Are the adaptations of xerophytes due2 natural selection?

see title
will give rep
(2morrow if I'm all out today)

hello casual, long time no hear!!! i'll answer your question, tbh every living thing on this earth is a product of evolution (which is a fact), which in turn is explained by the theory of natural selection! xerophytes are amazing they are adapted to retain water unlike most plants which actually lose 98% of its water through transpiration. they have rolled up leaves, hairs, deep set stomata and their roots go to greater depths in the ground to obtain more water, (so it must have extreme negative phototropism or just geotropism, learned that in bio 2day lol) it prob has many other adaptions too but i love plant topics they just make so much sense and are awesome. the plant responses topic is awesome so is the animal 1, blahhh sorry this reply is so long lol, but i hoped i answered your question!

omg ikr!

hehe it wasn't too long and yeah it answered my question and gave me a few more details .

Thank you

(tried to rep you but says I've already repped this member before )

no worries, happy to help!! you dont have to rep me btw, you have helped me a lot before so its all good

oh btw when i said evo is a fact, i was joking because i think its a fact as it prob is true, its not a fact sadly because we cant prove that it happens all the time

no worries, happy to help!! you dont have to rep me btw, you have helped me a lot before so its all good

oh btw when i said evo is a fact, i was joking because i think its a fact as it prob is true, its not a fact sadly because we cant prove that it happens all the time

If that's the basis we used to call something a fact...nothing in science could ever be considered "fact". Science relies on inductive reasoning, by definition. That doesn't make anything less "factual". The idea that biological evolution occurs is, by all means, a fact.

thats what i recall one of my teachers saying once or maybe i misinterpreted it, i always thought that evolution is an observed fact, and natural selection is a theory that explains that fact

Well evolution's both, really (although some would dispute). It's a fact in that we can observe it happening throughout time and in the present, and it's a theory in that it explanatory framework for the diversity of life. Natural selection is more a mechanism by which we explain the drive behind evolutionary change on a population level, rather than a theory in and of itself. A component of the theory, if you will.

ahhhhhh i see, that makes a lot more sense, although i still dont get why some people dont believe in evolution... do you study biology? actually, i think i remember you saying you study medicine right?

I study medicine, but I've got a long-standing interest in evolutionary biology. Might be doing a degree in it next year.

The biggest reason people don't believe in evolution is simply because of religion. Religion's been around for a lot longer than the theory of evolution, and once you've accepted an idea as "true" and centred your life around it, it can be hard to accept the contrary position. So children are brought up in strictly religious families or religious schools and taught creationism, are misrepresented evolution and thus don't understand it, or are made to internalise fallacious arguments against evolution.

I have read a theory or hypotheisis, about how dna was created and apparently they are saying that the sea (called a soup in this hypothesis) contained iron oxide and that there was rna in the water from microorganisms and the iron oxide interacted with the rna forming a dna like structure, and also they proved it was right by mimicking the conditions in a lab. oh and the first microrganism was called luka or something. i might be explaining this in a bad way, sorry about that it just been a long time since i've read about these things, just thought i'd share this thought.

You're referring to the primordial soup hypothesis, a hypothesis within the study of abiogenesis.

We haven't "proved" either of these ideas - we don't really know how life came about. We have a couple of ideas about how life might have come about, and we have varying levels of evidence supporting these ideas. But we don't really know anything for sure yet.

LOL, yes. LUCA stands for "last universal common ancestor" - it's the earliest organism from which all life on Earth is descended. This is again a hypothesis, but it's the most likely one of all the hypotheses we have. LUCA wasn't necessarily the first organism in existence, others could have come about earlier who didn't manage to reproduce (but this gets a bit philosophical because one of the characteristics of life is reproduction ), or whose cell lines died out later.

hmm maybe luca wasnt the only luca? what if there was a bunch of luca organisms that only contained rna and due to this promodial soup, dna was formed in their cells, which gave them the instructions to reproduce. or like you said maybe other different organisms similar to luca was there and luca reproduced with them gradually forming more complex structures and becoming more multicelluar over time? by reproduction are you referering to sexual or asexual? oh i was also curious about mitochondria having its own dna, do you think that mitochondria was a virus that remained in our bodies and became a part of our cells?

Haha, no! LUCA is definitely the only LUCA. It's in the definition: last universal common ancestor - the last SINGULAR organism from which ALL life on Earth is descended. If there were other organisms in LUCAs time (and there might very well have been!), they haven't survived to the present day.

I'm referring to asexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction is something that evolved quite late, evolutionarily.

Wow, you're really close! The current line of thinking is that mitochondria came from bacteria that became a part of our cells. That they're the descendents of an intracellular bacterium that evolved to exist with eukaryotic cells symbiotically (a mutualistic relationship), and eventually evolved into what we see is mitochondria. Mitochondrial DNA actually codes for very little of the information that it takes to "make" a mitochondrion, most of the information is stored in the nuclear DNA, which is a major support behind the idea that this was a mutualistic symbiotic relationship between bacterium and eukaryote. Since we evolved for both to contain the information required to make an efficient energy factory.