is there a possibility for evolution to happen in reverse- (retro-evolution)?

Answer 1

Yes, it is. It's still called evolution when it happens. Evolution is driven by present conditions. There's no intelligence in natural selection that anticipates different conditions in the future, so it's possible for life to adapt to the present but be terribly maladapted for the future.

Intelligence is what permits creatures such as us to track the trends in environmental changes, including those we are causing. When it has become reasonably certain that the future will require a different set of adaptations, but we persist in perpetuating what works now, we're evolving in a way that will cause us trouble later. That's "evolution in reverse."

An example is the rise in the frequency of people with poor vision, weak constitutions, heritable diseases (diabetes), and so on. Medical technology enables people who would not be fit to survive in a wilderness to live into adulthood and find mates. They have children, and these children inherit the defects and the need for technological compensations.

Now, suppose it were soon going to be impossible to provide technological compensations. Maybe fossil fuels will become so depleted that we can't supply redress for these people's inherited shortcomings. What happens then? The diabetics die from kidney failure. People who can't see an enemy or an accident coming fall prey to circumstances.

If defective genes have become typical in the population, there might be a large die-off. The die-off is nature's correction for the "reverse evolution" of earlier times. In fact, our whole species could become extinct. Evolution means that life will try to adapt: it does not guarantee success. It doesn't mean that every species gets to continue to inhabit the world.

Answer 2

Evolution is just the changes in the genes from generation to generation. The genes will change because one characteristic will be favorable to another. When one characteristic has an advantage that animal will reproduce.

The conditions in an environment will change and that could put a once harmful characteristic to an advantage and that will be passed on and the next generation will have evolved, back.

Retro-evolution does occur but it is just called evolution. There is evidence of this in cave dwelling creatures becasue they have lost their eyes. Many fishes and lizards that live in dark places have no eye balls at all. I guess this would be considered retro-evolution.

Answer 3

Yes, some aspects of evolutionary change can be
reversed. Insects evolved wings a long time ago,
but some of them have then lost them. Many
kinds of animals have increased in size, but others
in the same groups have then decreased.

It's not possible, however, for ALL characters of
an organism to reverse. No matter what happens
nothing exactly like any of the dinosaurs will ever
be produced again. There have been too many
changes in the DNA, millions of nucleotide changes would have to be reversed, and probably
in the correct order. (I am excluding birds from
the dinosaur group. Even if they are the descendants of dinosaurs, that doesn't mean they
ARE dinosaurs, despite what some references
say.)

Answer 4

Yep. It's apparent on this site!

Actually, evolution does not have a direction per say. It is just the body's adaptation to what is happening around it. Cancer is part of evolution, again, it's your body trying to evolve. Unfortunately, there is no cure for evolution, thus, no cure for cancer.

So, no, there is no such thing as de-evolution.

Answer 5

Well if we studied science to the extent where we were able to create a super powerfull nuclear bomb that was big enougth to destroy us all. If we used it to destroy the world that would be retro-evolution, because our vast knowledge would have caused a step back to no life at all.

Answer 6

Evolution doesn't go in any particular direction. It's completely random.

Answer 7

yes it happens all the time, for instance if you use an anti-biotic on an infection the bacteria will evolve to be resistant, if you stop using the anti-biotic for a long enough time it will be effective again because they would have evolved to not be resistant because they didn't need to be resistant for such a long time

Answer 8

I don't think that the other people are responding to what you've asked. I think that de-evolution may well be happening. I think that people were much smarter and stronger in the past than we are now. Bear with me while I give you an example.

There is a primitive device called an 'atlatl'. It is the predecessor of the bow and arrow and was used by primitive men to hurl spears long distances to hunt game, tens of thousands of years ago. There are still some people in different corners of the world that use them. (Not that they are so primitive, just that they are traditional and they still like to use them.)

There are also some modern atlatl users, who have recreated the devices, and compete with them throwing for distance and accuracy.

Now, when an atlatl is found in a museum showcase, it typically has two cards attached to it. The first one states that the purpose of the stone bound somewhere along the middle of the shaft is unknown, but it may have religious significance.

This is bunk. The modern atlatl users will explain that the stone is needed for dynamic balance, and that the spear travels much further with the stone than without it.

Similarly, the second card states that the purpose of the braided strands of grass attached to the tip is unknown, but it may be mere decoration.

Once more, this is bunk. Modern users of the atlatl will tell you that it is a silencer; it cuts down on the whistling noise as the spear is thrown so the game is not spooked.

So what? So the primitive men who developed the atlatl gradually developed these things with trial-and-error practice, right?

Wrong. The temptation is to assume that these things came about by means of an evolutionary process (don't worry-- I will get back to organic evolution, bear with me.)

There are a number of factors that argue against that. One if that people tend to be set in their ways. Especially primitive people, who tend to be hide-bound tradtionalists, do not accept changes easily, not unless it is spectacularly successful. Second, it is not possible to develop a hunting technique like this piecemeal, or in stages.

Someone who lives by hunting dies if the hunt goes poorly. If the game was spooked too many times, or if the spears fell short too often (same result, scaring the game away) the hunters drove all the game out of their area and starved.

They didn't have preserved foods to fall back on; they did not have vehicles to travel to a new hunting area quickly, they didn't have agriculture so that they could practice and fail and learn from mistakes. Mistakes drove the game away; the game could flee faster than the men could follow them.

They had to get it right the first time. (You may remember the old joke, 'vegetarian': an ancient word meaning 'inept hunter'. There may be more truth to that than we realize.)

So, how did they develop the atlatl, if not by an evolutionary process...? By intelligent design. (Do NOT be thrown off by the term! I'm not using it in the sense you thought, at first.)

I believe that primitive men were far more intelligent than we give them credit for being.

Analysis of the behavior of the atlatl and the dart thrown by means of it requires a FOURTH ORDER DIFFERENTIAL EQUATION to describe! They may not have solved it numerically, but I believe that the primitive men modeled the behavior of the atlatl in their minds and ran simulations hundreds of times, maybe thousands of times-- discovering the need for the balance-weight to gain extra distance in the cast, and the need for the silencer to keep from driving off the very game their lives depended upon-- before actually building a prototype and trying it out.

So, back to the original concept: can evolution happen in reverse...? I believe this is an example of it.

Why can't Johnny read...? Because, for centuries and millennia, we have been rewarding laziness, using artificial memory and calculation aids such as writing and the abacus, and now the computer. We have been dumbing our species down.

S/F writers have written of the 'genetic superman', the result of a sudden evolutionary jump (not the laughable stereotypes found in the X-movies, but someone able to get things done in a clear and sensible manner.) Why do we not see this happening...?

Because for the ages of ages, we have been relegating persons who could do this to freak shows and labelling them 'idiot savants', when all humanity may once have been able to add the numbers on passing freight cars, design sophisticated engineering devices in their heads, and build a mnemonic memory circuit out of flint knives and bearskins.

Yes, I think evolution can happen in reverse. I think it HAS been happening in reverse. It has been happening to us. We have been losing all that we have previously gained or been given. And we are the losers for it.

Does anybody doubt that social structures and communications and tool usage are more powerful than evolution...? All of them enable the race to take care of their weak and helpless better, allowing them to survive and breed long past the time when they would ordinarily have died.

The tribe, the family, the basic unit of the species. We are already in the midst of giving this up, by blurring the definition to the point where we will no longer have any definition. We may forget how sex works, and what it is intended to accomplish, next.

We are in the midst of redefining language, the first and original of all the communications systems and artificial memory aids. We are losing aboriginal tongues and the languages of restricted grounps, by introducing them to a global tongue.

(It is worth remembering that the multiplicity of languages occurred at a point in time in our history where it was realized that nothing would be too difficult for us.)

Leetspeak, slang, gang terms, criminals' argot, grafitti, the 'generation gap'-- these are all examples of the disintegration of communications.

As our communications become meaningless, our minds will become void.

As our tools become more and more sophisticated, we become more and more dependant on them. The classic S/F story "The Machine Stops" is a simple view of what would happen if we became dependent upon a single system for food, water, air, communications, transportation, and everything else.

We had a frightening threat of this in the Y2K problem. That we fixed it in time did not correct our own inner weakness, our vulnerabilty. That remains and can be exploited by any visiting barbarian.

Except, that, in our modern world, there IS no 'outside' and there are no 'barbarians . As the Soviet system had to die and rot out internally and wait until it could be toppled by an un-intelligent agent, by the witless effect of market forces, so our entire civilization may someday collapse because we have tried to make things 'easy' for ourselves.

We insulate ourselves from the germs outside and lose the immunities to diseases which our ancestors had. We sterilize our environment, and we wonder why we have increased incidence of allergies and auto-immune diseases. In trying to help ourselves, we are destroying ourselves, slowly enough so that we do not notice it. By the time we do acknowledge it, we may be too far down the path of genetic decrepitude to return.

And all we will be able to do is to debate the problem, like politicians, and fail to arrive at admitting our own responsibility to ourselves.

Yes, we are devolving. It is all fine and well to say that evolution has no preferred direction, but I would certainly prefer that my distant descendants remain human, instead of reverting to mindless beasts.

I am sorry, but I do not have a solution....

Answer 9

You can go any direction you want too. I want to evolve in all directions.