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Techno2000
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Where did all these environment changes come from to produce all these different species , there are million of different fungi species alone !
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PetraG
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Here’s the thing: when an environment doesn’t change for a long time, there is more diversity in species. It is reasoned that more time allows more chances to stumble onto yet another good survival strategy.
When conditions change abruptly, the reasoning goes, the organisms with broadly-applicable strategies survive (even if they weren’t champion strategies under the old conditions) and those with strategies that are really great but only in narrow circumstances are wiped out.
In other words, less change leads to more diversity, not the other way around.
When conditions change abruptly, the reasoning goes, the organisms with broadly-applicable strategies survive (even if they weren’t champion strategies under the old conditions) and those with strategies that are really great but only in narrow circumstances are wiped out.
In other words, less change leads to more diversity, not the other way around.
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Techno2000
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Can you give me a real life scenario ?
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Dan123
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Dinosaur extinction
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Techno2000
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If the Dinosaurs went extinct, how was evolution able to morph them into birds?
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Dan123
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Not every creature alive at the time died, not all the dinosaurs died. Some species survived and changed.
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Techno2000
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So, if all the dinosaurs would have died, we would never have had birds?
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Dan123
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We would. Birds emerged prior to the extinction event. They’d actually been around or awhile beforehand.
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Techno2000
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So, birds and dinosaurs both lived together, and evolution made them both fit ?
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PetraG
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Well, seeing extinctions of whole populations in areas where the habitat has been changed abruptly aren’t that hard to find. If you mean the actual data, here’s a paper that shows the sort of methods the biologists would use to find evidence for hypotheses about what could have caused extinctions at the end of the last Ice Age:
Mammoths killed by abrupt climate change
New research has revealed abrupt warming, that closely resembles the rapid man-made warming occurring today, has repeatedly played a key role in mass extinction events of large animals, the megafauna, in Earth's past.
www.sciencedaily.com
Likewise, you’re not going to see “real life” evidence of new species arising from nothing except in the fossil record. To the best of my knowledge, there has not been a single instance of a new species arising in the sense of a species with a totally different number of chromosomes, species that differ as much as, say, humans (with our 23 pairs of chromosomes) and apes and monkeys (with their 24 pairs.) Subspecies, yes, but not a new species with a different number of chromosomes, which obviously had to happen over and over again for evolution to take place on a grand scale.
There is evidence of such a possibility that can be had by comparing the human genome to that of other apes that our differerent number. Our genome is consistent with the change of a telomere-to-telemere fusion in an ancestor that had 24 pairs. To the best of my knowledge, though, there is no known mechanism by which this happens randomly. Certainly, if such a change happened to any of us, if it didn’t kill us it would still make us unable to be parents with anybody that had a genetic make-up that was typical before our mututation took place. That doesn’t mean such mechanisms don’t exist, but I really think there has to be a non-random attack on the DNA for that to happen to enough individuals to get a breeding population that come through the change with compatible genomes. There has to be more than random mutuations if evolution is the real origin of the species. There has to be non-random mechanisms that change a lot of organisms at once. It could be something that would kill 99% or even 99.9% of a population, provided it left a lot of individuals alive with a new genome that could interbreed with each other to propogate the drastically-changed genome.
Back to the topic of the thread, this shows why small “s” skepticism is fairly necessary if logic is going to be used to find the most likely explanations for physical phenomena. By small “s” skepticism, I mean not rushing to believe that what seems to be a really good explanation must be the correct explanation or that a better answer isn’t needed. That is in contrast to the OP’s example, which I’d call big “S” Skepticism: the conviction that there isn’t any way to know anything for sure no matter how much evidence you have for believing it.
As the singer Vicentico put it: No creer en nada es creer en todo; that is: to believe in nothing is to believe in everything. There is some truth in that, I think. Well, big “s” Skepticism deserves to have its tires kicked, too. I think it really causes people to more gullible, not less gullible.
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Techno2000
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Seems to me, extinction is a failure of evolution.In real life (not speculated billions of years ago) if an environment changes too fast, and a ecosystem dies, evolution has no answer for this.Techno2000:
Well, seeing extinctions of whole populations in areas where the habitat has been changed abruptly aren’t that hard to find. When the last Ice Age ended, for instance, a lot of mega fauna species disappeared all around the same time. While that can be linked to the arrival of human hunters–that is, it happened faster in places with humans–it was also going on where there weren’t any humans. It isn’t as if the wholly mammoths were the only species to disappear.
Here’s a paper that shows the sort of methods the biologists would use to find evidence for hypotheses about what could have caused extinctions at the end of the last Ice Age:
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AlNg
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Life can evolve in a different direction.
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PetraG
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Well, actually, extinction is part of how evolution is proposed to work. It was used to explain all the animal fossils dug up that obviously do not belong to any species that survived and the layers of how those fauna (and even the flora) changed as the layers go deeper and deeper and deeper.
It is pretty rare for an entire ecosystem to become absolutely uninhabitable. The “extinction events” aren’t proposed to be events when all life on Earth was wiped out!! No, those are eras when the number of species dropped by a huge amount, but not when everything died. So, for instance, when the dinosaurs were wiped out, there were mammals who survived the same environmental catastrophe. When the plants grew back in, all of a sudden there were mutations in the mammals that were no longer fatal, like being big enough to interest a hungry dinosaur, for instance.
Does that make sense?
Now, for instance, it isn’t proposed the environmental changes happening are going to wipe out all life on earth. No one believes that. The problem is that it is wiping out lots of species. If microplastic bits get into everything everywhere all over the planet, for instance, there will be animals that can tolerate that. The problem is that we don’t want to lose any of those that can’t.
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Dan123
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Can you give a real life example of an environment changing so much that the entire ecosystem died?
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Techno2000
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Well, here in New Orleans the salty Gulf of Mexico is moving closer and closer to us, destroying the freshwater ecosystem.Techno2000:
Can you give a real life example of an environment changing so much that the entire ecosystem died?
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Dan123
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So every animal is dead?
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Freddy
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This is like watching a smash on the freeway in slo mo.
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EndTimes
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The previous and relatively recent glaciation
covered all of Canada in a very thick layer of ICE…
some as deep as 3 km…
Worse… Further back in time - Snowball Earth enveloped the planet Earth…
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