Thanks in advance. I come from a Christian school so they don’t teach evolution because they don’t believe it.
In: Biology
Evolution reflects the adaptations of organisms to their changing environments and can result in altered genes, novel traits, and new species. Evolutionary processes depend on both changes in genetic variability and changes in allele frequencies over time.
You are a little different from your parents. Your kids are a little different from you. Over time these changes add up. The changes are random, but with so many creatures a lot of different changes will happen. Those that are better adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce, so over time the species becomes better suited to its environment.
1. Random mutation.
Every baby is a rough combination of mom and dad. That’s it. Sometimes something new shows up, like someone who is taller than normal (taller than both parents), or maybe the kid’s tooth enamel is like 1% harder. It’s totally random. Most of it doesn’t really help or hurt.
2. NONRANDOM selection.
Sometimes… the girls like a tall guy… or maybe his body can actually get rid of the microplastics… it doesn’t matter what it is. If it helps you have babies, raise babies, increase survival rates, etc, then you’re more likely to participate in .. breeding. Your kid is a rough combination of you and the other parent, and there’s a 50% chance that kid gets whatever you have.
And so over time… everything changes a little. The ones that breed better become more numerous. The ones that don’t… die. If you die without kids, you take your genetic information with you. If you have kids, your genetic information goes forward.
There are obviously several ways a species evolves but as a rudimentary idea: lets assume an island with a really strong high and low tide. Therefore big parts of the islands are
Flooded for parts of the day. There is a species of lizards. Some of them can swim (and maybe even have a bigger tail for swimming), others can’t. Due to the rising tide, the non swimming part of the population has lower chances of survival(either due to drowning or food shortages, etc). The swimmers have an advantage and will reproduce more, over time the species will only consist of the swimming variety.
I’ll give an analogy that simplifies it.
You are a mix of your mom and dad, but *mutations* in your genes can happen that are different from your mom and your dad’s genes.
So, let’s imagine a bunch of brown rabbits living in a brown forest, where their fur keeps them camouflaged from predators. Now, for whatever reason, this bunch of rabbits starts moving North, where it gets colder and colder, and thus more snow.
As the rabbits reproduce, *some* of the rabbits have a mutation that causes lighter-colored fur. As the rabbits move North into more snowy territory, more of the darker rabbits get picked off by predators, where the lighter-colored rabbits survive more.
As the lighter-colored rabbits reproduce more, and mutations create offspring with even *lighter* fur, and so on, eventually you have a population of rabbits where they’re all white.
This is evolution. There is no conscious process behind it, it’s just natural selection where the organisms with beneficial traits survive more, while those with less beneficial traits die off.
Take that analogy, and apply it to ALL traits any organism has, and that’s how evolution explains the diversity of life we have on Earth.
Mommy and Daddy were primates who walk on all 4 limbs.
When Daddy’s sperm was duplicating there was a glitch and one gene was not a perfect match of Daddy’s.
So when I was born I had a birth defect, my hips were slightly tilted. This didn’t cause me too much trouble, my gait was a little different from everyone else’s but I was able to keep up with the pack.
I eventually had kids and they had the same hip defect. My grandson had a kid with another primate with a different birth defect, her legs are longer than normal.
With the two traits combined their kids are able to stand on two legs much easier than the rest of us, which has come in handy as they can reach branches in the trees where the best fruit resides.
I never ate this well before those kids were born.
The hell kind of Christian school doesn’t teach evolution?
OP, I answered and others have, but I want you to understand something about evolution: It is as scientifically real and true, as any other thing we consider true in science. We actually understand evolution *better* than we understand electricity or gravity.
There is no scientific debate about whether or not evolution is true. It’s a done deal. It’s as true as gravity is.
The ONLY reason there is any illusion of a debate about whether or not evolution is true, is because of religious fundamentalists who don’t like that it disagrees with their holy books. Thus those religious fundamentalists create pseudo-scientific arguments and websites trying to debunk it, which no real scientist takes seriously, just like no real scientist takes Flat Earth websites seriously.
Let’s imagine there is a species of light green insects who live on an island where the plants have light green leaves.
One day a bird picks up a branch covered in these insects’ eggs to use in their nest. They carry it a long way but accidentally drop it on a different islands where plants have dark green leaves.
These insects survive, but being a different color to the leaves means they often get eaten by birds.
They’re not all the same color though, random mutation means since are slightly different shades of green. The lighter the green, the more likely that individual insect will be eaten first.
So on average more of the darker insects will survive to lay eggs than the lighter ones. And they pass that color down to their next generation.
Mutations will keep changing the color as well, starting with that darker color and then either making it lighter again or making it even darker.
The darker the insect, the better they blend in with the leaves they are living on and the less likely they are too be eaten.
Over millions of years all these small changes followed by the external pressure of the “less fit” individuals getting eaten means the insects can become perfectly camouflaged just though these small random changes.
For example if you were born in Ireland and moved in your teens to Egypt. You would probably suffer a lot of sunburns through out your life. I’ll bet your kids would not be susceptible as much to sunburns and their kids even less until you ancestors didn’t really suffer from them at all
Now let’s say your twin stayed in Ireland. After the same amount of generations, I’d bet the twins ancestors would still burn
That’s evolution
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