Counterpoint: tiny terrestrial mammals becoming whales.
Whales came onto land, said fuck this and walked right back into the sea. It is widely regarded as a good decision in whale culture.
I wish I could do that :(
More importantly, actual evolution doesn’t change the individual. The “evolution” in Pokémon and Digimon should be called “development”.
Or metamorphosis.
Yes, that’s better, thank you.
That’s actually what it’s called in German. Never thought about the implications of the “X evolved to Y” screens.
In Italian Digimon it’s called Digievolution
This title is also misleading, though. By claiming “evolution isn’t linear” and then showing a massive dinosaur leading to a chicken, you’re suggesting the chicken is a downgrade (otherwise, what “linear” would even mean in this context?).
The chicken is, however, a massive upgrade - for the specific environment it lived in. Well, “proto-chickens”, let’s say. The actual domesticated chicken is the result of artificial selection.
The title and the meme are correct. Many people think that evolution means a line of becoming bigger and physically stronger and having more powerful offensive capabilities and smarter and faster etc. But in reality evolution can just as easily mean becoming smaller, weaker, dumber, and slower
The issue is precisely in your mix up of “linear progression” and implying “smaller” is somehow a counter argument to that. While it’s true evolution isn’t linear, being smaller is not a downgrade at all.
I haven’t mixed up anything. Smaller to bigger to smaller again is not a linear progression in size going always upward, which is what happens in games and in people’s misconceptions.
Well, “proto-chickens”, let’s say.
Also known as red junglefowl.
Needs 3 stages for balance
The chicken will eventually be a crab
I’m pretty sure they made the Digimon evolutions while fucked up on coke.
You forgot to put the lion on two feet and to give it boxing gloves
Can you selectively breed chickens back to dinosaurs?
i’d rather selectively breed ostriches into rideable flying dragons.
Chickens are already dinosaurs. So…yes?
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Yup, the T. rex is just extinct, chickens are the closest thing genetically speaking (or one of the closest, I’m not sure).
Same reason why humans don’t actually descend from monkeys, both monkeys and humans descend instead from a common ancestor that no longer exists. This is why, IMO, Digimon could be a better representation of evolution than Pokémon, since one Digimon can evolve into many different forms, so that kitten could become a fridge, but also a dragon or a knight with cannons, depending on the evolutionary line.
Then again, I doubt any of these were intended as a realistic portrayal of anything at all, least of all the theory of evolution.
I mean, monkeys are an evolutionary group. Technically, we are monkeys, as well as being apes, hominids, mammals, humans, tetrapods, etc.
Chicken is equally close to T. Rex as all other birds. They all go back to the same common bird-ancestor who was a relative of T. Rex.
T. rex is more closely related to birds than to all non-theropod dinosaurs.
T. rex also lived closer to us in time than to Stegosaurus.
Same reason why humans don’t actually descend from monkeys, both monkeys and humans descend instead from a common ancestor that no longer exists
But that ancestor was a monkey! We are monkey, you can’t evolve your way out of a clade.
This is why, IMO, Digimon could be a better representation of evolution than Pokémon, since one Digimon can evolve into many different forms, so that kitten could become a fridge, but also a dragon or a knight with cannons
But that is specifically not how evolution works. You can’t evolve your way out of a clade, everything a cat would evolve into, would also be a cat. Maybe a weird cat, maybe a whale-cat (like whales are still ungulates, even if they are really weird ones) but still a cat. You can’t evolve out of your ancestry.
My grandpa used to have backyard chickens. I saw a couple of chickens completely brutalize and dismember a field mouse that had made it into their coop. I also have a pet parrot, he’s small, but if that little fucker was 6’ tall and pissed off, I’d be dead. Even at his size he can mess you up. If dinosaurs were just bigger versions of current chickens, they’d eat us all.
Technically, it is very much linear. It’s just it doesn’t always go the way we feel like it should.
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