why are all animals different to each other in evolution.
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Answer:
You are an animal, but a very special one. Mostly bald, you’re an ape, descended from apes; your features and actions are carved or winnowed by natural selection. But what a special simian you are. Shakespeare crystallised this thought a good 250 years before Charles Darwin positioned us as a creature at the end of the slightest of twigs on a single, bewildering family tree that encompasses 4bn years, a lot of twists and turns, and 1 billion species.
“What a piece of work is a man!” marvels Hamlet. “How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! … In action how like an angel! / In apprehension how like a god! … The paragon of animals!” Hamlet then ponders the paradox at the heart of humankind: what is this quintessence of dust? We are special, but we are also merely matter. We are animals, yet we behave like gods. Darwin riffed on Hamlet in 1871 in his second masterpiece, The Descent of Man, declaring that we have “god-like intellect”, yet we cannot deny that man – and woman – carries the “indelible stamp of his lowly origin”. This is the central question in understanding our place in the scheme of evolution.
What makes us special, while we remain rooted in nature? We evolved from earlier creatures, each on a unique trajectory through time. We share DNA with all the organisms that have ever existed; the proteins our genes encrypt utilise a code that is indistinguishable from that in an amoeba or a zebu.
Only 0.1% of the 900,000,000 acts of heterosexual intercourse taking place each year in Britain results in a fertilised egg
How did we become the beings that we are today? Scientists call this state “behavioural modernity”, or sometimes “the full package”, meaning all the things that we consider as part of the human condition: speech, language, consciousness, tool use, art, music, material culture, commerce, agriculture, non‑reproductive sex and more. Precisely when these facets of our lives today arose in our species is debated. But we do know that within the last 40,000 years, they were all in place, all over the world. Which facet singles us out, among other animals – which is distinctively human?
Navigating this territory can be treacherous, and riven with contradictions. We know we are animals, evolved via the same mechanisms as all life. This is comprehensively displayed in the limitless evidence of shared evolutionary histories – the fact that all living things are encoded by DNA. Or that similar genes have similar functions in distantly related creatures (the gene that defines an eye is virtually the same in all organisms that have any form of vision). Or that our bodies harbour the indelible stamps of common descent in our bones (our hands contain bones almost perfectly like-for-like with the bones in the flat paddle of a dolphin’s fin, and with a horse’s front legs, and a bat’s wings).
Prudent scepticism is required when we compare ourselves with other beasts. Evolution accounts for all life but not all traits are adaptations. We use animals in science every day to try to understand complex biochemical pathways in order that we might develop drugs or understand disease. Mice, rats, monkeys, even cats, newts and armadillos, provide invaluable insights into our own biochemistry, but even so, all researchers acknowledge the limitations of those molecular analogies; we shared ancestors with those beasts millions of years ago, and our evolutionary trajectories have nudged that biochemistry to suit each species as it is today.
Answer:
evolution account for all life but not all traits are adaptation