History Headscratchers / Evolution

!!''Film.{{Evolution}}''
* So the golf course amphibian was literally suffocating in Earth's atmosphere and its first priority was to attack the club owner? Instead of trying to retreat back into the caves when it found the surface unfavorable? These creatures have no sense of self-preservation...
** Bit of FridgeBrilliance however, as the creature itself was, at most, a few hours old,it wouldn't have developed any self preservation instincts, and suffocation is a painful way to die, it was probably lashing out.
* Although it's hardly the most obvious example of bad science in the movie, one point sticks out in my mind. Toward the end, Ira and his "team" realize that selenium might be an effective weapon against the creatures, at which point Ira starts talking about how many gallons they'll need to defeat them. The problem? Selenium is a solid at room temperature, and he hadn't been made aware that [[spoiler: selenium is the active ingredient in Head & Shoulders shampoo]] at that point. Shouldn't a scientist of his caliber know better?
** Gallons are just as valid a measure of volume as anything (I've heard people talk about gallons of gasses, for instance), and easier/faster to say than cubic feet/meters, etc. Plus, people have a better idea of what a gallon is than other measures of volume.
** Plus one assumes that he figured he would have to make some sort of solution out of it anyway, as the other option would be to make a large club out of the stuff and start clonking the monsters on the head.
*** Now that [[Film/PacificRim Pacific Rim]] has come out the club idea doesn't sound too ridiculous...
*** It's ridiculous if they're going to hose down the cave's interior to eliminate the threat once and for all, because you can't really club the cavern's ''microscopic'' life over the head. And a selenium club would only cause mechanical injuries, same as a club of any other material would: the benefit of using that element against the creatures is that it's ''poisonous'' to them. Which means you'd need to get it into their bloodstream via food, drink, breath or injection, so it needs to be dissolved or aerosolized, not solid.
* When they take a class out to pick up the meteorite, why don't they actually get the meteorite?
** They planned to initially, since they brought a truck, but then they found the aliens and decided not to.
** Also, they hadn't realized when they set out to retrieve the meteorite that the cavern would be filling up with toxic gases from the alien life forms.

* They planned to initially, since they brought a truck, but then they found the aliens and decided not to.

*** It's ridiculous if they're going to hose down the cave's interior to eliminate the threat once and for all, because you can't really club the cavern's ''microscopic'' life over the head.

* Evolution doesn't work according to plans or logic, it is possible that humanity may have devolved, predicting the future is notoriously difficult.
** The fact that you would even use a word like "devolved" shows you have no understanding of evolution whatsoever.

*** Now that [[Film/PacificRim Pacific Rim]] has come out the club idea doesn't sound too rediculous...

* Although it's hardly the most obvious example of [[DidNotDoTheResearch bad science]] in the movie, one point sticks out in my mind. Toward the end, Ira and his "team" realize that selenium might be an effective weapon against the creatures, at which point Ira starts talking about how many gallons they'll need to defeat them. The problem? Selenium is a solid at room temperature, and he hadn't been made aware that [[spoiler: selenium is the active ingredient in Head & Shoulders shampoo]] at that point. Shouldn't a scientist of his caliber know better?

!''Literature.{{Evolution}}''

!''Literature.{Evolution}}''

* Huh? Did we watch the same movie? The plot discussion above doesn't relate at all to the movie called ''Film/{{Evolution}}'' I saw, and that is described on the main entry.
** He seems to be talking about Evolution in general...or something? Maybe how in a lot of post-apocalyptic settings humans have regressed? I really don't know what he's on about.
*** It's a Stephen Baxter book. Also, Baxter says somewhere along the course of the book that the ape-like posthumans evolved from feral children, so they wouldn't have a heck of a lot of social knowledge anyways. After that, it was just a gradual slide downwards again. Besides, it's not always energy-efficient to have a big brain.
*** Which still doesn't have anything to do with the movie this JBM is linked to.
* Possibly this page needs two sections. I got to it from literature. In response to the IJBM, evolution doesn't work according to plans or logic, it is possible that humanity may have devolved, predicting the future is notoriously difficult.

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<<|ItJustBugsMe|>>

* Huh? Did we watch the same movie? The plot discussion above doesn't relate at all to the movie called ''{{Evolution}}'' I saw, and that is described on the main entry.

* The original comment above with respect to the San and Australian aborigines is true in that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is one where intelligence is really important and therefore promoted by selection, and humanity's long ancestry as hunter-gatherers is a big part of why we evolved and maintained high intelligence. (Indeed, individual intelligence is arguable more important hunter gatherers than it is for agriculturalists of modern city dwellers, where sociability is of greater value, and a argument can easily be made that the average hunter gatherer is in fact more intelligent as an individual than your average modern city dweller). However, in the context of the Baxter novel, this is not a valid criticism for the presented loss of sapience. It is specifically shown that in the post-apocalyptic environment after the collapse of modern civilization, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was no longer viable. There were no longer enough animals left to hunt, no longer enough edible plants left to gather. (A similar situation occurred in real life after the mass extinctions at the end of the last ice age, and it is thought that this environmental pressure promoted the rise of agriculture as a lifestyle to displace hunter gathering, which had become less viable.) The novel describes scattered populations of human survivors trying to survive in a variety of ways, but in the end, all the ones that tried lifestyles that relied on intelligence, such as hunter-gathering, all failed, and they took the last remaining large edible animals with them into extinction. (The time period over which this occurred was also quite drawn out - it could easily have been several thousand years, which arguable doesn't really constitute that great a failure, when you think about it). The ecosystem had become so depleted that essentially all the large, energy-hungry animals died out. The only way that some human populations survived was by becoming more energy-efficient, shrinking down their energy-hungry large bodies and brains, and giving up the high intelligence that came with it (and they really didn't lose that much intelligence - they still remained the smartest group of animals on the planet). The book also states the random chance played a role in this as well. The incredulity of the OP on this point in fact speaks to one of the overall themes of the novel, which is that while we humans might like to think that the evolution and future maintenance of our high intelligence was someone special, pre-ordained, or inevitable, in reality it is not. Our existence in our current state is a happy accident (which we should recognize and cherish and protect), which can very easily be lost or reversed by another series of less happy accidents.

* The original comment above with respect to the San and Australian aborigines is true in that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is one where intelligence is really important and therefore promoted by selection, and humanity's long ancestry as hunter-gatherers is a big part of why we evolved and maintained high intelligence. However, in the context of the Baxter novel, this criticism is not valid. It is specifically shown that in the post-apocalyptic environment after the collapse of modern civilization, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was no longer valid. There were no longer enough animals left to hunt, no longer enough edible plants left to gather. (A similar situation occurred in real life after the mass extinctions at the end of the last ice age, and it is thought that this environmental pressure promoted the rise of agriculture as a lifestyle to displace hunter gathering, which had become less viable.) The novel describes scattered populations of human survivors trying to survive in a variety of ways, but in the end, all the ones that tried lifestyles that relied on intelligence, such as hunter-gathering, all failed, and they took the last remaining large edible animals with them into extinction. The populations that did survive that ultimately gave rise to the "devolved" non-sapient humans in the far future were populations that stumbled onto life-styles that did not rely on high intelligence, which happened to work in the post-apocalyptic environment. The book also states the random chance played a role in this as well. The overall point of the novel is that while we humans might like to think that the evolution and future maintenance of our high intelligence was someone special, pre-ordained, or inevitable, in reality it is not. It was a happy accident that it occurred in the first place, and another, less happy, accident in the future can reverse it.

** The point of that part of the Stephen Baxter novel is that there are no free lunches in nature. Everything has a cost. Sure, intelligence and language will always have survival utility, but they also come at a steep cost. And that cost is in energy. The human brain uses up over 20% of all the calories we consume. The size of the brain results in our children being born more helpless and vulnerable than those of any other animal. The time required to fully develop our intelligence means that we have the longest relative childhood of all animals - a period of time during which we are vulnerable to predation, before we are mature enough to reproduce. Many of the most potent aspects of social intelligence, such as language, require a minimum population density to perpetuate, and are self-reinforcing - the denser the population, the greater the advantage these traits provide. But the smaller the population, the less advantageous they become, and below a critical threshold of population density, maintaining the trait in its full complexity becomes a net resouce loss. (For example, the more people you have to interact with, the more advantageous complex language skills are. The fewer people you have the interact with, the less sophisticated your language needs to be. And if you end up living most of your life entirely alone, then complex language skills become almost useless.) Humans evolved greater intelligence in an environment where the huge advantages of intelligence outweighed the huge cost. But such environmental conditions are ''not guaranteed to remain so'' in perpetuity in the future. In an environment where the cost of maintaining high intelligence is greater than the benefit provided by that intelligence, natural selection reduces the average intelligence of the population over the generations. ''This has been observed to happen'' in many instances in many different lineages of animals. There is no reason to assume that humanity is guaranteed to be immune to this possibility. The loss of language in fact is explicitly explained in the novel. The genetic trait is a ''capacity for language'', not language itself. Humans are born with the innate ability to learn a language, but without a social environment that provides an opportunity to learn a language, they won't. And there is a critical window in development after which ''they can't learn language anymore''. This has been demonstrated with actual known cases of feral children. In the post-modern apocalypse envisioned in the novel, the isolated surviving populations of normal humans all succumb to starvation. The surviving lineage comes from abandoned feral children who grew to adulthood without any social contact, thus missing their window for learning complex language skills. The social continuity for the transmission of language was broken. Subsequent generations could not acquire language because their parents never acquired it. As a result the genetic capability for language, though still present, is no longer used, and therefore no longer provides any survival benefit. After several more generations of this situation, the genetic capability itself is lost and no longer penalized by natural selection. Indeed, it is favored, since precious resources are no longer spent in building and maintaining the expensive neural structures.