I was just listening to eons in my car and specifically the episode about armored fish, and the thought occurred to me: isn't evolution ultimately selecting for adaptability?

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It would seem the design that can survive the most extinctions would be the clear winner in the end.

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Not exactly. There are some species which haven't changed all that much for millions of years, and those have certainly managed excellent adaptability.

Others, though, might find themselves evolving to cope with the climate right now at the expense of being vulnerable to some future problem. Say the climate is very hot, but in a few tens of thousands of years there'll be an ice age. An animal which is well adapted to the ice age will probably go extinct before it arrives, having all been eaten by an animal well adjusted to the heat which is here right now.

"In the end" isn't useful if you get outcompeted in the meantime

That was one of the points they made about the two big Devonian extinctions. They said it may have involved a warming, followed by an ice age, followed by another warming, all in rapid succession. The cartilaginous fish came through, the armored fish were all wiped out.

There are some species which haven't changed all that much for millions of years

Like... crocodiles?

The biggest one (aside from obvious examples like sponges and jellyfish) has got to be dragonflies. The original dragonfly was as big three-dimensionally as a footlong sub from Subway, though it was a breathing machine (like us, so let this be a true fable for us to learn from) as it needed oxygen that wasn't in large enough supply. So it simply shrunk in size to adapt once all the air ran out and there was no Druidia to restore it, and ever since then, we've had the same tiny dragonfly model ever since, for almost a billion years.

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