this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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What evolutionary benefit do these pseudopenises have?
If you want to know some theories about their purpose, I've written a few in respone to another comment!
Not everything has to have an evolutionary benefit. If it doesn't impose a significant malus, random nonsense mutations can just as easily become evolved traits. Evolution doesn't have a plan, and nature makes frequent mistakes.
This random mutation, which seems to be mostly negative, has to have outbred the standart form to be the widely known hyena today, no? It just seems to be the sorta trait that would disappear along the way.
Interestingly, evolution doesn't seem like it's actually random. There's mechanisms to it we're only beginning to understand
It seems to only improve in a single area (genetically) so much before switching, it doesn't optimize, it is focused, and the rate of evolution is driven by stress.
My theory is that too much success would cause a population boom and bust, and so it's encoded into terrestrial life very early on - the studies come from bacteria genetically edited to break respiration pathways, and all the evolution was focused there before the evolution moved to a different area - but they didn't even recover their original efficiency, possibly because they just reached a comfortable point without competition
So in this case, I think the female hyenas were probably being killed opportunistically, which led to evolutions related to size and dominance. Bigger females that fuck the males in dominance rituals are enough to relieve the evolutionary stress, and so evolution slowed and they reached "good enough"