Thread:TheSquidychicken/@comment-31308946-20170525193032/@comment-27388204-20170607064517

I forgot to address your message regarding genetic bottlenecks. First of all, in evolutionary terms, there is no such thing as a "higher" or "lower" species. I like that; our kinship with and equality to all things living is a glorious thing to me.

Anyway, no. These so-called "lower species" (I'm referring to arthropods) still make up 84% of all animal species today. The forces of natural selection are incredibly intense in the bug world. In addition, many arthropods have short lifespans (with exceptions such as mygalomorph spiders, scorpions, large centipedes and some other arthropods living for one or more decades). This means that they can have many more generations in a select amount of time than a comparatively longer-lived organisms such as a human. These two factors allow for a varied gene pool, and allow arthropod species to become adapted to every ecological niche present in a habitat, thus resulting in enormous diversity. Let's also remember that the arthropod population still outweighs the vertebrate population BY FAR. So no, there was certainly no major genetic bottleneck in the time of the invertebrates. Certainly nothing compared to every animal on this planet being descended form only two ancestors. As for the perfect Adam and Eve genes, well, didn't they start the fall (which was because of a talking snake instructing them to eat a magic fruit, but I'll set that aside for now) before they created descendents? So imperfections had already occurred, not just in humans, but in all other animals, well before the Arc, when we were subject to a second genetic bottleneck of equal magnitude.