Hey guys, what’s up, Jonathan12345 here again with today’s topic: Evolution.

Just a heads up, sometimes I want to post stuff related to my own projects, (insert shameless fanfic promotion here), but can’t find a good place to do it, or I’m afraid to flood other communities with my shitty content. So I might convert this community into a sort of Chapterhouse, for me to just post random things I’m thinking about or working on.

Anyways, time for the actual content. I know you’re all looking forward to it.

I’m sure we’ve all heard evolution and natural selection thrown around a lot. From its earliest days, it was first denied by right wingers, then appropriated by right wingers to justify killing people they didn’t like. So it’s probably justified if you feel a bit inclined to dislike the notion of “survival of the fittest”. But just because reactionaries use it as a tool doesn’t mean it’s false! Reactionaries also breathe air, after all.

Evolution and natural selection are not the same thing. Natural selection is a component of evolution, and an important one at that.

To understand natural selection, let’s look at an example first. Now, I’m not going to steal any old example off a textbook. No, I’m going to use my own. What say a trip to Arrakis?

As everybody knows, sandworms live deep in the desert, are attracted by vibrations, and can grow to great lengths—up to over 100 meters. Since there’s little food in the desert, aside from autotrophy, producing their own food, most of the sandworm diet consists of other sandworms. And what determines who is eaten and who eats? Size, of course.

So in an ideal sandworm population where they mature evenly, the main deciding factor of survival would be pure chance. If you’re older, you win. If you’re younger, you lose.

But what if some mature faster than others?

These new sandworms, let’s call them Shaq Hulud, grow much faster than normal ones. So at a younger age they can compete with normal Shai Hulud easier, and soon phase them out to dominate themselves.

That’s natural selection for you.

The “natural” in natural selection refers to the fact that humans are not intervening: nature is doing all of this, making the sandworms as fit for their environment as possible. However, there’s not always a happy ending. If a sudden or too catastrophic change occurs, say the surface of Arrakis is transformed in a few hundred years into a green paradise, then it’s very likely that the sandworms would all go extinct. unless some were preserved as part of the God-Emperor’s body

Aside from being big and living in deserts, sandworms are also known to produce the precious spice melange, making them a very attractive target for domestication. Now, as far as I know, nobody has been able to do this, so please don’t try this at home, but let’s just say it was possible. What would happen?

First of all, the breeders would want increased melange production. So they would, hypothetically, select for worms that produce the most spice. Over generations, these domesticated worms would eventually produce much more spice than their natural counterparts. Although this trait wouldn’t necessarily increase their chances of survival in nature, it’s desirable for humans, so specimens with this trait are continuously bred. And that’s artificial selection, folks.

You may have noticed something by this point: where are these desirable traits coming from?

That’s right. All these exotic favorable traits must’ve come from somewhere. When they weren’t advantageous, wouldn’t the individuals harboring them die out? And if they were always favorable, why didn’t they appear and spread before? They couldn’t have come out of thin air, right?

Right?

First of all, less favorable traits don’t guarantee extinction, just reduced chances of success. And second, these new traits do indeed come out of thin air. Let me elaborate.

You all know that DNA decides stuff, right? How specifically it does that is a topic for another day. But the main point is that DNA can be damaged. Most of the time this does nothing, very rarely it does horrible things (as anyone who knows someone with or has a genetic disease themself can attest), and very, very rarely it produces a good change. And even then, the change is only spread if it takes place in a reproductive cell, and just the reproductive cell that is used to create offspring. if you look at it this way, it’s a miracle that evolution progresses at all!

That’s evolution, folks. Natural selection coupled with mutation. And as always, see you in the next one!