On Saturday, February 15, 2014 10:16:19 PM UTC, Brent wrote: > > On 2/15/2014 2:17 PM, Russell Standish wrote: > > On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 11:08:07AM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: > >> On 14 Feb 2014, at 20:47, meekerdb wrote: > >> > >>> On 2/14/2014 7:12 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: > >>> > >>> I find cuttlefish fascinating. They are social, relatively > >>> intelligent, can communicate, able to grasp and manipulate things. > >>> It seems like they were all set to become the dominant large life > >>> form (instead of humans). > >> A mystery: they don't live a long time. Usually "intelligence" go > >> with a rather long life, but cuttlefishes live one or two years. > > Yes - I find that surprising also. > > Which is not doubt related to having only one clutch of young. But I > wonder what is the > evolutionary and physiological reason for that? > > Brent > Evolution doesn't do reverse very effectively. The viability of the concept is fairly heavily tied in with forward gearing, in that what is there can be combined someway with what else is already there, layers built over the top, traits exchanging characters, and extending the potential for interoperability in the process. All which just for illustrative purposes. But that same more typical process, causes existing traits to become 'hangers' for subsequent or parallel traits. So traits become necessary not only for what they manifest, but as links in infrastructure that other traits depend on. So going backwards, as in eliminating traits, reeling back to an earlier state, is exponentially more complex and correspondingly exponentially less efficient, and less probable. An adaptive progression lead into new possibilities and continue to do so indefinitely. But it can go the other way. It can walk into a blind alley. And depending on the complexity of the adaptations that got it there, it could well stay there right through to extinction. It's a simplification because the complexity obviously increases for more embedded traits, whereas can be minimal for the extremities. The hand builds on what was already there in the flipper, and the flipper could feasibly likewise build on what was already there in the hand. The extremities might be translatable both ways...if both those ways sit along side. But is that a reverse or does it just look a bit like a reverse? But even that is immensely rare by comparison with the forward gear. Which one has to take note of, since there is no known directional bias in the conception of evolution. So why not major migrations from land to sea,. Reconquering the world where once long ago you had to run away. But it never happens. Dolphins and Whales have no analogue. They only returned to the sea in a strictly historical sense involving geologically separated epochs. They did not reverse much if at all,. They became a new idea, a mammal of the ocean. Might get a longer species life in exchange by way of consolation. But that dysfunctional family life, might not be reversible, and doesn't have to have a psychological or evolutionary advantage anywhere else than that dead end niche, which is barren, which drives concept desertification on the psychological side as the major source of selection forces, since anything more than barren is surplus to requirements and connects to nowhere. Poor Octupus. How long has she been stuck there. If evolution can't do it, perhaps we can do something for them, if we feel sure there's something of the special and the untapped. If you ever do consider it, perhaps spare a thought for me and my dysfunctional nature and try doing something for me. Bloody octopus lovers.
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