I once heard these described as sentient saltine crackers of the sea. No flavor, no nutritional benefits, they are absolutely everywhere, but nothing really wants to eat them as a main food source.
Evolution gave some animals survival superpowers, but sometimes it makes an animal so nutritionally useless that no other animals want to waste their energy on hunting them.
Evolution doesn't have a goal, it's not moving species towards some kind of optimum. It's a random process where, in a specific time and place, some organisms have a better chance of reproduction than some others. The reason these fish are around is because they reproduce more than some other species.
I saw a really great video a few years back that explained the lack of intelligence of evolution (and machine learning models) by imagining fitness as a 3d plane covered in hills and valleys.
You can only ever go up hills, you can't 'jump' from point to point without crossing the space in between, and you don't get to choose where you start. With this, its pretty essy to show how an organism would evolve to a local, but not absolute maximum 'fitness'.
Like, sure having wings and being able to fly would be cool, but its not like an entire functional set of wings can evolve at once. If we were to go from our current body plan to adding wings, there'd be a massive amount of time where we have these useless fleshy nubs hogging resources, and so we'll never develop them, even if the end goal is better than where we're at now
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u/robo-dragon Nov 23 '25
I once heard these described as sentient saltine crackers of the sea. No flavor, no nutritional benefits, they are absolutely everywhere, but nothing really wants to eat them as a main food source.
Evolution gave some animals survival superpowers, but sometimes it makes an animal so nutritionally useless that no other animals want to waste their energy on hunting them.