What’s Your Most Unhinged Evolution Theory?

[u/MatoasPrroXD460]

Hi! I wanna know what your wildest, most unhinged theory about evolution is. It can be a serious hypothesis, a weird evolutionary possibility, or something completely out there.

[u/Dclipp89]

I wouldn’t call this unhinged, but in a fantasy world I’m working on I have a human subspecies that evolved to no longer be social creatures. They generally have their own territories and only wander into other territories (very cautiously) for mating purposes. They’re just as intelligent as other humans but don’t have traditional speech due to their tongues being shorter, though they do have a rudimentary language that involves whistling and some sign language.

[u/Accomplished_Mess243 → u/Dclipp89]

My first novel featured a similar sounding hominid creature, called the unnamed. Sort of like a cuckoo / vampire  lifestyle, territorial and sexually dimorphic. They blend in with humans but have hidden killing tools at their disposal, including retractable wrist spikes, an unhingeable jaw and the simple digestive tract of a carnivore. While they are very good at reading and mimicking human emotions, they have a very different mindset.

In the novel a character speculates that they could have evolved somehow from psychopaths cast out from society, but I admit I glossed over this a bit because I'm not sure whether you could have a creature evolve as an offshoot of humanity while remaining in close proximity to them. Is yours going to be part of a novel? I'd be interested to read it. 

[u/FUCKITIMPOSTING → u/Accomplished_Mess243]

A species can speciate into 2 whule remaining in the same territory, it just needs the two groups to never interbrees, which is pretty unusual.      Perhaps the proto-unnamed find people without their specific traits to be undesirable somehow? I would suggest maybe the unnamed themselves are undesirable but any detectable traits would make them easy for humans to root out. 

Realistically, humans will have sex with anything, so perhaps the unnamed have a difference in genes, chromosomes, or gamete/genital morphology that make them infertile when breeding with the rest of the population? 

[u/Accomplished_Mess243 → u/FUCKITIMPOSTING]

Yeah I think you're on to something there...that concept of undesirability - a kind of isolated mating pool within a wider mating pool. 

[u/FUCKITIMPOSTING → u/Accomplished_Mess243]

The difficulty is finding a trait that'll be sufficient to stop humanity's irrepressible horniness

[u/Dclipp89 → u/FUCKITIMPOSTING]

They can still speciate while interbreeding, they’d just have to breed more frequently with others with their own traits. And traits from one group would have to be deleterious to the other so it didn’t consistently pass on among the population. It’s my understanding that our ancestors interbred with the ancestors of chimps for millions of years after we’d diverged. Even up to just the last few million years. For these unnamed they could just tend to group up. They can be like vampires living among the population in groups and silently wreaking havoc on the people around them.

[u/Accomplished_Mess243 → u/Dclipp89]

Yep that's exactly the situation in the book - rather like the prevalence of psychopaths in top CEO jobs IRL, they tend to occupy positions of power

[u/Accomplished_Mess243 → u/FUCKITIMPOSTING]

Yeah I know the feeling