Mollusk Eyes Reveal How Future Evolution Depends on the Past

The visual systems of an obscure group of mollusks provide a rare natural example of path-dependent evolution, in which a critical fork in the creatures’ past determined their evolutionary futures.

Biologists have often wondered what would happen if they could rewind the tape of life’s history and let evolution play out all over again. Would lineages of organisms evolve in radically different ways if given that opportunity? Or would they tend to evolve the same kinds of eyes, wings and other adaptive traits because their previous evolutionary histories had already sent them down certain developmental pathways?

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64 sats \ 1 reply \ @south_korea_ln 6 Mar 2024

Reading Richard Dawkins many years back was a true eye opener on what the science actually says about the popular phrase of "survival of the fittest". It's counter to what people often intuitively believe, especially at the level of the time that is often needed to have a mutation to stick.

Interesting to see research is still going strong. 7 million years is a blink in terms of evolution :)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner OP 6 Mar 2024

I'm fascinated by everything related to evolution. It's incredible to think that it takes thousands of years of evolutionary processes to witness the emergence of distinct features and the multitude of possible paths that life can take. In humans, we can observe this in various aspects, such as the presence of hair and fur, or the structure of our teeth.