Question

The popular media often portrays evolution as being predictable with a definite goal. For instance, in one Star Trek Voyager episode, the captain instructs the ship’s computer to extrapolate the “probable course of evolution of hadrosaurs (a bipedal dinosaur) if hadrosaurs had been removed from the Earth before the K-T extinction and allowed to evolve on another planet. Is it theoretically possible to accurately predict the long-term course of evolution? Explain your rationale.  What information about the hadrosaurs and their new environment would be useful for making the best possible prediction?  

Answer 1

Evolution theory has been a hypothesis and from the time it has been introduced with the evidence of Darwin, until today, it has been a hypothesis and not completely a proven theory of fact.

It would not be required to make it possible to make the correct prediction for evolution and its course. Since the natural laws are in place and from various evidence it suggested that nature is ever been adjusting and changing for a better balance to come.

1. This present-day environment is the mix of living and non-living and there are laws that govern the Earth and its systems. Various theories like plate tectonics, meteorites bringing life, and so on are proved to be a hypothesis and not as a true factor that can be applicable to everything on earth.

2. There are theories like chaos theory. It suggests that the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. It tells that slight changes can have an impact on nature, weather, and many such important factors on things.

An accurate theoretical prediction would require the exact detail and evidence of the past events that are consistent today and infinite knowledge to know what are things that will be present for human evolution to continue.

Information about the hadrosaurs and their new environment:

These may involve their physical strength and abilities, their surviving skills, etc.

Physical adaptations or evolution- their well-developed eyes and ears, their strong crests varied independently of internal structure, this crest which makes them dimorphic as well, their species diversity.

Their environment may tell us the conditions they lived on, the type of other species giving them competition, and available resources.