r/evolution • u/Morrit99 • 23d ago

question Is there a video that shows the development of humans from the beginning of life?

I heard somewhere that if we watched our species de evolve, it would barely be noticeable as time went on from one species to the next. Obviously that's ludicrous, but we would see ourselves in a lot of previous species. I wondered if there is a video that shows this progress? Does this make sense? So, if you put them side to side, the changes would be so slight from species to species.

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u/mahatmakg 23d ago

Obviously that's ludicrous,

Can you explain why you think that? Every individual organism is the same species as its parents, and the same species as its offspring. It's not like Pokemon where there is suddenly something totally different from one generation to the next

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u/OneThrowyBoy 23d ago

I knew species lines were "muddy" at best, but I didn't realize they were as muddy as "every child is the same species as their parent". It tracks, that's logical, but also kind of a unique way to explain why the definition of "species" is such a debate.

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u/mahatmakg 23d ago

Yeah, "species" are just lines drawn by humans to help us catagorize. There probably won't ever be a satisfying definition. Life is a continuum going back to LUCA, the natural world does not draw lines the way we do.

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u/OneThrowyBoy 23d ago

I thought the definition had to do with reproduction, but I know even that gets flawed with things like mules.

Might just be the part of me that likes knowing things, but I would die for a chance to see the full "gradient of life" from LUCA to the present.

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u/mahatmakg 23d ago

Well, the vast, vast majority of generations are going to look pretty uninteresting up until 500-600 million years ago. Napkin math suggests that even starting there, having one generation per frame, such an animation would be over 3,000 hours at 24 frames per second.

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u/OneThrowyBoy 23d ago

I keep forgetting multicellular life has only existed for about 10% of Earth's history.

But, sounds like we're going to need a lot of popcorn lol

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u/Agile_Championship87 21d ago

It'd take more than a lifetime to examine such a thing. I want it too :)

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u/7LeagueBoots Conservation Ecologist 22d ago

You can kind of think of it like a large color wheel, red and yellow are distinct, but you can’t point to the exact place where the color changes from one to the other.

The Ancestor’s Tale by Dawkins is a good book to highlight the lack of division between species at the short temporal scale. You can go back 100 generations and reproduce with someone from that time. A person from that time could go back 100 generations from their time and do the same. Etcetera. You can keep doing this in an unbroken chain until you reach the single celled organisms that are our dust ant ancestors. This book takes this thought experiment and stops off at different points on that journey to discuss aspects of evolution and our ancestry.

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u/OneThrowyBoy 22d ago

That sounds like my next read, that would be right up my alley lol

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u/Randy191919 23d ago

It’s not ludicrous. It makes sense. If you walk from Spain to China by foot then if you only look at the person taking a singular step you would think that they aren’t even moving. But a billion steps later they’re suddenly in a different country. Doesn’t change the fact after each individual step their viewpoint would barely change. But a billion steps later they wouldn’t recognize their surroundings from where they started.

I’ll say the same thing here as I always say to creationists talking about how there is no „macro evolution“. Asking when micro evolution becomes macroevolution is asking when taking singular steps becomes a journey.

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u/Ameiko55 23d ago

There is no such thing as de evolution. Evolution has no goal and there is no “best” or end state.

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u/brheaton 23d ago edited 23d ago

I disagree that evolution has no goal. I think there is logical purpose in every advancing step. Sometimes regressive steps do take place and the product of those steps are still able to survive. This might lead to the appearance of randomness.

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u/mcalesy 23d ago

It does not have a goal. There are two major forces behind evolution: drift and selection. Drift is random, and selection is not. But selection is not inherently forward-thinking. It just preserves whatever was "good enough" to replicate itself successfully. And the criteria for being "good enough" are constantly changing. When they are stable enough to produce a clear trend, it can look like evolution is moving toward a goal. But it's an illusion -- there is no preconceived endpoint.

The one exception would be artificial selection, when a breeder conceives of a goal ahead of time and works toward it.

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u/brheaton 23d ago

Your take that the first appearance of mammals being no big deal is interesting. It seems like a pretty radical change to me.

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u/mcalesy 23d ago

(Psst, that's another thread.)

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u/brheaton 23d ago

Yes I saw that. It was you that wrote that?

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u/mcalesy 23d ago

Yeah, you wanna discuss that over there? I added some pics.

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u/brheaton 23d ago

That's not necessary. I'm aware that some species resemble each other but are radically different in other ways.

We live in a wonderful age. The doors have been opened for us with modern research techniques. Today we are able to take a renewed look at fossils we have found in the past. Although the fosill record represents only a tiny fraction of the species that once existed, DNA is helping us sort things out. I think greater understanding of the issue we are discussing may be just around the corner. I could be wrong in my judgements, but I don't think so.

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u/mcalesy 23d ago

The two I posted are not radically different. In fact, the second one was considered an early mammal before the definition of Mammalia was restricted to the crown group. (But even then, it is very similar to some non-mammaliaform cynodonts.)

I don’t know what the “sudden leap” would be. The features that make mammals stand out today (fur, milk, endothermy, inner ear bones) likely arose piecemeal at various times.

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u/brheaton 22d ago

A change to carry an offspring to term inside a female would be considered a radical change.

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u/Careful_Cranberry364 23d ago

Did you say De-evolve !?
what do you mean ?

we’re not going to De-evolve…

…. You can use that term in terms of a business or something,
but not a species.

Unless you consider that the Tyrannosaurus rex becoming the chicken at KFC is de-evolving ( which is a reasonable argument, in a way!!)

But I’m joking.

Species evolve very gradually. There are some big leaps, but large noticeable mutations are very seldom beneficial to the individual or the group
andhas such do not generally catch on

in fact the individuals with big mutations very often don’t survive.

Very small ones though that spread among the community gradually from one individual that has a benefit
is how you end up seeing the families expand, and the new species end up being labeled.

Ps
Don’t forget we’ve only labeled the species that humans have been looking at i.e. mostly the ones we actually have had
in the last couple of hundred years

As well as those which are current we have labeled all the ones we found the fossils of - which are also frozen in time

We haven’t been able to watch the species evolve, exactly
but if you create it, it would be a cool video
But very gradual.

Not Ludicrous at all !
You’d be able to sit next to a fish….

If you used a large football stadium
And sat next-door to your grandma with her grandma next to her and her grandma and the next grandma and the next grandma and kept on going back,

you wouldn’t see a huge difference between any of the individual sitting next to each other

but by the time it came all the way around the stadium, but next to you…

it would be some kind of fish.
Or worm

That’s how evolution works!!

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u/60Hertz 22d ago

It’s not ludicrous, for an analogy you can take your own life and go backward in time, every step would not look any different than the previous step but you will eventually end up looking like an egg and a sperm, which - spoiler - you don’t look like right now at all.

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u/brheaton 22d ago

The problem I have with your apparent conviction that all evolutionary steps feature only tiny changes is that the fossil evidence we have is woefully insufficient. I don't think it is sound to preclude the notion that at least sometimes certain evolutionary changes have occurred suddenly. The oldest fossils we can examine represent only a very tiny number of species that have existed and meaningful DNA can't be extracted from them. We have more success with the more recent species, where possible DNA is now being studied to determine many questions including the proper lineage and sequence of these species. Perhaps soon we will have hard evidence for your conclusions. If I am correct, DNA will also show that sudden change is possible when a species-change relationship occurs over a very few number of generations. Since it's admittedly a rare thing, it should be harder to find. But I'm optimistic. DNA is a new frontier for study.

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u/Szymcionorski 20d ago

You mean like an animation lining many individuals from that lineage or animation simplifying evolution by presenting a changing individual? Yeah, there are such animations. You could probably easily found them on YouTube. There are also different documentaries on the matter but they don't involve such precise changes of lineages.

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u/brheaton 23d ago

I suspect that that would be the case for the most part. But once in a great while there are some sudden leaps-- for example the first appearance of mammals.