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10 Worst Evolutionary Designs
JamJam writes "Besides my beer gut, which I'm sure has some purpose, Wired is running a story on the
10 Worst Evolutionary Designs. Ranging from baby giraffes being dropped 5-foot during birth to Goliath bird-eating spiders that practically explode when they fall from trees."
This was posted 2 weeks ago, it was stupid then and is stupid now. Also, go back to digg with your lists kthxby.
"If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid" - that also applied to evolutionary designs.
Also, some of these 'design issues' might in truth be advantages. For example, sea mammals can swim through oxygen-depleted dead waters just fine - they don't depend on dissolved oxygen.
Exactly. The only way I can think of to even start to consider a "worst evolutionary design" would have to be in terms of adaptability. I.e., how sensitive is the life form to small changes in its environment? Even that is full of problems though, as "best" and "worst" are measured only relative to the current environment. Any stable population could be considered the best solution for its environment--at least a local maximum, if not global.
As a side note, this thread is also why you should never invite a pedant to a party. We have the capability of sucking the joy out of nearly any conversation.
3) Walking upright leads to distended colon, piles, etc
It also allows us to use our hands better, for things like wielding weapons against animals that would kill us otherwise.
"...evolution does not provide traits that are advantageous, ..."
Yes it does.
"it simply removes those that are disadvantageous"
That would assume you ahve all traits at the 'beginning'.
New traits can develop from new mutations.
You seem to be a little too Lamarkian.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Storing fat is a useful way of surviving famine or food shortages. Unfortunately the stored fat always makes the male less athletic, less able to fight, hunt, evade, etc. Storing extra fat on the gut/love handle area is probably the best compromise for athletic purposes - lowest center of gravity possible without adding excess weight to the legs (which have to change direction rapidly).
The worst places to store fat in large quantities are at the extremities such as fingers, toes, hands, feet, forearms, calves and the head, because of the reduction to athletic performance.
Ass, thighs and chest aren't as great as the mid-section but aren't terrible. These areas are where women usually store their fat because if they stored it on their gut men can't tell if they are are pregnant or not.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Not to mention the fact that people shouldn't confuse evolution for "perfection". We're choosing an arbitrary point in time (now) to draw a line in the sand, claiming organisms should be perfectly adapted at this point. Wrong.
I record my sleeptalking
It's not really evolutionary design, it's evolutionary results.
Evolution doesn't sit down at the drawing board and try to figure out how to give birth to a giraffe. This is the end result of bazillions of little experiments that ended up with the rather comic/disturbing notion of a baby giraffe falling that far.
I'm sure to an advanced species, our mating habits, genitals, mode of breathing, and whatnot look hilarious. :-P
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This is something that I've always found hard to understand with the argument for evolution. Surely the natural selection process would strongly bias against any traits that result in the animal being killed off in the first few minutes. (And likewise a strong bias towards traits that improve birth mortality rates). Yet we see so many instances of "poor design" in the birth process. Four in this article alone.
If natural selection does such a "poor" job of refining the birthing mechanism when there is a clear correlation between some new (good or bad) trait and the likelihood of that trait being propagated to future generations, then how can we reasonably expect that it is also responsible for highly refined systems where there is a much lower correlation between the new trait and the likelihood of producing offspring. (For example, in esoteric features of the imune system, or the brain - the new trait may only even come into play in certain situations during the animals life, and therefore only has any selective power in the specific animals for which it occurs ... unlike traits relating to birth which are immediately tested for all creatures)
If evolution is about compromise, then the most obvious compromises would favour succesful birth. If birth is unsuccesful than other traits don't even get a chance to be tested.
Considering the following.
Evolution is flawed, makes sense because its an ongoing process.
Creatures are flawed, through the deliberate act of the creator. That makes the creator either a dipshit, or an asshole.
Take your choice.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Evolution is a process, not an end goal. The creatures described here are not 'completed', but are instead a work in progress. Also note, many of the 'issues' have secret advantages. For example a whale can dive deeper than most fish can swim because of the huge lungs that go with the blow hole instead of the gills that are more limited.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
He isnt saying poor design. He is saying there are a whole lot of traits that would have had/have zero reproductive advantage, yet are clearly evident in modern animals. .2 centimeters longer than another is not going to breed so much more than his friends that the noses of the species are effected.
I tend to agree. My example is the elephant. The first animals (presumably like a pig) had a short nose. Some random member of the species gets born with a slightly longer nose. Not much mind you, because they cant have very much variation in only one generation, so this nose is barely noticeable to be longer, yet it has so much reproductive advantage that generations later the short snout has evolved to a long trunk? It doesnt make sense.
Another example, this one from the stupid list in the article. Dolphins and whales breathe through a blow hole. Supposedly their ancestors where land mammals that returned to the sea after having had developed for land. At first they held their breath and breathed like every other land mammal, meaning they stayed near the surface. How does their breathing tract move from their mouth, to another orifice? That isn't something that could have been done incrementally.
Granted evolution makes a lot of sense when you look at it and say "it had X million years to change from this to that", but when you get into individual generations, there are a lot of things that COULD NOT have developed because the change from one generation to another would not have been reproductively advantageous. A pig with a nose