nPeace
Veteran Member
So there are persons on here who try to mislead us? Or is everyone confused about what is what?
So it applies only to particular organisms?Adaptation, in evolutionary terms, is the process that species go through in order to become accustomed to an environment. Over many generations, through the process of natural selection, organisms’ physical and behavioral features adapt to function better in the face of environmental challenges. Adaptations are slow and incremental, and the result of successful adaptation is always beneficial to an organism.
Wrong... according to Daemon Sophic.
Adaptation
An adaptation is a feature that arose and was favored by natural selection for its current function. Adaptations help an organism survive and/or reproduce in its current environment.
Adaptations can take many forms: a behavior that allows better evasion of predators, a protein that functions better at body temperature, or an anatomical feature that allows the organism to access a valuable new resource — all of these might be adaptations. Many of the things that impress us most in nature are thought to be adaptations.
Mimicry of leaves by insects is an adaptation
Wrong... according to Daemon Sophic.
...and all the other information out there. All wrong... according to Daemon Sophic.
Bye peppered moths evolution.
At least they agree with me, provided they aren't assuming millions of years.
I'm really sorry you thought you had to go through all of that.So, no. For such bacterial feats of evolution, you have to consider VERY LARGE NUMBERS. E. coli bacterial colonies reproduce by mitosis, once every 20 minutes in optimal conditions. So. 1 bacterium becomes 2 in 20 minutes. In one hour there are 8 bacteria (2 ^3 because you had 3 reproduction cycles which double the population each cycle). Therefore, in one day (24 hours = 72 twenty minute reproduction cycles) a single bacterium has turned into 2 ^72 bacteria. That's 47,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bacteria from one momma
DNA is copied pretty accurately, but on a rare occasion, an error is made in the copying process. Such an error is called a mutation. Most bacterial mutations are lethal, so all of that "daughter's" lineage never even happen. Thus at the end of 24 hours, we have less than 47 sextillion.
Supposing (purely hypothetically) that many lethal mutations occurred, along with several non-lethal ones. One of these non-lethal mutations makes the offspring glow purple, one that makes offspring glow green, one that lets the offspring eat plastic, and one that provides the offspring with immunity to penicillin) and at the end of the day, we have a total of 47 Quintillion bacteria. To simplify things, we'll also suppose that any one of these mutations cancels the bacteria from having offspring with any of the other mutations (yes sometimes that happens). But mutations are rare, so most of the bugs (bacteria) are just like great-great-great grandma the original.
Now we need that biological stressor.
So we take the small teaspoonful of bacteria and drop them into a soup of water with very little food, but lots of plastic. The stressor is that those who cannot digest plastic for energy.....DIE.
One day later, we have a population of E. coli bacteria for whom 99.999% are able to eat plastic (thank you very much random chance mutation + stressor = evolution). No green glowers, no purple glowers, no penicillin resistant daughters, and no daughters who are just like great-great-great grandma.
Note that the ones who could resist penicillin are now all dead. The stressor they faced had nothing to do with antibiotics. It was about getting nutrients from plastic vs starvation.
If the stressor was that they were trying to make an abscess and septic infection inside a human who was taking penicillin, then that's a different biological stressor, and only the penicillin resistant daughters would have survived to the end of the day. No plastic eaters.
If there had been daughters who were resistant to vancomycin (a different group of antibiotics) they would have died out too. Since in the environment I listed above, the stressor was Penicillin, not vancomycin.
So evolution occurs from generation to generation, with genetic mutations (most of which are lethal), combined with biological stressors in the environment that kill off those who were not simply lucky enough to have been born with the right genome.
Also, bacteria have VERY simplistic genomes and biological systems compare to multicellular animals, wherein a mutation in one system often has to be accompanied by mutations in other systems or else the offspring dies. For example, being able to functionally chew and degrade grass cellulose in grass cells with grinding teeth and longer/slower gullet, as well as biochemically converting cellulose to glucose inside the intestinal epithelial cells. One without the other won't convert a carnivore to an herbivore. And of course (thankfully) lions don't reproduce themselves by mitosis every 20 minutes.
Lastly, with enough mutations to a genome of any organism, it will eventually be no longer capable of reproducing with its EXTREMELY distant cousins of the same generation. And THAT is when we would consider them to be of two different species. They started with the same great-great ancestor, but enough change in the genome makes the gametes (egg and sperm) from connecting to one another to make a living offspring.
In this way, we are VERY DISTANT cousins of the other great apes. There was one great-great-great-.....grandma great "ape"; and over the many millennia, there were many mutations and stressors our ancestors (and off-branched relatives) were pitted against; leading to differentiation based upon survival for those environments.....so that gorillas, and baboons, and humans, and chimpanzees, and etc....etc...etc....other 'great apes' are what remain.
I hope you enjoyed doing it, because it's nothing informative or new to me.
Thanks for trying anyway.
Last edited:
