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chadodiles
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this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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They just reached top possible performance for their specific niche. They're basically perfect, so there is little need for evolution to change anything - random selection keeps selecting the same traits for millions of years because those are the ones that work and manage to get them to reproduce.
I like to think of it as having maxed out one specific talent tree for that environment.
Exactly! They didn’t explore the “aerial flight” or “beautiful colors” tech tree at all, but are maxed on armor and chomping.
That's not actually necessarily true. Even if we adopt this "top possible performance" thing, which isn't how organisms work, you can't guarantee their current set of traits would be this optimal maximum.
Evolution can only work with traits already present, or small additions or deletions. It can't jump around. Meaning, for instance, perhaps a crocodile capable of shooting a literal stream of acid would be even more optimized for this environment - but such a trait can't appear out of thin air, and the necessary stepping stones won't be selected.
They might also be more succesfull if they can put sticks and stones together to eventually create a military industrial complex in order to hunt prey using a 50 Caliber machine gun.
Sounds like machine learning with a very small learning rate. You will most likely end up in a local minimum ie. no acid shooting (it would be cool and terrifying)