No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
I'm not sure I understand the question.
Those are the same thing. The environment determines who can reproduce (most successfully) by selecting the fittest (meaning the one who is best able to adapt to the environment), thus changing the genes of the group in the next generation.
So yes, of course humans would evolve differently if they started living underground. For example they'd probably evolve larger eyes because larger eyes can see better in low light and make survival (and reproduction) more likely.
Or maybe I'm misunderstanding.
I'll try to explain my thought process. Due to modern medicine and other aspects driving down mortality, human evolution isn't really based on survivability (I assume it's more based on attractiveness currently?). If we assume that people who have less sensitive eyes would have the same survival rate, would people still evolve to have more sensitive eyes?
Death is not the only driver. Reproduction is by far more important. Death only affects evolution because it prevents reproduction. With modern medicine then sexual selection becomes a bigger driver.
And even then evolution will always happen as mutations will always happen. Even if it is mostly just random drift in features.
We see many aspects of this over and over. Birds on island tend to lose their ability to fly. Larger animals on islands tend to shrink over time. Even isolated humans in extreme places (like high up on a mountain or that do a lot of deep sea diving) show adaptations to their environment. Once isolated even small pressures on your ability to reproduce will affect the population over time. It just might take a lot longer.
Oh you mean because we have developed technology to balance out evolutionary pressures and the people going underground would take that technology with them. Good question.
I'm no expert (just an interested layperson). But I'd assume the evolutionary pressure would be lower so evolution towards larger eyes might be slower. There'd still be a certain advantage in being able to see better in low light. Technology can fail after all.
The thing is that we've had technology to circumvent our bodies' weaknesses only for an extremely short amount of time, from an evolutionary point of view, so there's no precedence. There are scientists speculating that we're now driving our own evolution.
Attractiveness btw is just fitness made visible. We generally find things attractive that promise offspring that will be able to adapt to the environment. That's the very very short version, in reality it's of course a lot more complicated. And again, we now have technology to fake fitness so who the fuck knows what's going to happen.