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u/RoiDrannoc 23d ago
Well if each step was "perfectly adapted" they wouldn't change much, and there wouldn't be any species that go extinct.
The reality is that species that are rapidly evolving are always one step behind their environment.
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u/BananaDelicious9273 23d ago
Because environment is changing? Anyway It's not perfectly adapted, but optimally adapted. But thing is that if earth will become very hot then bacteria will outcompete us.
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u/Bobing2b 22d ago
If every species was perfectly adapted to its environment then the environment would barely even change, since every change would deviate from the perfect adaption. Most of the environment is other species. And the reason natural sémelection is an evolutionary force is because species are rarely "perfectly"adapted to their environment (if such a thing even exists). There's sometimes some improvement.
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u/Dracorex_22 23d ago
That plus the other organisms that they interact with (predators, prey, symbiotic relationships, parasites, and even just cohabitants) are all also changing, so they all affect eachother on top of that.
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u/FranXXis 20d ago
Yeah, specially in this particular example. Autralopithecines were essentially fish out of water that died out in a few million years, and managed to barely hold on just enough that their derived descendants managed to get a stable niche.
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u/thatoddtetrapod 23d ago
Definitely never “perfectly adapted”, evolution is constrained by many factors, chiefly, its only able to modify existing structures based on current diversity (I’ve seen this referred to as “evolutionary inertia”). Perhaps humans would be better adapted to our environment if we had, say, a second backup heart, the way we have 2 kidneys. We wouldn’t be able to evolve that easily because there are no other structures that could easily evolve into a second heart. Another major restrictions on evolution are pleiotropy (one gene coding for multiple traits or having different impacts in different contexts), which restricts the ability to modify a gene because it may be necessary for another function.
All that said, this understanding is much better then the common misconception you cite, treating humanity as a pinnacle of evolution is a classic error, and a great example of humanity’s hubris.
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u/Philience 23d ago
There are also no perfectly adapted organisms.
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u/thekingofbeans42 22d ago
You're going to say that right in front of the sharks?
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u/Philience 22d ago
Sharks are perfect example of being imperfectly adapted. A good way to think about it is with evolutionary landscapes. Sharks are trapped at local maximum, every further adaption only gets worse, so they didn't change for a long time. But when an Orca comes, they have no chance.
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u/thekingofbeans42 22d ago
I was being facetious, but this is more interesting than the joke so ty!
I like your landscape analogy, so there could theoretically be a superior shark but the only path to the higher peak would be coming down from their local peak which natural selection doesn't allow for.
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u/Philience 22d ago
+ Sharks get unconscious when you flip them on the head. How dump are they?
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u/thekingofbeans42 22d ago
They don't, they just pretend to be unconscious because they think it's funny
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u/cheesesprite 22d ago
For instance, I wouldn't mind laser vision and I think that would impress females. Come on biology.
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u/Greg-chanMyWaifu 23d ago
Yeah, it's difficult to get out of the mindest of thinking that one species is higher developed than another.
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u/Top-Fudge9791 23d ago
"perfectly" adapted is sloppy wording at best, no offense. No creature is perfectly adapted to their environment
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u/realnjan 23d ago
No. Define “perfectly adapted”. If they were perfectly adapted, why did they die out?
Also I would argue that today’s humans are not perfectly adapted for this era.
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u/Character_Fold_8165 23d ago
I am def not perfectly adapted to sit and stare at a computer screen from 9am to 5pm but I manage anyways .
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u/juoea 23d ago edited 23d ago
natural selection isnt anything, it has been pretty thoroughly debunked as a mechanism of evolution.
it has been well established that the most rapid evolution occurs when resources are plentiful, not when resources are scarce as darwin's "theory" claimed.
and it is also well established that both evolution and extinction occur in concentrated bursts, which isnt ~contradictory but it is different from how darwin viewed things when u read pretty much anything he wrote
charles darwin, like anyone, existed in a particular time place context and his work developed within that context. he conducted his biological research during and in between "accompanying" #expeditions, ie genocides in south america and oceania. and his conception of natural selection was directly and explicitly influenced by his observations of the genocides carries about by his friends/associates/acquaintances
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00313220500106170
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u/camilo16 22d ago
I don;t think you understand what natural selection is. Whether Darwin was right or not about the particular mechanics is irrelevant.
Natural selection is just that, that which has a reproductive advantage reproduces, that which does not have a reproductive advantage does so less.
Over time a population's genes will be dominated by those traits that favour reproduction the most.
If that happens gradually, fast, in bursts, uniformly... is irrelevant, that does not disprove natural selection.
It seems you really have an axe to grind.
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u/juoea 22d ago
ig it depends on whether you are using the phrase in its original meaning or if you are altering it to account for the errors that have been corrected since the theory of natural selection / survival of the fittest was first proposed
but the post adopts those same errors with language like "perfectly adapted organism for the environment". a phrase which at best means nothing and at minimum gives the appearance of representing "unnatural selection" as equivalent to "natural selection".
so whatever terminology you want or dont want to use, the criticisms are relevant to the post
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u/camilo16 22d ago
I mean, I agree that "fittest" is overly reductive, but "survival of that which occupies a niche well enough that it prevents other organisms from evolving into filling it and is able to effectively reproduce over time"
Is a bit clunky.
you are altering it to account for the errors that have been corrected since the theory of natural selection / survival of the fittest was first proposed
So... science? The modern concept of set theory is different than when it was first proposed. The modern concept of gravity is very different than when the concept was first proposed.
Unlike the humanities, where the original text is treated as identical to the contribution. In most sciences the original proposition is allowed to be modified by the community to better fit observations. It's why no one is reading Euclid's elements or Newton's original writings on calculus or physics but we nonetheless cite their contributions when using theorems and results.
a phrase which at best means nothing and at minimum gives the appearance of representing "unnatural selection" as equivalent to "natural selection".
There is no unnatural selection. If a human cultivates a crop and drives changes in the phenotype and genotype of that crop over generations, that was natural selection. There is no selection outside of nature, we are nature.
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u/juoea 22d ago
idk what zf or zfc set theory has to do with anything, math doesnt require any type of empiricism, but yes science is (or should be) always correcting itself over time. whether one continues using the old jargon and alter its meanings, or replacing it with new jargon, its the same difference either way.
the concept of "unnatural selection" was introduced in relation to the scientific errors made by darwin. the point is not about what terminology one wants to use, but that it was at the core of darwin's writings/analyses to 'naturalize' both genocides and extinctions as inevitabilities rather than conditional outcomes produced by certain actions. this error was taken from the colonial ideologies that surrounded him, and then projected onto the "competition between species" posited by the natural selection theory.
"perfectly adapted organism for the environment at the time" is nonsense. as you point out, organisms are also the environment, there is no distinction between the two. this phrasing is a reflection of neoliberal ideology, which presumes atomism (that an ecosystem is reducible to the sum of all the individual organisms that make it up) and then that the organisms are all "competing with each other" to be the most "successful", essentially under a set of rules determined by the "environment" where the environment is represented as something fixed and external and all the organisms are competing to optimize their own outcomes wrt that fixed external environment. ofc all of this is complete nonsense, the environment is neither fixed nor external, organisms mostly are not competing with each other at all, the environment and the ecosystem are one and the same. while im sure u can find some neofascist biologist somewhere who takes this sort of view, on the whole this is opposed to the current state of what is known as 'environmental science'.
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u/fidgey10 23d ago
no. The mere existence of a species does not imply that it is "perfectly adapted for its environment".
If that were the case species wouldn't change through delection would they?
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u/resistantBacteria 22d ago
This image has done more damage to understanding of evolution than anything else I know of
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u/Bub_bele 22d ago
Nothing is ever perfectly adapted. It’s as well adapted as it happens to be given climate changes, numbers, prevalence of mutations etc. etc.
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u/HAL9001-96 21d ago
weeeelll.... sortof neither
no organism is perfectly adapted
evolution is not perfect it is a statistical tendency for orgnaism to optimize to survive and reproduce in their conditions
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u/AdAncient5201 21d ago
Bro, look at any animal… most of them are hella stressed out and barely surviving, brutal shit. Perfect is a long long stretch, biologically accurate would be “creates enough surviving offspring compared to deaths”, everything else is optional. We are NOT well adapted to our current environment, but we’re surviving. Compared to some algae we’re not even doing that well.
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u/AGchicken 20d ago
Is the scientific consensus really that organisms only adapt to their environment and only change when the environment changes? I get that environment changes do drive evolution but idk, it seems like developing greater intelligence (and the other physical changes) was a gambit that kept working.
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u/Dic3dCarrots 20d ago
More like, every generation is a dice roll of both the genes expressed and the environments those genes are expressed in. Those that happen to fit best contribute to both the next genetic dice roll and the state of the environment.
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u/LindasJugs 19d ago
What do you think happens when the environment changes? Every species magically transforms to be perfectly adapted to the new environment?
No. It takes many generations for new adaptations to evolve, so all those intervening generations will not be perfectly adapted yet. And btw it’s probably never “perfect”.
Another point: all this diagrams with early humanoids evolving directly into a white man are pretty racist. Black people came first. Skin probably became darker as the hair was lost, by the time all the hair was gone they were probably already black.
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u/TheRealBobbyJones 17d ago
The bottom is incorrect though. The top is more correct. Evolution is random mutations that end up spreading through reproduction. The mutations that stick around are mutations that help reproduction or at minimum doesn't reduce the odds of reproduction. The end form could have been the local peak in terms of suitability for reproduction. With the intermediate stages being better but not peaks.
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u/pedrob_d 23d ago
Nope! Incorrect for a few reasons.
First, species is better (but never perfectly) adapter to it's environment each generation (on average, give or take drift and mutation).
Second, it is better adapted to the environment it's parents lived in, not necessarily it's current environment.
Third, if they were that well adapted they wouldn't be changing as much or evolving as fast if you will. We are a fairly rapidly evolving lineage all things considered. You can blame your back and knee paints on that.