If my adaptation supersedes my predator's adaptation, does Evolution stop?

[Gottservant]

Hi there,

So yes, a very simple thought, today: if my adaptation supersedes my predator's adaptation, does Evolution stop?

The premise here is simply that survival of the fittest, is only possible while there is "selection pressure".

Evolutionists have tended to talk as if pressure is a given, but as I demonstrate with the scenario I give here: it is possible that Evolutionary pressure could become redundant.

Evolution being redundant, we may need to model how it is that a predator provokes himself to persist.

Alternatively, some sort of theory of the drive to get the best mate, may need to supplant the notion of one species acting predatorily in general.

 

[Job 33:6]

Well, I think you have answered your own question there. That selective pressures come in many forms, not just as a result of predation.

You mentioned finding a mate. Well beauty certainly produces selective pressures. Especially in birds that flaunt their colorful feathers.

Another example, climate change between warm global temperatures and ice ages transform environments, thereby manipulating natural selection in other ways, pushing life to change in ways in which they can survive in our ever changing planet. Whoolly mammoths for examples thrived during the last glacial period of the pleistocene. But they wouldn't be particularly successful in a warmer climate, such as in the mesozoic in which there were no ice caps.

Beyond this though, mutations do not simply stop occuring when pressure is lost. Organisms continue to change, it's just a matter of what direction they change in.

Genetic drift - Wikipedia

And species don't necessarily have to evolve in a particular direction. In the fossil record there is something called a "series of random walks" in which lineages are observed over time to morphologically change bigger and smaller, wider and shorter, and any which way without a specific direction.

https://www.researchgate.net/public...nd_stasis_in_the_evolution_of_fossil_lineages

So even if pressure goes away, life doesn't simply stop changing. It may slow down and it may go in unclear directions, but it doesn't necessarily stop.

 

[-57]

Well, I think you have answered your own question there. That selective pressures come in many forms, not just as a result of predation.

For example, climate change between warm global temperatures and ice ages transform environments, thereby manipulating natural selection in other ways.

Beyond this though, mutations do not simply stop occuring when pressure is lost. Organisms continue to change, it's just a matter of what direction they change in.

The problem is the need for the mutations to effect a particular trait being selected by the "pressure" over and over again until a new trait is realized.

The real problem is what the mutations will actually do to the genetic information contained in out DNA.

 

[The Barbarian]

Congratulations. You've discovered the Red Queen effect:

The Red Queen hypothesis (also referred to as Red Queen's, the Red Queen effect, Red Queen's race, Red Queen dynamics) is an evolutionary hypothesis which proposes that organisms must constantly adapt, evolve, and proliferate in order to survive while pitted against ever-evolving opposing organisms in a constantly changing environment, as well as to gain reproductive advantage.

The hypothesis intends to explain two different phenomena: the constant extinction rates as observed in the paleontological record caused by co-evolution between competing species,[1] and the advantage of sexual reproduction (as opposed to asexual reproduction) at the level of individuals.[2]
Red Queen hypothesis - Wikipedia

 

[The Barbarian]

The real problem is what the mutations will actually do to the genetic information contained in out DNA.

That's been observed. It tends to increase fitness in a population over time. Would you like to learn about some examples?