clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Am 29.11.2017 um 04:08 schrieb omniverse:
>
> > Or in other words, the way evolution seems to be mostly finished. You don't see
> > a creature becoming future whales or dolphins anymore. What happened to their
> > land-based counterparts? How could they only be 100% water-borne since they
> > began taking to the ocean, why not half and half, like seals and walruses?
>
> ... or maybe like hippos?
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whippomorpha
> (Spolier Alert!)
>
>
> The most common phenomenon in evolution is that you have some animal
> developing a trait that is of benefit in its natural environment, and
> such traits tend to get passed on until they are prevalent throughout
> the species' population. In such a manner, species may change as a whole
> in response to their environment.
>
> But now and again you have populations being separated, and one develops
> in another direction than the other (because their natural environments
> differ somewhat, or just because one beneficial mutation arises in one
> population but not the other). As each population undergoes its own
> changes from the original form, they become so different that if they
> ever meet again later they can't (or won't) interbreed anymore, and have
> thus become different species -- each differing from the original
> species in its own way. The original species isn't gone -- it has been
> absorbed into the two new species, each of which is better adapted to
> its respective habitat than the original form.

Yeah, yeah...  LOL Thanks for that, I just never seem to get the biology
reasoning about why there wouldn't be everything else in between continuing too.
Sure. It makes sense about the changes occurring, as in dog breeding and the
multitude of variations, but likewise it's the curious way it only goes on and
on ever changing yet nothing remains of all the others.

Well, unless you think of all primates as an example of "other" human relatives,
maybe. But there's always the far separation into unique varieties without the
many almost the same ones existing too.

I can figure it must be something I don't understand about life forms
"evolving", just that I get confused about the odd way such change takes place
so decisively with only a certain kind of outcome, leaving all else as failure
to exist.

It's interesting anyhow, either way.

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