When humanity found out how long horseshoes crabs had been around, unchanging and perfect, they decided to name their divine human leaders after them.
That is why royalty are called 'blue-bloods'.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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I was taught it was because nobility were the only pale Spaniards in the middle ages, so they were the only people whose skin showed through the blue color of the veins. So they claimed their blue blood showed their divine right to royalty.
whose skin showed through the blue color of the veins
Would this not be the other way around? Blue veins show through the skin?
Yeah, I wrote that poorly.
You • may • not • like • it • but • this • is • what • peak • performance • looks • like 🦀
So like I know horseshoe crabs have been around nearly unchanged and all. And good for them!
But are you (general you, not op specifically) really trying to tell me that not once in their entire historical span of time on earth.. not one single time did anything evolve from a horseshoe crab?
Clearly I’m not saying the whole species changed, but that is separate from an offshoot population evolving into something different. Which surely must have happened, no?
one single time did anything evolve from a horseshoe crab?
We don't talk about those cowards.
Weirdly enough, evolution isn't random - it follows rules. We're still figuring out what those rules are, but it does in fact reach a certain point, then lock down the genes.
Horseshoe crabs are chemically incredible, they're extremely resilient and physically pretty good for their niche
Maybe they are a genetic endpoint
Do you have any citations for that?
I’m not saying you are wrong, because I’m open to new information, but that’s not ever been my understanding of how evolution works, and I’ve read a ton on the topic.
Evolution continues even if a species doesn’t obviously change over time. Unless it’s an asexual reproducing species, gene recombination ensures some level of diversity, and more opportunity for novel traits. But even a clonally reproducing species have a chance for mutations, they are just significantly more likely to be detrimental than useful.
You're in for a treat. The basic situation is that physiologists are watching it in real-time, neo-Darwinists have a hard time accepting it because "it's not necessary for evolution to work", physiologists then wish they could batter the neo-Darwinists with their microscopes until they relent.
Noble is going over more but as a programmer, the information theoretical argument is close to my heart: DNA transcription, if left completely to its own devices, has a quite high error rate. Correction mechanisms (which evolved completely randomly at some time) then take that error down to practically nothing, and after that randomness is again introduced. Which means that evolution (or, well, how many a genome evolves) is not a random process, but a process employing randomness, enabling it to strategically choose where to mutate. The genome of a bird, for example, if it senses that the current phenotype can't get at nectar, is well-advised to mess around with beak shape genes instead of mitochondrial DNA, and this "different environmental stressors cause different genetic transmission" is indeed what physiologists are observing and I don't just mean epigenetics. It's not that the same result couldn't be achieved by pure, blind, randomness, it's that a genome able to employ strategic randomness is more fit, can adapt faster and more successfully. And as it's a metasystem transition it gets locked in, there's no backsies because any deviation from that kind of achievement is always less fit than one that retains the capacity, same as you don't see DNA-using life suddenly ditching it, being content with only RNA.
Wait, so it's stops before 'the heat death of the universe'? That's bizarre!
Two things: first, horseshoe crabs almost certainly have changed/evolved considerably over four hundred million years, just in aspects of their physiology that aren't fossilized. Second, horseshoe crabs have like nine different types of eyes; even that tail is essentially one big eye, covered in photoreceptive cells. We humans consider ourselves the "dominant" species, but I don't think we could handle crawling around in slime and mud for four hundred million years quite as well as they have.
Nah we drain the mud and build a road on it to run over our children. Much better.
Why aren't these things considered Trilobites exactly? They look like Trilobites and I'm pretty sure they fill some of the same general niches? Is it just a taxonomical thing? Are they just not in the right clade?
This reads like it was written by an LLM
If it quacks like a LLM ...
Not in the right clade, basically.
They look similar, but aren't directly related. It's similar to why legless lizards aren't snakes, and bats aren't birds.
But snakes are legless lizards. Link to youtube
Edit: Wrong link, I'll leave the previous one anyways because it's also fun https://youtu.be/_5jNZyoSszE
Fair. I should have said that many legless lizards aren't snakes.
Even the speech bubbles look like them
Aren't these the guys who drink blueberry smoothies?
Yeah then they go down the waterslide
Obligatory individuals don't evolve, populations do.
I know it's just a silly meme but misconceptions about evolution unfortunately seem to be pretty widespread.
Who knew horseshoe crabs were the Pikachu's of the sea?
Perfection is the end of evolution, it's a far predecessor of spiders and scorpions