My question. How does nature know how to phase/add anything to our existence? I just don’t believe that if someone doesn’t like balding, that it would simply dissappear in 100 years. Your mind might not like it, but that doesn’t mean over time, humans will get rid of it through genes. Make sense?
I mean, before we had hair, how did our body’s know how to produce hair? The most popular answer would be, “because, when it’s cold out and our bodys need to protect ourselves.” Really? But how did our bodys know that hair was the solution?
My examples may be weak, but you know what I mean. How does our genes overtime decide what is needed and what isn’t needed. I don’t think that simply thinking “we need wings to fly” would simply yeild us wings in the next 1000 years.
Random mutations occur all the time. If such a mutation proves beneficial to an organism, it allows that organism to reproduce slightly more than others without this benefit, and so the gene for it gets passed on. Major changes like developing wings take many, many mutations over thousands or millions of years. Nature doesn’t “select” traits an organism needs to compete, it allows beneficial traits to be passed on to the next generation. Mutations that are debilitating have the opposite effect, not allowing the organism to reproduce as often, or at all.
“Selection” primarily has to do with encouraging or discouraging survival and reproduction. A trait (like baldness) that usually happens later in life (after the prime period of reproduction) usually won’t be greatly subjected to natural selection. “Beneficial traits” are those that help the organism survive from birth to the time when it can reproduce; reproducing includes finding a mate, etc. Thus, for instance, a “baldness from birth” gene would probably have been de-selected against if it created a feature that was unattractive to the opposite sex (and thus tended against mating.)
Well if the “unattractive” aren’t mating with the “attractive”, then I assume the unattractive will just mate with the unattrative. So nothing really gets weeded out. And every now and then, the attractive “slip up” and hook up with an unattractive person, out of pure love, happens all the time, which would mean genes aren’t a factor for such couple. It’s so mixed up anyway, everyone is just going to end up one color, with the same color hair and eyes, everyone looking the same in the next 10,000 years, which I’m not against, but the outlook looks boring. If the all traits are weeded out wouldn’t everyone just look similar? What’s the point of selection if the end result would just be everyone looking similar?
You’re missing the point. Evolution doesn’t care about everyone looking the same or being “boring”. Evolution only cares about passing on successful genes to the next generation. If eveyone ends up looking the same as a result of that, so be it. The point is, a trait will be passed on if it allows its possessors to breed, and willl not be passed on otherwise. If that trait also happens to impart a slight advantage, allowing the organism to produce slightly more, and more successful offspring, then eventually it will become part and parcel of that species. Attractiveness is merely an extension of this precept. Organims will generally prefer mates that have some trait that indicates good health, successful hunting skills, etc. A peacock’s fancy tail, for example, requires a large amount of energy to grow, yet serves no other useful purpose than to attract a mate. The peahen prefers males with larger, more colorful tails, because males that have them are usually healthier and better at finding food than males with smaller and less-colorful tails. Evolution doesn’t care if the peacock’s tail is pretty, only that those that have them get to pass on more of their genes.