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Yes! Thank you! I’m barely knowledgable when it comes to biology and I still get annoyed when evolution is framed as cause-and-effect.
by skipants 1y ago
Yes! Thank you! I’m barely knowledgable when it comes to biology and I still get annoyed when evolution is framed as cause-and-effect.
- pegasus 1y agoNo need to be annoyed. I think if you look deeper, you might find that, in fact, all occurrences of what we call cause and effect are of a similar nature.
- bsder 1y agoWell, there is some "cause-and-effect" in evolution. Whenever a species winds up isolated in a cave, it loses eyesight really quickly in evolutionary terms because making and maintaining an eye is so metabolically expensive. So, while the mutations are random, any of them that can save the energy of developing vision get selected for very quickly. So, even though the mutations are random, it really looks like "cause-and-effect" from the outside: get isolated in cave->lose vision; get exposed to outside light again->regain vision. By the same token, changes that aren't very expensive metabolically will have very weak "cause-and-effect" because there is no particular pressure to carry the mutations forward or clean them up.