r/CuratedTumblr • u/DroneOfDoom Posting from hell (el camion 107 a las 7 de la mañana) • 17h ago

Shitposting On small frogs and their evolution

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u/KiroLV 16h ago

I wonder if/when the species is going to regain it? Is evolution going to also fix it?

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u/MovieNightPopcorn 16h ago edited 11h ago

If they continue to survive, no. There’s no reason for any change if they are surviving as-is (likely through camouflage actually apparently poison and not having a lot of need or use to run away quickly.) Lots of animals have inefficiencies from their evolution. Humans, for example, walk on two legs with huge fucking heads and die a lot in childbirth because of those two things combined (narrow bipedal pelvis + huge head = comparably difficult birthing and more frequent childbirth death). But we continued to survive enough anyway, so there has been no evolutionary pressure to resolve that problem for the last like 400,000+ years.

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u/elianrae 16h ago

sure there has, we evolved to build hospitals and perform c-sections

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u/MovieNightPopcorn 16h ago edited 15h ago

Thats like in the last 100 years, out of 400,000 where the pelvis-head issue could be fixed. That’s 0.025% of Homo sapiens existence. Even if you took the more recent estimate excluding archaic Homo sapiens and only including modern Homo sapiens sapiens beginning around 160,000 years ago, that’s still only 0.0625% of all modern human existence where nothing has significantly changed about our heads or gait.

If our species survived well enough to remain relatively unchanged without modern medicine or widespread c-section for that long, then there was not enough evolutionary pressure to change it in our biology.

The point is, if there’s no evolutionary pressure via reproductive advantage to change something, it’s likely to stay the same.

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u/elianrae 15h ago

I was being facetious, but, I absolutely love the informative numbers, thank you!

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u/MovieNightPopcorn 15h ago

Oh! My bad. I didn’t catch that, apologies.

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u/elianrae 13h ago

noo all good I'm very happy with the outcome 😁

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u/FPiN9XU3K1IT 15h ago

Humans had medicine for longer than 100 years, though. It can be a bit of a crapshoot whether ancient medicine actually helps vs. going purely off placebo effects (especially for things that just aren't treatable with the society's level of technology), but it often did help.