this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
1064 points (98.5% liked)

Science Memes

10988 readers
1860 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
1064
Evolution isn't linear. (mander.xyz)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
70 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Yup, the T. rex is just extinct, chickens are the closest thing genetically speaking (or one of the closest, I'm not sure).

Same reason why humans don't actually descend from monkeys, both monkeys and humans descend instead from a common ancestor that no longer exists. This is why, IMO, Digimon could be a better representation of evolution than Pokémon, since one Digimon can evolve into many different forms, so that kitten could become a fridge, but also a dragon or a knight with cannons, depending on the evolutionary line.

Then again, I doubt any of these were intended as a realistic portrayal of anything at all, least of all the theory of evolution.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

Chicken is equally close to T. Rex as all other birds. They all go back to the same common bird-ancestor who was a relative of T. Rex.

T. rex is more closely related to birds than to all non-theropod dinosaurs.

T. rex also lived closer to us in time than to Stegosaurus.

Same reason why humans don’t actually descend from monkeys, both monkeys and humans descend instead from a common ancestor that no longer exists

But that ancestor was a monkey! We are monkey, you can't evolve your way out of a clade.

This is why, IMO, Digimon could be a better representation of evolution than Pokémon, since one Digimon can evolve into many different forms, so that kitten could become a fridge, but also a dragon or a knight with cannons

But that is specifically not how evolution works. You can't evolve your way out of a clade, everything a cat would evolve into, would also be a cat. Maybe a weird cat, maybe a whale-cat (like whales are still ungulates, even if they are really weird ones) but still a cat. You can't evolve out of your ancestry.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

I mean, monkeys are an evolutionary group. Technically, we are monkeys, as well as being apes, hominids, mammals, humans, tetrapods, etc.