ParkBoyz said:
I want to know why in the hell were there recognizable rodents, crocs, roaches, and Plesiosaurs that existed millions of years ago and still exist today as a species, yet we haven't been a unified species for any longer than 150,000 years. What makes us evolve so fast and them so slow, were they really truly that successful or was our environment that much more harsh? Evolution has a lot of underlying crack pot theories.. I remember watching some crap on the discovering channel about life in 5 millions years from now.. They proposed that humans would be extinct and that land would be dominated by super intelligent Squid.. I'm serious, half of evolution is a joke, the other half is scientifically plausible, but you can't mix fact with imagination and pass it off as a legit theory, it looks foolish and naive.
A. as far as scientists know, plesiosaurs went extinct 65 Mya....
B. your question is why we evolved so fast while other species:
1. we haven't really "evolved fast", phyisiologically we are absolutely the same as most other mammals
most of the "fast evolution" you are refering to has happened on a cultural level because of the development of language, which allowed us as a species to store and transmit information to the next generations
anyway, it took us more than 5 million years to evolve from apes, this is just as slow as most evolutionary events of that scale, because we are not at all as different from apes as you would like to think
2. functional genomics studies show that large portions of mammalian genomes code for non-coding RNA (ncRNA) of various length and in fact the portion of the genome transcribed but not translated increases in close correlation with the increase in organisms' complexity
ncRNAs can evolve much faster than proteins, because they are not limited by the genetic code as proteins are, there are no stop codons and nonsense mutations and very little damage can be done by substitution of bases
in the same time almost every RNA has a secondary structure and this structure is usually critical for its function, it is easy to see how ncRNAs can evolve fast
so far several ncRNAs have been found to play key role in synaptci transmission and hundreds of brain-specific miRNAs have been indentified
of course, these are findings from the last 3 years, so we certainly have a very limited understanding of what's going on, but that's the picture that's emerging