Random Key Point About Evolution

I know this is not about cybersecurity, but on any given day my interests range all over the place. On any single day, I think about dozens of topics. I frequently get into wormholes that suck the intended productivity out of my day. Just today, I spent time thinking about astronomy, time-space, how the brain works, past threats to democracy, long-range rifle shooting, mountain biking, Hallmark Christmas movies, dangerous weather, audio quality, and toenail fungus. Don’t ask about the latter.

I think most readers are that way.

And boy is the Internet a place you can learn a lot about any subject that you desire…and waste a lot of time.

Regarding evolution, this morning I thought about one key point about evolution that most people who aren’t overly familiar with it have wrong, and I thought I would just randomly share it today. Aren’t you lucky?

Here’s the issue. Most people mistakenly believe that evolution means that creatures evolve and get a new trait because the creature needed or wanted the new trait in order to be more competitive. For example, most people know that giraffes got longer and longer necks over time so they could eat leaves higher up on trees to eat more than giraffes with shorter necks. The traditional, mistaken belief, is that a bunch of giraffes kept straining their necks more and more to reach higher and higher and that innate desire somehow evolved into longer necks. They wanted it, they needed it, they got it. They only needed to want it to get it.

Yeah, that’s not how evolution works.

Any new trait that ends up staying in the creature is only there because it spontaneously…randomly…appeared in the creature’s DNA and stayed, but that random mutation allowed the creature to have some competitive advantage over the creatures that did not have that mutation. And so, the creatures with the random mutation lived longer, created more babies with the same mutated DNA, and those mutated creatures soon overwhelmed the creatures without the same, random mutation.

The giraffes didn’t grow longer necks because they desired longer necks to eat leaves up higher on the tree. Nope. Some giraffes got a random mutation that resulted in a longer neck, and that ended up allowing them to survive and reproduce more than giraffes without the mutation. The rest was just babies and multiplication. All the giraffes wanted longer necks to eat more leaves, but some randomly got a gene mutation that resulted in longer necks that ended up allowing them to eat more and live longer than the giraffes that did not.

I’m not sure why I shared this factoid on evolution other than it came up today in the few seconds between my thoughts on a new attack that bypasses MFA (https://www.inversecos.com/2022/12/how-to-detect-malicious-oauth-device.html) and looking for toenail clippers.