There are many amazing evidences of evolution. One example is the fossil record. The fossil record is a historical document that shows how life has changed over time. It includes a variety of evidence, such as fossils of different organisms, tracks and burrows, and even chemical residues. This record provides scientists with information about the history of life on Earth and how it has changed over time.
Despite these things being great and solid evidence for evolution, you can’t recreate them or experiment with them in a human lifetime, but there is a key mechanism of evolution and that is natural selection, but the evidence I am talking about is not natural because we are one that is doing that even before we understand the whole concept of evolution, but the mechanism is based on natural selection.
Selective Breeding
Selective breeding refers to the process of selecting individuals with desirable traits in order to produce offspring with those same traits. Farmers and breeders have used it for thousands of years to increase crop and animal productivity.
Selective breeding is now used to create plants and animals that are healthier, more disease resistant, and more productive. Dairy cows, for example, have been bred to produce more milk than their ancestors. Selective breeding can also be used to create new plant or animal species that are not found in nature.
The navel orange is a well-known example of a plant that was created through selective breeding. This orange has a small “navel” at the base where the fruit was originally attached to the tree. The navel orange was developed in Brazil in the 1800s by crossing two types of Chinese oranges.
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Selective breeding frequently makes use of artificial selection, which is the intentional breeding of plants or animals for desired traits. This is separate from natural selection, which occurs when organisms that are better suited to their environment survive and reproduce at a higher rate than those that are not.
While artificial selection can be used to produce desired results more quickly than natural selection, because in natural selection, you have to survive and reproduce to get your traits into the evolutionary chain, natural selection takes longer to produce changes than artificial selection, and in selective breeding, we manually choose animals whose traits we want in their offspring, so we breed them to get the changes we want in animals that basically cut the time of surviving and finding a mate to reproduce, resulting in faster changes than natural selection.
Selective breeding works because of evolution, so it is great evidence of evolution. It is very comparable to gravity. Things fall down because of gravity, and similarly, selective breeding works because of evolution.
Despite this amazing evidence of evolution, selective breeding is an important tool that farmers and breeders use to improve the quality of their crops and animals.
Fossils
Another great piece of evidence for evolution is fossils. Fossils reveal the characteristics of animals and plants in the past. They also demonstrate how various species are connected to one another. Horses and rhinos, for example, have a shared ancestry, according to the fossil record. This is due to the fact that their bones and teeth are quite similar.
DNA
Another great piece of evidence for evolution is DNA. DNA is the molecule that holds all living creatures’ genetic instructions. All animals and plants have DNA, and it is extremely similar between species. Human DNA, for example, is 98% similar to chimp DNA. This resemblance indicates that humans and chimps have a common ancestry.
Convergent and divergent evolution both play important roles in how related animals develop differing features or skeletal structure.
The process through which two or more unrelated organisms evolve identical features is known as convergent evolution. This occurs when the species share identical surroundings and challenges. Sharks and dolphins, for example, are both aquatic animals. They have acquired streamlined bodies as well as swimming fins.
Divergent evolution is the process by which two or more related species evolve divergent features. This occurs when the species live in different environments and confront different challenges. Humans and chimps are both primates. Humans have acquired upright posture and opposable thumbs for walking and tool use. Chimpanzees have acquired long arms and muscular hands for climbing trees.
Embryology
One of the most incredible pieces of evidence for evolution comes from embryology. Embryo research demonstrates that all animals have a common ancestor. This is because all animals go through comparable developmental stages in the womb. Human embryos, for example, start out looking like small fish with gills and tail fins. They eventually get legs and arms and abandon their gills and tail fins. This embryonic resemblance is significant proof that humans, fish, and other creatures share a common ancestry.
Simulation
Many simulations have been developed to simulate system-like evolution in which random changes and positive selection of those random changes occur and are observed.
The simulator, which will be presented at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, only works in two dimensions for simplicity. The team has created 30 unique tasks, such as walking, jumping over obstacles, dragging or pulling goods, and crawling beneath barriers, and researchers can even create their own challenges.
The environment enables design algorithms to create robots by connecting squares that can be soft, rigid, or effectors muscles that allow the rest of the robot to move. An AI system then learns how to operate this body and provides input to the design algorithm on how well it performed in various tasks.
By repeating this process many times the two algorithms can reach the best possible combination of body layout and control system to solve the challenge.
And if you’re wondering how this is a simulation of evolution, let me explain. In nature, we animals are given tasks to survive and reproduce, and when random mutations occur in us, only those mutations that help us survive and reproduce are kept.
However, in this simulation, the task given to these ai is not just to survive and reproduce, but also to walk, jump over obstacles, carry or pull objects, crawl through barriers, and perform other tasks, and ai algorithms assemble these diverse squares to achieve their given tasks.
And here’s another simulation Stanford scientists were interested in the physical-mental interaction that occurred during our evolution from blobs to tool-using apes. Could the brain be influenced by the body’s capacities and vice versa? It’s been mentioned before — over a century ago, in fact — and it’s undeniable that a grabbing hand learns to operate items more quickly than a less specialized limb.
“In essence, we discover that evolution rapidly selects forms that learn faster, allowing behaviours learnt late in the lives of early ancestors to be exhibited early in the lives of their offspring,” the scientists wrote in their research, which was published in the journal Nature.
They didn’t only learn to learn faster; the evolutionary process picked body types that would allow them to adapt and apply lessons faster. An octopus flop might bring you to the finish line just as fast on flat ground, but slopes and ridges required a body arrangement that was fast, sturdy, and adjustable. Introducing such body into the fighting ring gave those unimals from the school of hard knocks an advantage over the competitors. Their adaptable bodies were better able to apply the lessons their minds were teaching — and they quickly left their less adaptable competitors in the dust.
What does all of this mean, except than producing a few fun 3D stick figures galloping through virtual terrain? According to the paper, the experiment “lays the groundwork for large-scale in silico experiments to yield scientific insights into how learning and evolution collaborate to create sophisticated relationships between environmental complexity, morphological intelligence, and the comprehensibility of control tasks.”
Ending Notes
While researching this topic, I discovered that many people try to find how one topic is not evidence for evolution, but those people frequently misunderstood how science works, science looks for evidence and evidence is not served on a plate to us rather we have to find it, and most things in the scientific community that question evolution often end up making evolution a better and more accurate, science will abandon any idea or theory as soon as there are better theories with more evidence.
