evolution question (asked before with additional comments)?

Question

Animal X lives in a forest with very tall trees. While he can survive the best fruit grows at the top of the tree. Over time his descendants have long necks well evolve long necks. I can accept its not chance the long necked ones survive and take over short necked. But the fact the neck grew in the first place has to be chance unless the animal genome is intelligent and can pass down to the next one has to have a longer neck.
Mutated genes fair enough but is the mutation not down to chance. If there was a long necked mutation surely there could have been other mutations what a stroke of luck to evole the correct mutation where in fossil record are mutations that went wrong in my example we start off with only short necked animals long necked ones come along later. Lets say it takes millions of years for the long necked version to be perfected if the mutation is chance would there not be evidence of the mutations that went wrong

I accept it takes many years for the evolution to occur what I want to know is if the mutation itself is not pure chance does this mean the genetic code is aware of its surrondings and can adapt itself to pass on the correct adaptations to offspring

Answer 1

It is scientific fact that animals evolve to match their surroundings. They have to be adaptable if a species is to survive. Yes, technically there should be some record of strange mutations, as there is in living memory such as the platypus that defies mammals by laying eggs. There is much more to be discovered from fossils and the earth and I am sure in ages to come things will be found.

Answer 2

The mutations are mistakes in the DNA molecule that are absolutely random. The selection process happens after the DNA molecule mutates. The life may never get started if it is a severe blow to the molecule or it may allow the life form to develop awhile even to adulthood. If the plant or animal cannot have children from this problem or not enough children, that will lead to extinction and not many dead bodies (fossils) with that problem.
Let us say that animal Y had a short neck on and it is a tortoise on an island where no food was available to it because on the short neck. It would starve to death and there may be a fossil of it or maybe the body wasn't preserved. Either way, we will not be lucky enough to find evidence of the short necked tortoise.
When you think about it, animal X with a long neck may number millions of animals over time, but we will be lucky to find a couple of fossils of that species. I think less than 20 T Rex fossils have ever been found and it was a success for millions of years.
Now with human intervention we have the tools to add genes and alter them to produce mutations that aren't random, but this is not how species have evolved up to this century. There are mice with human genes for instance, but they are man-made.
Dogs have developed random mutations that we would kill or breed over time to give us bulldogs for instance. Probably for each puppy with a short nose that appeared, there was a puppy with a long nose that appeared, but we kept the short nose dog and killed the long nosed dog. We didn't change the DNA to get the bulldog, the DNA mutated totally randomly and after the puppies were born, humans then selected for what they wanted and that was not a random act. We kept the DNA we liked and threw away the DNA we didn't like. The human selection is not random and natural selection is not random, but the mutation event is random.

Answer 3

The mutation is pure chance. Some mutations are good some are bad- mutated animals are born with 2 heads, 6 legs, etc, and there is no advantage to it so they die out. You are correct- in the fossil record, you rarely see the unadvantageous mutations because maybe only 50 or so had it, and we only see 1 fossil out of each million or so animals that died.

Because that individual can reach higher than others, he can get more food. More food= healthier= more offspring. He breeds, some offspring have shorter necks, some longer ones. The longer ones can get more food and the cycle goes on. Sometimes the longer necked ones will completely take over and the shorter necked ones will die off, other times they will eventually break into new species.

Answer 4

Evolution is very much understood especially by people who ask these kind of questions.

The rate of adjustment is controlled by the pressure that the environment places on the species and the length of the species life cycle. Human, who have long life cycles and little environmental pressure evolve very slowly while fruit flys with very short life cycles and can have high environmental pressure evolve rapidly.

Very few creatures end up as fossils, say one in a billion, so it is quite likely that you would miss an intervening stage.

DNA carries a lot of functions that are set to off. It therefore takes only one maybe two mutations to cause, for example a long neck because all you have to do is switch the genes to on - you don't need to develop the long neck gene as one of you ancestors has already done it. If the species could not evolve with a long neck another species would move in anyway and out compete them. So we have evolution and adoption (there is also adaptation)

Answer 5

Try a simple case. Human body hair. The earth could have been much warmer when man evolved or man may have only evolved in warm areas(Africa?). So our hairy ape ancestor gradually loses hair. Why? Because the human does not like the various temperatures so wears animal skins. The longer the species wears animal skins the more survival selects for less hair. (The concept here is an useless feature will be selected against because it take more energy to grow a useless thing.) Now this will take a very long time but look around, Some men still have considerable amount of hair on their chest and back, but a lot have very little. The genes responsible for hair growth are still there to some extent but are seldom expressed.

Answer 6

As you know evolution is caused by mutations which as you should know means an addition or a deletion in the organism's genes then if the new characteristic(s) are a success for the organism to survive it's environment then the they will thrive and reproduce thus spreading the new genes to it's offspring so say if a population of Humans lived in a very aquatic environment then eventually due to evolution the Humans might lets just say grow webbed fingers and toes, hold there breath for longer periods of time or might have gills as well as lungs and rely on purely animals and plants as a food source from the water bodies they would live in or around them (making them amphibious)

Answer 7

Emus aren't mentioned in the Bible either. I guess they don't exist. Well now, how about a real answer to your question? You are assuming that the transformation from a short neck to a long one all happens in well fell swoop. Not so. There are natural variation in any population. As such, some of the animals will simply have longer necks than others. These will have a slight advantage in gaining food. This slight nutritional advantage translates into a slightly higher number of offspring as they subject is better able to compete for mates. The offspring will have a propensity to have the same longer-nack virtue of the parent. After uncountable generations of just a very slight advantage, the entire species will be dominated by those with a propensity for longer necks.

Answer 8

It is indeed generally random mutations that push an animal toward growing a longer neck in your example. There are other possible routes such as atavisms which is the reacquisition of previous traits, but generally it is accomplished through random mutations. If it is extremely advantageous to gain a longer neck, it will tend to be favored rather quickly. If it is marginally beneficial, then the adaptations will be acquired over a longer period of time.

Answer 9

Adaptation evolution which involves random mutation resulting in the production of long neck animal X. The mutation probably occured by the by the sudden change in genes by the conditions of environment that lead to long neck Animal X (Adaption to the environment). Maybe there are errors in mutation that does not result in change of phenotypic chracteristics, but causes genotype changes like base substituiton in DNA sequence causing certain amino acid of Animal X not to be coded, or the result in polyploidy alleles in the genomes due to irregular division by mutation creating reproduced orgnanisms that lacks certain part of sequence . I'm not sure because i have not got alot of knowledge of this. Fossil records does not varify the genotypic sequence as not all mutation cause change in physical characteristics x

Answer 10

There is little evidence of the mutations that 'went wrong' because of precisely that. They didn't survive long enough to reproduce enough to leave preserved remains. Consider how many dinosaurs must have lived and how relatively few remains still exist today. For species or stages of species that were not successful there is little likelihood of there being any preserved remains.