ant wrote:[
quote]now evolution has stopped and everything is optimised you say but in the past things were different. Were organisms in the past not adapted to their environments and optimised?
Thats actually a very good scientitifc question. And we all know that science answers questions by testing hypotheses.
Why would some organisms continue to adapt in an environment they achieved optimal adaptation?
It is not like the organism has a choice.
Adaptation is usually a defect or error in the original design that happened to find a natural niche.
If not for these errors, man would likely still not be able to speak.
What was it about the environment, say for example, that required further optimization up to, say, abstract thought and language?
Lions and lies.
We needed to warn each other at a distance. That and yelling at the kids.
.[/quote]
Apparently, Darwin predicted that there should be a finch with a proboscis of about a foot long before he even found one but figured there should be because there was a flower that produced a niche for such an adaptation.
The finch did not intentionally grow a longer proboscis. It just happened and survived as a trait because there was a niche for it.
Regards
DL