Timeline for Could fish (such as a moray eel) evolve chromatophores as advanced as a cephalopod's?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
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| Dec 13, 2022 at 1:46 | comment | added | Robert Rapplean | How do you get to Broadway? Practice, practice, practice. | |
| Dec 12, 2022 at 22:28 | comment | added | toolforger | Not many, actually. Remember that all the genes for attracting an axon to a cell and to make the cell react to nerve signals are already there, they're just inactive - every cell has the full set of genes. So it's just a matter of a handful of regulatory genes to be activated. Even better, it's not an all-or-nothing proposition, a hormone-based cell can get additional nerve input, and gradually move over to full nerve-based control over evolution; all it needs is evolutionary pressure. | |
| Dec 12, 2022 at 22:17 | comment | added | Robert Rapplean | @toolforger, Ok, how many genetic changes do you think it would take to get from chameleon-like hormonal color changing to neuron-based cephalopod color changing? | |
| Dec 12, 2022 at 22:15 | comment | added | toolforger | Actually, once chromatophores are established, adding more control is a relatively small step. All you need is an environment where blending in is an important survival trait, whether as prey or as predator. | |
| Dec 12, 2022 at 18:27 | history | edited | Robert Rapplean | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Dec 12, 2022 at 18:22 | comment | added | Robert Rapplean | Yes, all we can say is that this one instance took X amount of time, therefore, should a creature follow that path, these are the time frames you'd be looking at. The idea that it couldn't happen without extremely broad speciation is, I think, the more important point. | |
| Dec 12, 2022 at 17:59 | comment | added | DerekG | Right, I agree within the confines of the story that you can say whatever you want. You can say, "this trait evolved in this time". I simply disagree that we can say in general "likely would evolve this trait within this time" as this is a probabilistic statement, which we have insufficient evidence to generate. | |
| Dec 12, 2022 at 17:47 | comment | added | Robert Rapplean | This is fiction, so we have to go by the anthropic principal, a.k.a., the rule of cool. If you're telling a story about your new car getting hit on the day you purchase it, then the probability is 100% that it's going to happen. It DOES happen and it HAS happened, therefore the probability that it will happen to YOU is immaterial. This doesn't suggest that you could set up a lab and expect those results. | |
| Dec 12, 2022 at 14:22 | comment | added | DerekG | I'm curious about this claim: "so it likely wouldn't take more than fifty million years for a creature to develop them." With only 1 example of a statistical distribution we are attempting to model (i.e. one planet), can we really say anything at all about the distribution? For instance. I got a new car and it got hit by another car on the same day. Thus, with this one example I model it as extremely likely for any new car I buy to be hit on the first day. Obviously a trivial example but it illustrates how undersampling the distribution can lead to improper results | |
| Dec 12, 2022 at 5:09 | history | edited | Robert Rapplean | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Dec 12, 2022 at 4:46 | history | answered | Robert Rapplean | CC BY-SA 4.0 |