Can somebody explain me how evolution works? 3.5 billion years ago some microbial organism occured. Why didn't it stay the same forerever and developed into all these different forms of life? How are we evolving right now?
As far as I can tell, everything alive is such for the sake of having sex and procreating, thus creating another life, and everything evolution-related is such because it helps a creature somehow between its birth and its procreating to actually procreate. So the question should not be how evolution works, it should be why life is, since evolution appears to be a consequence of life.
Evoution is genetic change in a population.
>Very early organisms occasionally develop mutations as a natural error in DNA replication
>A small percentage of these mutations lead the offspring to become superior to the parent cell in some way that allows it to reproduce more
>Population of superior organisms continues to multiply, outcompetes the source population
>Different species develop as a result of different mutations accumulating and separating groups of descendants
>Because the environment is always changing, and other species are always changing, there are always new factors to adapt to, so even without mutations the frequency of alleles will shift
>Organisms keep developing and splitting into distinct species for a very long time, becoming more complex as they go, and now we have the immense diversity we see today as a result
So basically, it didn't stay the same because DNA replication is imperfect and messes up sometimes. Most of the time this is bad but sometimes happy accidents happen. But only one individual and its offspring will have the mutation, the species doesn't evolve as a whole. This is what causes the splitting into different species. "We're evolving right now" is a bit misleading, no individual evolves, the population does. Based on survivability factors (selection against genetic diseases, for instance), reproductive factors (selection for more attractive individuals), and pure chance (but that's only significant in small populations, it's called genetic drift), the sum of the alleles of the individuals in our species is always changing. I think a good example is the different races (subspecies) of human. We were separated from each other long enough to develop distinct adaptations and differences, but not long enough to be reproductively incompatible. If we didn't start migrating to other continents and race-mixing we would almost certainly develop into different species (can't produce fertile offspring) eventually.
If one monkey gets a beneficial mutation, does every monkey get a beneficial mutation? Does one superior monkey make every other monkey immediately obsolete? No and no. That's how it happens. The population splits into different genetic groups.
A (very) slight genetic mutation gave an offspring a one up on surviving and passing down genes. This might've been the ability to take in .01% more food than the others, etc. Just a conjecture.
Mind you live evolved very slowly the first couple of billion years due to the lack of sexual reproduction.
I, too, saw someone say this in a thread still on the front page of reddit right now.
Nigger please. 4chan is a piece of shit nowadays. I hope you don't actually have enough faith in anyone here to actually engage anyone seriously enough to write for them anything which takes any effort. I don't actually post on Reddit since it's a passive aggressive shithole, but I check the front page every once in a while. I don't, however, respect anyone on either website.