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What's to say that species will adapt all the time? It could be that terns won't be able to adapt fast enough, and will die. There's die-offs of individual sp

What's to say that species will adapt all the time? It could be that terns won't be able to adapt fast enough, and will die. There's die-offs of individual species all the time, and historically there's been several major multi-species die-offs when conditions have changed too rapidly. Mutations don't have to occur at the point of their necessity. Mutations that survive can be survivorship-neutral (or nearly so), but suddenly become useful many years later during condition changes, and thus become dominant. Take eye colour. As far as I'm aware, aside from random sexual preference, there's no real survivorship benefit to have a particular colour eyes. So we have populations with various different colour eyes. If aliens who hate people who don't have blue eyes show up and kill everyone without blue eyes, that mutation suddenly becomes selective. The mutations that help species survive changes in conditions are usually already there when the change shows up.

inkaudio 13y ago
Don't underestimate natural selection. Animals need essential traits to survive at birth. Now consider that most animals are specialized to their environment, how did they get to that point ? What did an Eagle do before it eyes became specialized for air to ground hunting ? How did it survive before it can fly ? How did these animals survive is these environment during their evolution ? That's the paradox, natural selection works too well for evolution by gradual mutation to work.
- AlisdairO 13y ago
  You're can't rewind an animal x million years and place it in the same environment. You have to rewind the rest of the ecosystem as well. One possibility, for example, is that when eagle's eyes were less specialised for air to ground hunting, rodents were less specialised to hide themselves from airborne predators - because they hadn't had selection pressures from such specialised birds of prey.

inkaudio 13y ago

Don't underestimate natural selection. Animals need essential traits to survive at birth. Now consider that most animals are specialized to their environment, how did they get to that point ? What did an Eagle do before it eyes became specialized for air to ground hunting ? How did it survive before it can fly ? How did these animals survive is these environment during their evolution ? That's the paradox, natural selection works too well for evolution by gradual mutation to work.

AlisdairO 13y ago
You're can't rewind an animal x million years and place it in the same environment. You have to rewind the rest of the ecosystem as well. One possibility, for example, is that when eagle's eyes were less specialised for air to ground hunting, rodents were less specialised to hide themselves from airborne predators - because they hadn't had selection pressures from such specialised birds of prey.