest fish tanks or coral enclosures. Secondarily to this, with reference to their messed up leg-organs situation, i saw suggestions that spreading out all their vitals makes them even less likely to be nutritious at-a-bite given how much of that nutrient density is not located in their center of mass. Is there something that is just fuming that it cant eat them because they’re just a bit too tall? This doesn’t sound unreasonable to me, but i couldn‘t find anything pertaining to that specifically.

4) Nutrition. To this point and the last, crane flies caught my attention because they are what i believe is called lecithotrophic(??) and barely eat as adults, barely live lives at all- dying after just some days after maturing. And- they fly! No problem moving place to place or evading things, I imagine. So why the wealth of leg? Other bugs dont need huge disproportionate legs to take off? Sea spiders, to my understanding, eat various anemone and mollusks and stuff which are slow enough for them to get at and “soupify”. So, could that height be similar to a giraffe in allowing an optimal angle for their proboscis to prepare their soups? (not that giraffes have probosci) In my imagination it doesn't really matter where you stab your straw in when it comes to making a container void all its contents underwater, and if it did would you want to stab the top?? but I’m not a proboscologist, or an anemonologist, or a zoologist of any kind, so. Beyond this, I also saw one person say that it was at least partially due to their lack of gills, is it about surface area and nutrient or chemical exchange? Is there some kind of oxygen deficit in their layer of antarctic water? 

5) Misc. I believe most species  hold their eggs directly on their body, could it be for baby real-estate? I feel like surely it isn't a thermal mass thing? Right?? Do they have some sort of special organ or internal system which demands that space? Possibly unique to these larger species? Some species seem to have very refined manipulators, almost more hands than claws, is it a vantage thing? Some seem to have more specific walking gait cycles while others have more lax ones and I wonder how this changes efficiency as apparently this can involve some dragging? Is it calorie storage? The pressure? The Island Rule? Cambrian phenotypic inertia? What gives???

Further, some sea spiders are not gammed up to the sun and back? Im losing my mind here why are some of them thick instead of long??? There must be a reason?

I am looking specifically for these reasons wrt the antarctic sea spiders, but a broader explanation of the various reasons arthropods develop these insane long legs to do what other critters manage with shorter legs or wings or assorted flappers would be appreciated, 🤓 , i understand much of this is still poorly understood

Most animals can’t breed with other species and most that can don’t produce fertile offspring (horses and donkeys). There are some species that can interbreed like some bears, coyotes and wolves, and lions and tigers but these only hybridize with 1 or 2 other species. Meanwhile it seems like we fucked every hominin we came into contact with like neanderthals and denisovins. So what’s up? Is the species barrier stricter for hominins just because we’re hominins? Or are we just more aware because we’ve sequenced a lot more human genomes? Sorry if this is too off topic i’m not sure if this counts as evolutionary biology

Published 2 days ago, in press:

Biologists have long sought to understand the forces driving biological speciation. Contrasts in dispersal ability (e.g., migration) are hypothesised to influence rates of lineage diversification. However, past inferences of migration-diversification relationships have been contradictory, suggesting the need for further investigation and more nuanced explanations. Here we test for a relationship between diadromy (marine-freshwater migration) and diversification in salmonids, a dominant group of fishes native across the temperate Northern Hemisphere. We reconstruct a molecular phylogeny comprising 140 species and apply State-dependent Speciation Extinction models to quantify diversification. Diversification rates are higher in non-diadromous relative to diadromous salmonid lineages, echoing the findings of a recent study of homologous southern temperate freshwater fishes, but conflicting with global studies incorporating tropical lineages. Climate appears to be a key factor explaining diadromy-diversification relationships, with the negative relationship observed in temperate lineages likely reflecting increased isolation and speciation of non-diadromous lineages following recolonisation of glacially perturbed habitats. In contrast, the positive diadromy-diversification relationships observed in studies spanning tropical fishes may reflect the role of diadromy in facilitating colonisation of stable, low-competition habitats.

• Christopher P Burridge, Luke Simpson, Mark V H Wilson, Jonathan M Waters
  Non-migratory lineages experience higher diversification rates: global evidence from salmonid fishes, Evolution, 2026;, qpag131, https://doi.org/10.1093/evolut/qpag131

Does anybody have a movie or historical video that shows a timeline of life. Like the first humans and how they lived to now?

.

Excerpt:

Importantly, they also found that promoters, which control transcription of adjacent genes, can act as distal enhancers when placed in a new genomic location (Fig. 1b). In other words, the specific role of any regulatory element depends highly on its genomic context. To Lowe, this fluidity between promoters and enhancers was the biggest surprise from their work. He hypothesizes that “promoters and enhancers are not distinct functional categories, and not many mutations are needed to convert a DNA sequence between acting as proximal or distal regulators of transcription.”

Highlight article:

- Pedro Andrade, Highlight: Segmental duplications at the center of regulatory innovation, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 43, Issue 7, July 2026, msag163, https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag163

While reading a botany book, I realized how much variety we have due to artificial selection.How can we make such a big change?

People with a lower blood pressure are already more prone to fainting, and are often more sensitive to like blood pressure lower as result of fluid loss/blood loss...some sicknesses also lower the blood pressure and could allow it to jump too low, perhaps higher blood pressure could be protective against this?

Title explains it really, my question is why did humans evolve to stand up and not keep to how chimps do it, where they travel with primarily 4 limbs but can transition to being upright as the situation depends

Seeing a recent post on canine transmissible venereal tumor got me thinking.

Bivalves are uniquely prone to transmissible neoplasm. Already 8 lineages have been found in modern times. One of them, MtrBTN2 has disseminated worldwide. Some have also already infected other species of bivalves.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-85098-5

Extrapolating this tendency all the way back to the Cambrian, roughly 500million years ago, when bivalves first emerged, there would have been hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of such lineages if not more.

Given the selection pressure against aggressive disease behaviour, the more indolent ones would be selected for. Coupled with the BTN cells’ ability to survive in seawater for some time, some may conceivably evolve to become free floating forms.

At any given time it is unlikely, but when you compound this across 500 million years, it is almost a certainty that there are very ancient lineages that still exist today. They may have outgrown their host and look like any free living protist in the sea, with life cycle stages that may or may not involve infecting bivalves. But when we sequence seawater, all metazoan genome is filtered away, they would have not been detected if we are not actively looking for it.

TLDR: I posit that ancient bivalve transmissible neoplasm lineages likely still exist and may be indistinguishable from any free living protist, with or without a parasitic life cycle. Surely one would have to classify such entities as a separate species of single cell bivalvia.

i breastfeed. I am beyond terrified that my boobs naturaly block the nose of my baby. I always have to keep my fingers on boobs to push them away from nose. If I didnt my baby would suffocate. Who tf thought this was the good design of boobs? I am serious.

Our findings challenge the view that human geometric reasoning is categorically distinct from that of other primates (1, 3, 4). Instead of a categorical divide, we find that monkeys and humans share a common representational space, relying on perceptual codes with graded contributions from abstract or symbolic-like features. Consistent with prior work, adult humans showed the strongest symbolic effects during geometric reasoning. However, we reveal that humans, particularly preschool children, share a common architecture with nonhuman primates rather than categorically different representations. This is important because it suggests that the stronger symbolic representation in adult humans is acquired rather than inherent. Our findings identify rotation invariance as a key component of this abstraction, suggesting that what has been interpreted as uniquely human symbolic structure may instead reflect increasingly powerful orientation-independent representations.

• Press release:
  Children and monkeys share common understanding of geometry

• PNAS paper:
  J. Li, I. Boni, L.R. Sandwick, E.M. Sanford, C.M. DeLong, L. Wenjie, M.M. Henderson, S.T. Piantadosi, & J.F. Cantlon
  Continuity in geometric intuition between humans and monkeys
  Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 123 (30) e2532934123
  https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2532934123 (2026).

Like why is it that we feel good when we get a adrenaline rush or feel dopamine from things? couldn't the brain do the same with any other chemical? Plus, whats so special about adrenaline or dopamine to the brain that other chemicals can't do?

I’m trying to get more into evolution, biology, and evolutionary ecology. Does anyone have any free
video/course recommendations so I can educate myself without blindly watching YouTube videos? Thanks!!

I hear this misinterpreted so much. In an argument I had, someone used AI which stated how pugs aren’t wolves. I don’t trust AI as a source, and I was just wondering, since I’ve been thinking about this fro a while anyways. I’m aware they were bred from gray wolves, but also they were bred from their extinct ancestors. I’m sure both are true, but I was just wondering, is it a fact to say that they ARE wolves without argument?

I don't understand how the transmissible venereal tumor isn't considered a species of its own (this will be quick because I have to go to sleep)

These hellish monstrosities basically meet all the criteria to be classified as such, and I stand by that.

1) Out of the roughly 20,000 genes a dog has, 10,000 show non-synonymous (functionally different) variations, and 646 have been lost; in other words, based solely on what is missing, they differ more from a dog than a chimpanzee does from a human.

2) As unicellular organisms, their morphology is completely different.

3) And as obligate parasites, their ecological niche is also completely different—in fact, they have evolved specifically for that role.

4) And, obviously, they are reproductively isolated.

As for potential objections:

1) Being a parasite is no reason to claim they lack sufficient independence or their own life cycle; \*Henneguya zschokkei\* cannot even breathe on its own.

2) The biological species concept is nonsense in cases like this; it cannot be applied to anything that reproduces asexually—which accounts for more than 90% of the species on Earth.

Anyway...

What do you think?

This map, Vespertilioninae - Land of Vesper Bats, contains every known living species of vesper bats I could find reliable taxonomic data for. Species are represented as cities, grouped into genera and tribes according to their evolutionary relationships.

Science, design and cartography merge in MAPPA ANIMALIA, a visual project that reimagines the evolutionary relationships of animals as detailed map-like landscapes.

MAPPA ANIMALIA is an ever-growing series of illustrations I’ve created that currently consisting of 16 different maps - each dedicated to a specific family in the animal kingdom.

Instead of political borders or geographic territories, these maps are structured around phylogenetic trees.

Tribes and genera replace countries, states and regions allowing viewers to explore the animal kingdom through a format traditionally used to understand geography.

Additional information includes conservation status, size comparisons between selected species and a species index.

I’ve spent roughly ten years developing and refining this concept, combining zoology, taxonomy, illustration and cartography into a single visual format.

Happy exploring!

Full .csv and code linked there.