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Comment by maxbond | Hacker News Reader

Not always, species go extinct all the time. Evolution can get stuck in local optima. Consider the whiptail lizard, which has lost the ability to reproduce sexually. Will they be able to adapt to future changes of the environment? Maybe, but the chips are stacked against them.

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No one said that those nooks are not deadly. But evolution will explore them just in case.

Evolution doesn’t explore anything, mutations are random, selection pressure causes beneficial traits to become more common overtime.

Yes, but those mutations are part of why evolution works. Through random mutations, every possible way of doing something is explored. If something is beneficial, organisms thrive. If it's not beneficial, organisms die. The same is for whole species. If a species was using some niche to their advantage and the niche disappeared, the species will die. But that niche (nook) was explored.

That's what exploration looks like; mutation plus selection. I think you know this but consider exploration willful, perhaps?

Yes, that's it. I could have worded it better. My point was that it's random, evolution isn't a directed willful phenomenon but a consequence of the physical world/physics.

> mutations are random

Kind of. Mutation rate of our dna is "managed" by the dna/chromosomes/genes to reduce the rate in critical areas.

Wow what an interesting animal, haven't heard about it before.

> the chips are stacked against them.

Wikipedia says: "This reproductive method enables the asexual desert grassland whiptail lizard to have a genetic diversity previously thought to have been unique to sexually reproductive species."

Doesn't look to bad?

Sorry for the late response. I wanted to find time to do more research about this before responding but I'm gunnuh accept that it's not happening on a useful timeframe.

I'm not sure which Wikipedia article that is or if there has been revision between when you checked, I didn't find that in the Wikipedia articles for Telidae or Parthenogenesis. The Parthenogenesis article notes that it's controversial whether this is a threat to their ability to adapt.

So I may have been wrong with that example and I thank you for correcting me. I stand by the statement that evolution can get stuck in local minima but I may have been wrong about the Telidae.

I found it in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_grassland_whiptail_liza...

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