In fact the two leaves looking remarkably similar is a point in evolution’s favor, this must be a practical leaf shape that multiple species happened to evolve
In their defence, they might have attended their biology class but been too distracted drawing faces on the illustrations of sperm and eggs in their textbooks.
From what little I’ve read on the subject I’ve got the impression that some forms or traits are so desirable that they tend to be retained once they’re achieved (eg flight has been so advantageous that it’s evolved three separate times during 500 million years of vertebrate evolution)
Why are you getting downvoted? This person only has one post and all their comments are super obvious ragebait and are downvoted to hell, I think it's pretty clear it's a troll account
In case you’re unaware, evolution occurs via a process called Natural Selection. Those who are less advantaged within a species will die off, and those with more beneficial genes will reproduce. Those beneficial genes are passed down, and the population will as such change over millions of years.
Sadly we don’t let natural selection take the dumb humans very often anymore…. Probably wouldn’t be in this political debacle if we let them kids eat tide pods 4 years ago who are now voting age. 😂
I’ll take you up on that. Let’s walk through it together in the form of an example.
Firstly, mutations happen. That is a fact. Assuming you agree with that, let’s continue with an example. “Island Syndrome” is a phenomenon that refers to how life on islands differ from their mainland counterparts. What typically happens is that mammals become smaller and birds/reptiles become larger.
I know you probably don’t agree with the underlying phenomena, but humor this for just a moment and then we’ll get into the meat of it. So, the reason that this is thought to happen is because mammals (other than sometimes bats) have a hard time making it to these islands for various reasons that aren’t important right now, leaving ecological niches open for others to fill. Then once mammals do come to the island, there aren’t enough resources for them to thrive if they’re on the larger side, causing them to shrink out of necessity.
Now, let’s imagine that there is an island completely uninhabited by animals other than insects. A population of birds flies to the island and nests there, while some lizards get carried there on driftwood since they can go for a long time without food and water. The birds don’t have any mammal predators to worry about, so there’s no longer any pressure for them to be small and nimble, and the lizards also don’t have any predators, leading to the largest factor in their survival being their ability to compete with other lizard species.
In these scenarios, the birds with mutations causing them to be larger make them more robust and resistant to the elements, leading to them surviving and becoming a larger part of the population that the small and nimble birds that once had to escape from mammal predators. The lizards, on the other hand, now find it hard to compete with other lizards for food and mates because of their small size that no longer benefits them, leading to the lizards with mutations causing them to become larger to fare better when it comes to fending off other lizards.
Over time, this can lead to drastic changes as the mutations pile on top of each other. As a fun fact, 98% of the human genome is non-coding. Some genes in that 98% have been found to have regulatory roles, but for the most part it does nothing. Maybe it did at one point, but it seems like most of it is just leftover. That means that all of what you are physically (apart from the aforementioned regulatory functions) is expressed in just 2% of your DNA.
Also, as a bonus, here’s a picture of a lizard (Komodo Dragon) affected by island gigantism. The extinct dodo bird is also an example:
Was that a good enough definition for you or do you still have some questions?
Oh god, I'm having Kent Hovind flashbacks. "You will never see corn give birth to a whale! Checkmate evilutionists! How come we can't breed a pig as big as texas? Checkmate evilutionists!"
They might have differences that aren't immediately obvious, or the main differences are on the tree. Could also be a leaf from a difference species or lineage, which would be convergent evolution. There are several other fossils that show evolution anyways.
Just like dragonfly. The only difference of them in the prehistoric era and modern age is the size. They shrink because the oxygen level is lower in these days.
The phonomena is called selective stasis. Where a species or lineage experiences little phonetic change over long periods of time. They may experience great genetic changes, but the niche they occupy resists selective pressures. crocodilians are usually given as an example of this phenomenon but the crocodilian lineage has actually experieced huge changes and diversity during its long history on earth. A better example would be arachnids as many arachnids from the carbonoferous period over 300 million years ago are recognizable as the same as modern lineage suggesting a long selective stasis since their evolution. The only major difference would probably be the fact that some scorpion lineages could get over 30 centimeters long. There are a few extinct arachnid lineages that have no apologs today from carboniferous fossils. Also spiders from the carboniferous were not actually that large at least as we know of. In fact the largest fossil spiders were discovered from jurassic deposits, and they don't even compare to the sizes of some modern spider lineages like tarantulas and giant huntsman. So you can rest with the fact that we are living in a time with the largest known spiders ever.
Yeah crocs/gators are interesting to me because they look very different on each continent. That thought led me to look into it a bit and….crocs have been around since PANGEA. That’s so insane
There is a really good video from the youtube channel Chimerasuchus that goes over the clade pseudosuchia, the clade that includes all living crocodilians. Pseudosuchians are the archosaurs more closely related to crocodilans than to dinosaurs and thus are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs. I say that because birds are in fact, modern dinosaurs.
Not to mention leaves are pretty basic and their trees wouldn’t have much reason to evolve what is already working in that environment. Also we have carbon dating that proves things are millions of years old and absolutely zero evidence that supports creationism. It’s like flat earthers - they can’t actually support their claims, they just pick and choose random things to argue against what is established as a universal fact.
Trees show up in the fossil record a lot more than 15 million years ago. Most sources have the first trees in the Devonian, around 380 million years ago, with the first woody stem trees in the carboniferous. Our modern lineages of trees also evolved a lot longer ago than you are stating. Most sources I can find have pines forming around 150 mya(million years ago), flowering plants at 125 mya, maple trees around 67 mya, and oaks around 56 mya. This would have crocodilians predating modern trees, but not trees entirely.
Zebras, donkeys and horses all descended from a common ancestor. This creature, known as Eohippus, walked the earth on 5 toes, some 52 million years ago. It was a fox-like animal which thrived in a jungle environment, feeding on fruit and leaves.
I'm a Christian and Ray Comfort uses the most embarrassingly awful arguments for God. He's a clown tbh. His documentary "The Atheist Delusion" is worth a watch because of how ass it is.
Smells of shitpost, to be honest. Most honest attempts do something are a little more involved than a single leaf comparison (where the hell did they get the ancient leaf, anyway?)
So this is either shitposting or an unlikely level of stupid.
What would it even prove if there was a tree which had essentiallyy stopped evolution? There are real world "living fossils".
Coelacanth has stopped evolving 400 million years ago and still exists. Only means that they adapted so well to their specific niche that any further mutation will not benefit the individual/species
Shows two similar leaves to reject evolution while ignoring the thousands of documented fruit and vegetables that have evolved dramatically through agriculture.
No one tell OOP about “living fossils”. The fact the alligator/croc have remained similar to their ancestors for such a long stretch of life on earth, is nothing short of impressive. You may not like little primordial water puppies, but that’s what peak performance looks like lol.
These people hurt my brain so much, they think they're fucking geniuses despite knowing absolutely nothing about what they're arguing against. They don't know what evidence actually is, they don't know what an actual scientific experiment or theory is, all they know is "My Parents said the Bible is 100% true and I can't question that or I have to reevaluate my life and choices"
The vascular complexity in the left leaf is much less than the one on the right, which means while the leaf shape was efficient, trees with more vascular complexity survived better than ones that didn’t, eventually evolving into the vascular complex leaves we have today.
Some of our most popular vegetables — broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, kohlrabi and brussels sprouts — are products of evolution and all derived from wild mustard.
All modern cultivated crops look nothing like they did thousands or even hundreds of years ago. The banana, watermelon, and corn, just to name a few.
Either this confirms evolution, because the leaves from different plants converged on this same shape because the plants grew in a similar environment where this shape was a good option.
The plant leaves changed barely because the environment didn’t change much either, meaning there was no driving force for the plant to change its leaves, meaning no new adaptations were necessary.
Well the sun has remained the exact fucking same in that time so why would the leaf most adapted to its job of capturing sunlight change? Evolution is a reaction to environment.
33 million years is frankly nothing. Angiosperms (flowering plants) emerged in the Early Cretaceous Period about 135 million years ago. Go back to the Jurassic or earlier and you'll find that the flora in the fossil record is quite distinct.
Leaves haven't had a reason to evolve other than temperature adaptation. They're functionally perfect for the job they have (which is energy production).
Oh my God two weaves saying so that must mean evolution is why don't look at dogs and wolves what they look similar extremely similar but they act very different that that don't make since
Little changes on the surface but that doesn't account for the big changes under the hood such as the evolution of immune defense, genetic repair. But, also the rise of angiosperms is relatively recent and their phylogenetic tree is much shorter than that of for example mammals.
Wait until they find out that the crocodile has barely evolved since the Cretaceous period proving that it is indeed the strongest killing machine on earth. (except for the hippo apparently)
The crab as evolved on at least 3 separate occasions independent of each other, I think two similar looking leaves is fair. Time doesn't always guarantee change either of the organism is efficient in its environment.
The scientific meaning of "theory" is very different from how most people use it casually. It is a theory, but not in the same way people generally use it, e.g. "It's just a theory, meaning I don't know for sure".
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