Thank you all for your insightful responses. It’s been very interesting. I’m sorry that my limited understanding of the topic has lead to confusion, but thank you all very much for helping me to work through this.
I see now what you mean that every organism has biological advantages and disadvantages. What I’m looking for are examples of specific trade-offs. Like the cheetah being built for speed and not able to defend it’s prey. Examples that actually affect the organism in it’s day to day life, they have a very direct impact. The ability to breath underwater would be great, but is not really part of a human’s daily life and therefore is not really missed.
I really like the big brain + standing upright = back problems + pregnancy issues example. What I’m trying to show is that the net effect of the trade-off must be positive for the organism to be successful.
Along that line, I was going to say to approach the problem from the reverse direction. If it’s a disadvantage, look at extincted species and see if any of their specialization led to their demise. Why did wooly mammoths die off? Saber tooth tigers.
You are correct, in general, and it’s a good example.
But I always like to bring up the Phorusrhacidae, or terror birds of South America, which were at the top of the food chain during the age of mammals and always reminded me of their ancestrial theropods…you wouldn’t want to meet one of these guys in a dark alley!
Extremely unlikely. Wooly mammoths may have become extinct due to humans (most likely) or due to climate change, but most if not all of their range did not overlap with sabretooths. And the same factors, not sabretooths, are the most likely for the other species of mammoths and mastodons. In fact, the reverse is possibly true: the extinction of the largest game species may have caused the extinction of sabretooths due to the loss of their main prey.
Well, even if it technically isn’t running, they can still move pretty fast. What difference does it make if you call it running or not? What is the disadvantage?
Here is an interesting article about whether elephants run.
How about the Giant panda? They only eat bamboo leaves-which is problem no. 1 ( bamboo grows only in a limited range). No 2: they only mate once a year-and sex seems to be of little interest to them!
From an evolutionary point of view-a very bad combination!
Arguably? Laugh as you might at the concept of Fox-TV’s “Man vs Beast,” it pitted a teenage female orangutan against a comparably sized male human in a tug of war. She toyed with him–one-handed–for a while until she got bored and then he went flying.
(Other entertaining segments included a zebra racing an Olympic sprinter–it had some idea what was going on because it gave an insulting buck as it pulled away–and Kobayashi’s only professional defeat when a brown bear ate more hot dogs.)
Okay, here’s a very general example out of the bird world.
Bright colors on males = good for mating + bad for not being seen by predators.
Male birds generally tend to be more vividly colored than their female counterparts. This (in addition to other behaviors) indicate to females their ability to reproduce successfully (because they look healthier than males with less vivid and well-maintained plumage), but it also means that their predators can find them more easily. This is a problem with all male birds, and, if combined with a greater weakness than the average male of their species, can mean that they are more vulnerable to predation.