Evolution seems more like building a tree where mostly all you can do is ascend the tree and add finer detail, leaving the trunk and branches (our evolutionary history) in place. It seems unlikely that, say, vertebrates are in the future going to "undo" the major evolutionary developments of the past and lose their skeleton, body symmetry, number of limbs, lungs, alimentary canal, nervous system, brain, etc. We see things like these developing in the evolutionary tree and mostly staying in place once created. Sure some fins turned to limbs, some gills to ears, but once things like that happened they seem to stay in place.
I wonder what evolution would look like if we could see it sped up from the origin of life to billions of years into the future? A building up of complexity to begin with, but those major branches of the evolutionary tree remaining pretty stable it would seem. Continual ongoing change, but of smaller and smaller scope, perhaps - building on what came before.
Try looking at whale skeletons over time. What isn't beneficial gets undone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve#Evid...
Similarly, beneficial and complex traits, like eyes, can "regress" if nothing selects against that trait. Plenty of species have lost their sight, making them less generally fit for many environments, because in a certain place and time those species could reproduce even without perfect vision, or just as the result of genetic drift.
There's lots of processes that favor certain patterns over others, only considering the biochemistry of the cell, not even the fitness of the animal.
I didn't know this. I suspect this evolved because some amino acids are more useful than others, and increasing the probability of encoding for them was beneficial.
Basically, your sex drive is the main search optimization :p
Edit: This is essentially how genetic algorithms in computer science work. They’re often remarkably effective at finding good solutions without needing brute force.
