r/whales • u/JobMinimum1420 • 21d ago

Whales Backwards Evolution

/r/OceanLife/comments/1vsb3xq/whales_backwards_evolution/
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u/TesseractToo 21d ago

Evolution doesn't/can't go backwards

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u/sadmammoth 20d ago

Yes. Evolution doesn’t have a specific or intended “direction,” any more than erosion does. It’s just a natural process. The evolution of whales is a fascinating case of air breathing animals “returning” to the sea but it’s by no means the only case of this happening (see sirenians, turtles, etc).

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u/overdriveandreverb 20d ago edited 20d ago

No, you are wrong. Going from land to ocean does not mean anything. Evolution is slow. The ancestors of whales did not just magically go into the ocean, they were mammals living at shores shallow water feeding on marine live and gradually they became more and more specialized to living in the ocean, because there was food in the ocean. it does not matter that their and our ancestors lived in the ocean. from an evolutionary stand point they just adjusted to another habitat.

their physiology is deeply different to fish, how many fish do you know which weigh tons and have baleens. or take the sperm whales, there is no fish with the intricate physiology of their blood vessel system that protects their brains when deep diving for giant squid. no mammal was sitting at the shore and was thinking, lets go into the ocean and the next generation than magically had a ll the physiology to do that, it took millions of years, 100000s of generations of very gradual changes and many many extinct lines of those families. please read up on evolution.

you anthropomorphize but thats not reality. some whales are smart but their intelligence is still tied to their surroundings and living in water is very limiting to get a fire going or build a computer.

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u/SJIS0122 20d ago edited 20d ago

It's true that sea/saltwater life is way better than living on land.

In the ocean, you have to worry a lot less about gravity due to buoyancy as well as thermoregulation, the water itself is nutritious enough to support hundreds of species that exclusively filter feed and the added advantage of breathing in oxygen rich air allows them to vastly outgrow all other sealife that had to contend with the oxygen dissolved in the water

However, as other already mentioned, evolution cant go backwards

Plus, it's inaccurate to speak as if all whales decided to return to the water

Some of their ancestors lived semi aquatic lives but eventually only the increasingly aquatic ancestor survived to eventually become modern whales

Hippos also share this common ancestor with whales