Yeah definitely. Though if you look at say, things evolved to take advantage of the habitats trees provide, then, yes those only occur if trees occur, but trees themselves are just the shape you get when you try to take up as much room as possible with as little material as possible, so you'd expect photosynthetic life to arrive at that form more often than not. So you often end up with a chain of prerequisites that are also convergent. Of course the further along that chain you go the rarer the form will be - alien squirrels must be less common than alien trees.
I'd also like to point out that prehensile noses have evolved more times than hands, so adjust your expectations for sentient life accordingly.
things evolved to take advantage of the habitats trees provide, then, yes those only occur if trees occur, ...
This specific sentence is a very common, very wrong description of how evolution works and can lead to all kind of misconceptions.
Life does not evolve to take advantage of things that exist, in ways it would not have evolved if these things did not exist. Life evolves randomly. Because of things that exist (including other living evolving stuff), some of these random evolutions will significantly increase chances of survival of those who have it. If you survive, you can reproduce, augmenting the chances that there will be mutants like you for another generation.
« Useless », non particularly advantageous (nor disadvantageous) mutations occur all the time. Sometimes they disappear. But sometimes they survive. Life does not care.
So we see a lot of mutations that take advantage of trees. It’s not because there was tree that they appeared. It’s because trees can provide a habitat and having a habitat increases your chances of survival by a fucking lot that things taking advantage of it disproportionately remain.
Oh yeah I was not assuming that you did not understand that. I just felt compelled to make the precision because this kind of « semantic shortcut » (in French we call them « abus de langage », literally language abuse) always bothered me. Again it can lead to misconceptions so I wanted to make sure.
Fuck, 4 Americans in 10 believe humans were created by God ~10’000 years ago.
Yeah, I'm familiar with the mistake you're talking about. But I'd wait until someone makes a faulty conclusion based on that mistake before correcting them, rather than judging by whether they jumped through the right semantic hoops.
If someone has the wrong understanding, they'll make a mistake eventually.
"Every planet we go to produces something that looks exactly like a mouse. But they only look like mice. I mean exactly like mice. But one, we opened it up? I twas made of thousands of fuzzy worms that extcreated calcium to make a mouse-shaped skeleton so they could run around. But when we put it in a cage with another mouse they were like "Hey, another mouse, lets be buddies."" Fucking evolution, man."
See also Wikipedia's inadvertent list of animals we're likely to find on other planets.
I imagine that depends on the planet's terrain and other life promoting certain adaptations. That's still a cool observation.
Yeah definitely. Though if you look at say, things evolved to take advantage of the habitats trees provide, then, yes those only occur if trees occur, but trees themselves are just the shape you get when you try to take up as much room as possible with as little material as possible, so you'd expect photosynthetic life to arrive at that form more often than not. So you often end up with a chain of prerequisites that are also convergent. Of course the further along that chain you go the rarer the form will be - alien squirrels must be less common than alien trees.
I'd also like to point out that prehensile noses have evolved more times than hands, so adjust your expectations for sentient life accordingly.
This specific sentence is a very common, very wrong description of how evolution works and can lead to all kind of misconceptions.
Life does not evolve to take advantage of things that exist, in ways it would not have evolved if these things did not exist. Life evolves randomly. Because of things that exist (including other living evolving stuff), some of these random evolutions will significantly increase chances of survival of those who have it. If you survive, you can reproduce, augmenting the chances that there will be mutants like you for another generation.
« Useless », non particularly advantageous (nor disadvantageous) mutations occur all the time. Sometimes they disappear. But sometimes they survive. Life does not care.
So we see a lot of mutations that take advantage of trees. It’s not because there was tree that they appeared. It’s because trees can provide a habitat and having a habitat increases your chances of survival by a fucking lot that things taking advantage of it disproportionately remain.
People generally use "evolve" to mean "randomly mutate and then thrive because they're selected for" not to mean "randomly mutate."
Oh yeah I was not assuming that you did not understand that. I just felt compelled to make the precision because this kind of « semantic shortcut » (in French we call them « abus de langage », literally language abuse) always bothered me. Again it can lead to misconceptions so I wanted to make sure.
Fuck, 4 Americans in 10 believe humans were created by God ~10’000 years ago.
Yeah, I'm familiar with the mistake you're talking about. But I'd wait until someone makes a faulty conclusion based on that mistake before correcting them, rather than judging by whether they jumped through the right semantic hoops.
If someone has the wrong understanding, they'll make a mistake eventually.
Evolution is like water flowing down hill towards the sea. Water doesn't think or plan, but it always flows towards the sea.
And the sea is crabs.
"Every planet we go to produces something that looks exactly like a mouse. But they only look like mice. I mean exactly like mice. But one, we opened it up? I twas made of thousands of fuzzy worms that extcreated calcium to make a mouse-shaped skeleton so they could run around. But when we put it in a cage with another mouse they were like "Hey, another mouse, lets be buddies."" Fucking evolution, man."