Isnt it more like a bunch of tiny changes and shit dies until it doesnt or it becomes adaptative or at least survivable if not disaffected or even advantageous in the given biome?
Quick and dirty, broad strokes, about 50% just don’t make a difference. At worst it gives you a unique splash of colour somewhere or and odd shape that the other sex may or may not think is cute, or might not even notice. Maybe it slows down you digestion of something, or speeds up digestion of something else, or makes it slightly more or less hardy in specific environmental conditions. In your day to day it’s 99% irrelevant. About 35% just straight up kill you or make you non-viable in your current environment. About 15% have an immediate benefit. It gets more complicated when several irrelevant or just survivable changes end up adding up to something good or bad.
That’s extremely broad strokes and varies a lot between different species, different genomes, different grades of complexity, etc. We’re talking lots of spectacularly small changes over hundreds if not thousands of generations before something becomes noticeably distinct enough to matter at all. Megafauna like us are actually weird how slow we adapt biologically with our decades long breeding cycles. Helps to remember by biomas, beetles are actually the dominant genus of animals on the planet, not mammals. Possibly Krill.
Isnt it more like a bunch of tiny changes and shit dies until it doesnt or it becomes adaptative or at least survivable if not disaffected or even advantageous in the given biome?
Quick and dirty, broad strokes, about 50% just don’t make a difference. At worst it gives you a unique splash of colour somewhere or and odd shape that the other sex may or may not think is cute, or might not even notice. Maybe it slows down you digestion of something, or speeds up digestion of something else, or makes it slightly more or less hardy in specific environmental conditions. In your day to day it’s 99% irrelevant. About 35% just straight up kill you or make you non-viable in your current environment. About 15% have an immediate benefit. It gets more complicated when several irrelevant or just survivable changes end up adding up to something good or bad.
That’s extremely broad strokes and varies a lot between different species, different genomes, different grades of complexity, etc. We’re talking lots of spectacularly small changes over hundreds if not thousands of generations before something becomes noticeably distinct enough to matter at all. Megafauna like us are actually weird how slow we adapt biologically with our decades long breeding cycles. Helps to remember by biomas, beetles are actually the dominant genus of animals on the planet, not mammals. Possibly Krill.