The End of Evolution By Means of Natural Selection

But this isn't how evolution works. The other 19 alleles don't just disappear unless there are selective pressures against them.You're still thinking in black and white.What happens is by some selective pressure, say environmental or predatory, begins to favor one trait out of the 20, we will begin to see a steady increase of that one trait in the population. But the other 19 still remain, perhaps in lower number than before.Try to think of it like capitalism. Just because Bill Gates began to dominate the silicon valley market doesn't mean all other software companies went belly up. In fact, despite Microsoft's attempts to stamp out their competitions, we still have giant software corporations all over the place. Even in cases of monopolies in the past, no one single commercial entity of a particular market has ever dominated the entire market.In other words, despite selective pressure favoring one or two or a few traits doesn't mean the overall variation of the gene pool will necessarily decrease.Now, if we're talking about the bottleneck effect... that's a different story.Edited by Taz, : Fixed my damn grammar...

No, it's not obvious, because you are using it in the wrong way. It's like saying each individual atom of my computer is colorless therefore my computer is colorless. There's a fallacy for that. Try to guess what it is.While it is true that the seal population came back with less genetic variation than before, we're talking only a couple generations. You are trying to apply a couple generations of seal as an example of evolution. If I didn't get drawn in by your honest tone, I would have said strawman.What happened with the seal population you described is called a bottleneck, where an event triggered a loss of many traits and the resulting allele frequency is completely different than the one before. In this particular case with the seal, the event is called over-hunting.Because we know for a fact that each individual in that population carries at least several mutations compared to its parents, if left undisturbed it is inevitable that genetic variation in that population will increase given enough time. By enough time, I'm talking about at 50 generations or so, not a couple.Added by edit.As a side note, the rattlesnake population in the southwest are going through a bottleneck event as we speak. People there are hunting down every rattlesnake they could find, which are usually the ones that make a lot of noise. The very trait that helped keep their ancestors from being trampled on are now working against them with humans. There are reports of increasing number of silent rattlesnakes crawling around. Goddamn rednecks...Added by edit.I'm sure that one day in the distant future, our children's children will label this period as the great bottleneck era for most species on Earth. Man has been changing and molding population genetics to our liking. I'm sure we'll look back one day and realize the vast changes we've made to wild populations everywhere.Edited by Taz, : No reason given.Edited by Taz, : No reason given.

You are still trying to squish evolution into the confines of intelligent design. Evolution has no end goal. It's not a conscious process. It doesn't have any direction. It doesn't even care if nothing survives. It just happens. It's an inevitable result of how things work when left to themselves.You need to stop thinking of evolution as some kind of conscious entity that has a goal.Do you typically describe a rock sad, angry, happy, or mean? No. It's just a rock. It exists. It's an inanimate object. If it falls off a cliff and hits you, you don't get angry at it. You don't press assault charges on the rock. And yet, it has characteristics that we can easily use to identify it as a type of rock. It has mass. It's made of different kinds of minerals. Sometimes, it has a crystalized structure. By studying it, we can tell how it was formed and how long ago it was formed. We can even tell if it's from this planet or not. Yet, it's still just an inanimate object.Evolution has characteristics that we can study and predict. But to say that it has some kind of end goal is like saying the rock has feelings.