Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Why do Animals Look so Strange After Mass Extinctions" video.

You use the word "adapt" almost as if species evolve due to some Lamarckian process. They don't. They evolve because that one-in-a-billion mutation happens to have an advantage. At the end of a catastrophe, different mutations suddenly become viable, and I'd bet they come with some weird mutations along with the key mutation that worked. Those weird mutations make it to future generations because of the part of it that was so good it survived preferentially. The "new species" that emerge after major catastrophe wouldn't have made it at all without the catastrophe that changed all the rules. Very few species do much "adapting." They do what they do until it doesn't work, any more, and then something else - something quite a bit different - takes over. This probably doesn't make any sense to anybody. It just seems like the way we describe these processes is as if species adapt to survive, when they really don't. The mutation that works better is the one that takes over. Most mutations are anti-survival. It's not like the Kiwi birds all got together and said "We're gonna make a new kind of beak that works better."
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