this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
312 points (97.0% liked)
196
17133 readers
3101 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
Other rules
Behavior rules:
- No bigotry (transphobia, racism, etc…)
- No genocide denial
- No support for authoritarian behaviour (incl. Tankies)
- No namecalling
- Accounts from lemmygrad.ml, threads.net, or hexbear.net are held to higher standards
- Other things seen as cleary bad
Posting rules:
- No AI generated content (DALL-E etc…)
- No advertisements
- No gore / violence
- Mutual aid posts require verification from the mods first
NSFW: NSFW content is permitted but it must be tagged and have content warnings. Anything that doesn't adhere to this will be removed. Content warnings should be added like: [penis], [explicit description of sex]. Non-sexualized breasts of any gender are not considered inappropriate and therefore do not need to be blurred/tagged.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us on our matrix channel or email.
Other 196's:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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"