A Question About Evolution
Greetings to anyone visiting this page as a result of my YouTube comments. I thank you for taking time out to try and answer my question. I'm sure it will be a very dumb question for anyone with a strong scientific background, but please bear with me. I've only recently developed an interest in the subject.
Now then...Not long ago I received a flyer advertising the upcoming "Dinosaurs in Their Time" exhibit in Pittsburgh. It looks very interesting, and it's really got me thinking about dinosaurs again (I was extremely interested in them when I was a kid). I even went out and rented Jurassic Park. The more I think about them, though, the more I can't help but wonder why there aren't any dinosaurs around today.
Don't get me wrong. I understand that they're extinct, and that there's a lot of controversy as to what caused their extinction. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that their extinction was caused by an ice age. Once the ice age was over, why didn't the dinosaurs simply evolve again? Why did Nature only produce them once? Obviously, we see the descendants of dinosaurs in our world today - various reptiles and amphibians and such - but nothing on the scale of a T.Rex or a Brontosaurus or a Triceratops. Is it because the conditions that led to their development - climate, geography, etc. - experienced drastic change? Was it only possible for them to develop during those early stages of the world? Or is there something I'm not understanding about the nature of Evolution and extinction?
Any help you can give me with this question (including book recommendations) will be very appreciated. Please feel free to post a response here on my blog, or send e-mail to antiprincecharming@yahoo.com (an old e-mail address I only use for these sorts of occasions.)
Again, I thank you for your time. If you're reading this, have a great day.
Now then...Not long ago I received a flyer advertising the upcoming "Dinosaurs in Their Time" exhibit in Pittsburgh. It looks very interesting, and it's really got me thinking about dinosaurs again (I was extremely interested in them when I was a kid). I even went out and rented Jurassic Park. The more I think about them, though, the more I can't help but wonder why there aren't any dinosaurs around today.
Don't get me wrong. I understand that they're extinct, and that there's a lot of controversy as to what caused their extinction. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that their extinction was caused by an ice age. Once the ice age was over, why didn't the dinosaurs simply evolve again? Why did Nature only produce them once? Obviously, we see the descendants of dinosaurs in our world today - various reptiles and amphibians and such - but nothing on the scale of a T.Rex or a Brontosaurus or a Triceratops. Is it because the conditions that led to their development - climate, geography, etc. - experienced drastic change? Was it only possible for them to develop during those early stages of the world? Or is there something I'm not understanding about the nature of Evolution and extinction?
Any help you can give me with this question (including book recommendations) will be very appreciated. Please feel free to post a response here on my blog, or send e-mail to antiprincecharming@yahoo.com (an old e-mail address I only use for these sorts of occasions.)
Again, I thank you for your time. If you're reading this, have a great day.
posted by J. Wiltz at 8:34 AM
1 Comments:
Hi probably too late here but as you might also get from richard dawkins's lectures, evolution cannot go backwards. Generations before dinosaurs led to them - then they were extinct and remaining species after them were a result of forward evolution. As generations from passed the subsequent species are even more pronouncedly different from dinosuars. So they went extinct and never came back because evolution only goes forward , any species left behind cannot come back . Something similar might come back in a long time through a totally independent branch but it will take a long time.
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