Why are some animals thought of as useless or bad at evolving, and are they really?
There are several species today that are often viewed as “evolutionary failures” due to their odd and often nonsensical evolution. Some people even try to use these odd creatures to prove that evolution is not real, as something surely would not adapt in a way that would lead to its own death or the extinction of the species as a whole. The issue is that these people are focusing far too much on one piece of the puzzle. Due to our relatively short lifespan, it is not possible for us to view the entire history of a species, only a singular snippet in time. Luckily, humanity has been studying, documenting, and categorizing the information that is available to us for multiple generations, which has provided us with enough information to explain some of these “evolutionary failures”. There appear to be several common factors that result in an organism being viewed as “useless” or “bad at evolution”: specialization, population bottleneck, sexua...