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Counterpoint: tiny terrestrial mammals becoming whales.
Whales came onto land, said fuck this and walked right back into the sea. It is widely regarded as a good decision in whale culture.
I wish I could do that :(
More importantly, actual evolution doesn’t change the individual. The “evolution” in Pokémon and Digimon should be called “development”.
Or metamorphosis.
Yes, that’s better, thank you.
That’s actually what it’s called in German. Never thought about the implications of the “X evolved to Y” screens.
And would have avoided so much pearl-clutching from right-wing fundamentalist busybodies.
God damn were the 90s stupid.
Unlike the following two and a half decades, which were filled to the brim with meaningful conservative talking points.
At least we call bullshit now! Until the debacle of the W administration, the very premise of religious objections was nigh unquestionable. They had to move on to high-test crazy because nobody was buying the old brand.
high-test crazy
New favorite term discovered. Like high-test peroxide, but crazy.
Japanese media is stupid too, Pokémon especially. South Park even commented on that when it was new. So it was stupid against stupid.
In Italian Digimon it’s called Digievolution
Yo, I have chickens. The idea of a chicken the size of a pony is terrifying enough. One the size of a t-rex is nightmare inducing.
I love ours, they’re pets that get spolied and coddled. But they are vicious. Our rooster caught a little bluebird, stomped it and ate its head. Took all of thiry seconds. Our hen goes after bugs and just beats them until they’re tender and juicy before swallowing.
They would 100% eat us given a chance. Like, at the size they are now, you would not want to fall into a coma long enough for them to get hungry.
My father once made the mistake of letting himself be surroudee by chicken while having a flesh wound.
A coma is completely unecessary.
I have seen chickens eating chickens.
It’s a pecking order for a reason.
When I was younger, I used to throw grasshoppers into pens full of baby chicks where they would tear the grasshoppers limb from limb. Also, rats used to live in the henhouse but they don’t anymore because the hens killed all the rats.
Have you seen a cassowary foot? It’s basically a modern day velociraptor.
It might actually be scarier. Velociraptors were smaller than that.
Other raptors, though. Just a few days ago a new one was discovered in China. 5 metres long IIRC.
This title is also misleading, though. By claiming “evolution isn’t linear” and then showing a massive dinosaur leading to a chicken, you’re suggesting the chicken is a downgrade (otherwise, what “linear” would even mean in this context?).
The chicken is, however, a massive upgrade - for the specific environment it lived in. Well, “proto-chickens”, let’s say. The actual domesticated chicken is the result of artificial selection.
The title and the meme are correct. Many people think that evolution means a line of becoming bigger and physically stronger and having more powerful offensive capabilities and smarter and faster etc. But in reality evolution can just as easily mean becoming smaller, weaker, dumber, and slower
Exhibit A:
Koala bears.
Exhibit B: human
Hey evolution has decided at least one person I know is gonna become the start of a line of Neo-Neanderthals. So we aint all doomed.
The issue is precisely in your mix up of “linear progression” and implying “smaller” is somehow a counter argument to that. While it’s true evolution isn’t linear, being smaller is not a downgrade at all.
I haven’t mixed up anything. Smaller to bigger to smaller again is not a linear progression in size going always upward, which is what happens in games and in people’s misconceptions.
What you said isn’t an “upgrade” either. It is just adapting to the changes.
It is just adapting to the changes.
Increasing fitness in one’s environment is an upgrade. Being smaller or bigger, by itself, is not an upgrade nor a downgrade, it depends on context.
Well, “proto-chickens”, let’s say.
Also known as red junglefowl.
I adore the total lack of surprise for the ‘fridge with machine gun’ in the comments here. We all watched Digimon, apparently.
Hell yeah.
Pokémon: [day one] I wanna be the best Pokémon trainer the world has ever seen! [20 seasons later] Wow I got another gym badge! Pikachu is pretty decent!
Digimon: [day one] Oh this poor kitten, gotta save it from these big jerks! [end of season] Today, we must destroy God.
Digimon: [day one] Oh this poor kitten,
[midseason] kitten evolves into buff lion anthro then dies on you.
Right? It’s absolutely perfect and spot-on and I love it
Needs 3 stages for balance
The chicken will eventually be a crab
You forgot to put the lion on two feet and to give it boxing gloves
Nooooo! Not another fire/fighting starter!
Don’t forget the part where actual evolution requires a lot of sex and dying…
Can you selectively breed chickens back to dinosaurs?
Fig. 1: Baby blue heron
You can hear it scream.
Ahhhhghhhhhhghhhhhgghhhgggh -The baby blue heron
It just dropped the canister with the Metroid hatchling
I like heroin.
Congrats, buddy.
Ya know how mammal fetuses, for various parts of their development, look like other mammals?
I wonder if egg-born infants resemble their ancestors.
i’d rather selectively breed ostriches into rideable flying dragons.
Chickens are already dinosaurs. So…yes?
Modern birds almost certainly evolved directly from the Dramaeosaurus, not T. Rex, but otherwise, great meme.
No need to be so dramaetic about it.
U sure? Because dromaesaurus lived during the end cretaceous, birds were already a thing. Aurornis, which can be considered the earliest known bird, lived almost 80 million years before dromaesaurus. Even if you meant the dromaesaurid clade, birds aren’t usually classified in it, and possibly predate it.
Tho it’s true that birds are closer to dromaesaurus than to T-Rex, as birds and romaesaurids are part of the maniraptora clade.
Interesting. I was already out of school in 2013 so never knew about this discovery. Thank you for letting me know.
I enjoyed this piece of information
Thank you. I am glad my time in college has finally found a use!
Fun fact (if you’re a super pedant like me) the r is officially lower case in T. rex
I used to be super pedant, but my wife threatened to leave, so now I am just a regular one.
Thank you for the correction.
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The discovery of horizontal gene transfer implies that it’s more like a web than a tree.
"Biologist Johann Peter Gogarten suggests “the original metaphor of a tree no longer fits the data from recent genome research” therefore “biologists should use the metaphor of a mosaic to describe the different histories combined in individual genomes and use the metaphor of a net to visualize the rich exchange and cooperative effects of HGT among microbes”.
I look forward to this dinosaur = chicken colloquialism being inevitably discarded.
It’s funny, I remember being 7 years old and thinking two things.
-
T-rex feet look very similarly to chicken feet, they must be descended from the T-Rex.
-
I’m 7, there’s no way this is true.
I immediately wrote it off as being incorrect. There’s no way people actually believe this right?
-
How is horizontal gene transfer between microbes in any way relevant to a discussion about the ancestry of chickens that only reaches back to the dinosauria clade? Chickens are invariably a sub-group of the bigger group dinosaurs.
Not just microbes. HGT has been observed in carnivorous plants as well. It could be much more prevalent than we think.
Chickens are dinosaurs in the sense that they’re also tetrapods. A dinosaur is an evolutionary group in which all members have a common ancestor population that is distinct from the rest of the evolutionary tree. So too with tetrapods, isopods, primates, arachnids, etc. So anyway, it’s true that birds are dinosaurs, but it’s not a very useful description.
Why is this image muted?
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Isn’t Chicken the closest living relative but not a descendant of T-Rex?
Yup, the T. rex is just extinct, chickens are the closest thing genetically speaking (or one of the closest, I’m not sure).
Same reason why humans don’t actually descend from monkeys, both monkeys and humans descend instead from a common ancestor that no longer exists. This is why, IMO, Digimon could be a better representation of evolution than Pokémon, since one Digimon can evolve into many different forms, so that kitten could become a fridge, but also a dragon or a knight with cannons, depending on the evolutionary line.
Then again, I doubt any of these were intended as a realistic portrayal of anything at all, least of all the theory of evolution.
I mean, monkeys are an evolutionary group. Technically, we are monkeys, as well as being apes, hominids, mammals, humans, tetrapods, etc.
Chicken is equally close to T. Rex as all other birds. They all go back to the same common bird-ancestor who was a relative of T. Rex.
T. rex is more closely related to birds than to all non-theropod dinosaurs.
T. rex also lived closer to us in time than to Stegosaurus.
Same reason why humans don’t actually descend from monkeys, both monkeys and humans descend instead from a common ancestor that no longer exists
But that ancestor was a monkey! We are monkey, you can’t evolve your way out of a clade.
This is why, IMO, Digimon could be a better representation of evolution than Pokémon, since one Digimon can evolve into many different forms, so that kitten could become a fridge, but also a dragon or a knight with cannons
But that is specifically not how evolution works. You can’t evolve your way out of a clade, everything a cat would evolve into, would also be a cat. Maybe a weird cat, maybe a whale-cat (like whales are still ungulates, even if they are really weird ones) but still a cat. You can’t evolve out of your ancestry.
My grandpa used to have backyard chickens. I saw a couple of chickens completely brutalize and dismember a field mouse that had made it into their coop. I also have a pet parrot, he’s small, but if that little fucker was 6’ tall and pissed off, I’d be dead. Even at his size he can mess you up. If dinosaurs were just bigger versions of current chickens, they’d eat us all.
when I was little, my neighbor had this tiny chicken that acted like a guard dog. It would chase and attack anything that comes near the front gate. All the neighbor kids are traumatized by that little fucker, including me. That’s why I have an eternal fear of chicken, even now as a 6"2’ male adult.
We survived the Terror Birds, we can survive the Chicken Army.
