Comment by maxbond
2 days ago
Not always, species go extinct all the time. Evolution can get stuck in local optima. Consider the whiptail lizard, which has lost the ability to reproduce sexually. Will they be able to adapt to future changes of the environment? Maybe, but the chips are stacked against them.
Wow what an interesting animal, haven't heard about it before.
> the chips are stacked against them.
Wikipedia says: "This reproductive method enables the asexual desert grassland whiptail lizard to have a genetic diversity previously thought to have been unique to sexually reproductive species."
Doesn't look to bad?
No one said that those nooks are not deadly. But evolution will explore them just in case.
Evolution doesn’t explore anything, mutations are random, selection pressure causes beneficial traits to become more common overtime.
That's what exploration looks like; mutation plus selection. I think you know this but consider exploration willful, perhaps?
1 reply →
> mutations are random
Kind of. Mutation rate of our dna is "managed" by the dna/chromosomes/genes to reduce the rate in critical areas.
Yes, but those mutations are part of why evolution works. Through random mutations, every possible way of doing something is explored. If something is beneficial, organisms thrive. If it's not beneficial, organisms die. The same is for whole species. If a species was using some niche to their advantage and the niche disappeared, the species will die. But that niche (nook) was explored.