/lit/ - Literature

>>13846178
>lifeforms are just randomly mutating and arbitrarily gaining traits that help them to survive
That’s not how evolution works
Evolution works across species populations, there is a variation of traits within that population (caused by random mutation initially but mostly passed on from parent to child through descent), many of these varying traits have no effect on the evolutionary fitness of an individual (how well an individual passes on its genes to offspring, by both number of offspring, and how many of those offspring survive to breed themselves) but some traits do improve evolutionary fitness and give an advantage that leads to the individual breeding more and making its traits more common within the population in subsequent generations.
>wouldn't we see thousands of examples of superfluous mutations that neither help nor hurt the species?
We do see this. Many of them are so inconsequential as to only change a single amino acid in a single protein that has no actual effect on protein structure, but on a larger scale you might have differences in pattern on an animals coat, or slight colour change, or slightly altered tooth size, these traits might not have an advantage now but could some time in the future if a change in the environment of the population occurs.
>it is mathematically impossible for random amino acid chains floating around in a primordial soup to form into basic proteins, much less into complex single cellular life.
Evolution isn’t meant to be an answer to the origin of life, it’s an answer to the way it primarily works and changes over time, it explains diversity of life, not the origin