> But I think I see what you mean, there is a risk of getting caught up in "it could have happened like this" speculation that is not grounded in any reality anymore.
Almost but not quite. Evolutionary laser beams can be discounted out of hand but when we’re talking about a feature (phenotype) that already exists, it is somewhat grounded in reality because we have incontrovertible proof that it can evolve. That opens it up to wild speculation about convoluted evolutionary paths and, since 500+ millions of years of natural selection is nothing if not convoluted, very many of them sound very reasonable.
The added complication is that most of the evidence doesn’t exist anymore or is so degraded our current technology can’t recover the data. Figuring out the “direction” of evolution is nearly impossible because we have few intermediate genetic samples for organisms beyond ~500-1000kYa. The science of extracting DNA from recent fossils is also in its infancy.
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> But I think I see what you mean, there is a risk of getting caught up in "it could have happened like this" speculation that is not grounded in any reality anymore.
Almost but not quite. Evolutionary laser beams can be discounted out of hand but when we’re talking about a feature (phenotype) that already exists, it is somewhat grounded in reality because we have incontrovertible proof that it can evolve. That opens it up to wild speculation about convoluted evolutionary paths and, since 500+ millions of years of natural selection is nothing if not convoluted, very many of them sound very reasonable.
The added complication is that most of the evidence doesn’t exist anymore or is so degraded our current technology can’t recover the data. Figuring out the “direction” of evolution is nearly impossible because we have few intermediate genetic samples for organisms beyond ~500-1000kYa. The science of extracting DNA from recent fossils is also in its infancy.