On 12/7/2025 6:13 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Sat, Dec 6, 2025 at 7:34 PM Alan Grayson <[email protected]>
wrote:
/> Lately, I've watching videos about the animal kingdom, and I am
beginning to question Darwin's claim of evolution by natural
selection. I wonder; how does this explain the appearance of
defensive horns on some animals, like the Rhinoceros, and not on
others, such as the Zebra? //Does Natural Selection mean that
random changes in an animal's body, such as a very small horn on a
Rhonoceros initially, gives it some minor competitive advantage,
and that horn grows bigger over time, again randomly, until it
gets large as we see today?/
*If a rhinohas a gene for producing a slightly larger horn and that
gives it a small competitive advantage, either by becoming a better
fighter or because female rhinos think big horns are sexy (sexual
selection is the reason male peacocks have such ridiculously large
tail feathers) then that gene is more likely to enter the next
generation. The reason the horn on a rhino is not even larger is
because Evolution doesn't have infinite resources at its disposal, so
if you do more of one thing then you must do less of some other thing,
and that other thing may have more survival value that a larger horn.*
/> And yet on other specie of plant eaters, like Zebra, no such
process occurred? /
*Natural Selectioncan only select from among the genes that are available*
That's a little misleading since /the genes that are available/ include
new random mutations.
*, apparently in horse-like animals such as zebras random mutation
never produced a proto horn gene, and that's why Evolution never
produced a unicorn, although if random chance had been slightly
different it would have. *
Ironically, nature did produce a unicorn. It's the rhinoceros, which
Pliny the Elder described in his book "Natural History" which latter fed
into legends of a unicorn.
*However the ancestors of zebras did have a gene, produced by random
mutation, that no rino had, that caused a slight variation in the
color of its fur, and that gave a zebra a slight advantage because it
turns out thatdisease carrying tsetse flies and horseflies have
trouble landing on striped surfacesbecause the stripes interferes with
the fliesvisual systemscausing them to abort landingon them.*
*If you're really interested in this sort of thing you should read (or
listen to on Audible) Richard Dawkinswonderful book "The Selfish
Gene", it's one of the 3 or 4 best books I've ever read in my life,
and I read a lot. *
I second that recommendation.
Brent
*
*
*John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
<https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>*
*
*
ax9
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