Does the fact that we are likely to come up with a societal or technological development to solve any problems we might come across long before evolution has a chance to select for useful random mutations to solve that problem mean that we won’t evolve? For example, if you could go back in time to before primates developed opposable thumbs and given them prosthetics to do the same job, would the selective pressures necessary to have led to them evolving be eradicated, thereby offering no advantage to an primate with a slightly more opposable-type thumb mutation over any of the other primates, meaning that that primate had no more likelihood of passing on its genes than any of the others, resulting in no trend towards steadily more mutations of that type, and, ultimately, no opposable thumbs?
submitted by /u/Sinister_Minister101
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r/NoStupidQuestions Does the fact that we are likely to come up with a societal or technological development to solve any problems we might come across long before evolution has a chance to select for useful random mutations to solve that problem mean that we won’t evolve? For example, if you could go back in time to before primates developed opposable thumbs and given them prosthetics to do the same job, would the selective pressures necessary to have led to them evolving be eradicated, thereby offering no advantage to an primate with a slightly more opposable-type thumb mutation over any of the other primates, meaning that that primate had no more likelihood of passing on its genes than any of the others, resulting in no trend towards steadily more mutations of that type, and, ultimately, no opposable thumbs? submitted by /u/Sinister_Minister101 [link] [comments]
Does the fact that we are likely to come up with a societal or technological development to solve any problems we might come across long before evolution has a chance to select for useful random mutations to solve that problem mean that we won’t evolve? For example, if you could go back in time to before primates developed opposable thumbs and given them prosthetics to do the same job, would the selective pressures necessary to have led to them evolving be eradicated, thereby offering no advantage to an primate with a slightly more opposable-type thumb mutation over any of the other primates, meaning that that primate had no more likelihood of passing on its genes than any of the others, resulting in no trend towards steadily more mutations of that type, and, ultimately, no opposable thumbs?
submitted by /u/Sinister_Minister101
[link] [comments]