Did you follow the link to the article? "Cave fish dwell in perpetual darkness, are generally blind, having either greatly reduced eyes or no eyes at all. Yet presumably they evolved from fish with functioning eyes. Why lose the ability to survive in other niches? Researchers have put forth two theories. One holds that unused functions can accumulate destructive mutations without affecting the creature. The other theory posits that unused functions get dropped in order to redirect the energy involved in maintaining them, enhancing useful functions. New research published in the journal Nature supports the latter idea." Organs do vanish. So don't limbs. You can read about whales and manatees and all sorts of land mammals that returned to the sea and lost their limbs. You can read about mole rats and cave fish that dwell in perpetual darkness and have lost (or are losing) their eyes. An organism adapts to it's environment. I don't know why the show had them evolve into "salamanders", Its science fiction, and they had to evolve into something. But the notion of them evolving into simpler life forms because there was no environmental stimulus makes sense. Worm-like creatures might have made more sense, since everything would go... arms, legs, eyes. But the salamanders were more interesting.
What you mean is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestigiality Here's what was required to go terrestrial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletal_changes_of_organisms_transitioning_from_water_to_land Why would flying in a spacecraft provide any evolutionary pressure to go back, lose all advantages for land, and readapt to water? There's a reason why giant squids can't eat big meals quickly: They're still eating through their brains, cause their simpler predecessors had it arranged that way already when it wasn't a problem yet, and now it can't simply be changed anymore. Why do whales have lungs? Cause they already lost their gills, and already got their lungs. No way back now. Why do we choke? Because we have the stupid 'design' of two independent tubes meeting at a common opening. Keeping them separate would make much more sense. But the early lung evolved from the already existing gut, which is why they're still connected.
I'm a bit on the fence about some of the Voyager novels. Some of the earlier ones seem out of character. And I don't especially care for the ones that take place after the series ended.
It's hard to find any novels that seem in character. Curious thing though... A few novels were written by actual writers that wrote episodes for the series, and even those novels seem out of character.
I don't understand why you keep posting this. You will never understand the science behind the science fiction of what happened in that shuttlecraft and on that planet as long as you keep posting the same layman rhetoric, and ignoring the counter arguments. Why has the mole rat lost it's fur, and the use of it's eyes? I've asked this twice to counter your argument. By your argument, these facts should never happen. Eyes evolved, they're complex, then why is the mole rat losing them? You also try to make a point using whale's lungs... while ignoring the fact that the same animal started with flippers and fins, evolved arms and legs, and regained flippers and fins when it went back to the sea! Why didn't the whale retain it's arms and legs? You're right... there's no going back, because there is no such thing as "back". There is only adaptation. An organism goes back to the sea, adaptation comes into play. Arms and legs give way to fin and flippers. Noses turn into blow holes and move to the top. An organism decides to live 4 feet under ground, use it or lose it comes into play, and their eyes no longer function and eventually turn into a cluster of cells that can only sense light and dark. What do you suppose would happen to a human being if you put him in a box, then hyper-accelerated the evolutionary process for a "million years". It would be "adapting" to an environment that was that box. Eyes would go. Arms and legs would go, or at least shorten. Hair would go. Brain function would likely decrease. Would the organism still be able to speak? Who knows. After a "million years" of evolution in that environment, what went in certainly would not be coming out.
Are you saying you do? XD Again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestigiality It still has the same forearm bones, and remnants of the hindlegs. What about the squid gut & brain situation, or the trachea & esophagus problem? You say Tom and Janeway went "forward", but you deny the possibility of "backwards" Again, all of these changes happen over many generations and not within one individual's lifespan. There was no aquatic environment in the shuttle, and the changes happened after the flight. The person would be dead for a million years. For your thoughts to work in the episode, Tom would've had to have great-great-(...)-grandkids with Janeway (and with himself?!), and they would have adapted.
I happen to like the idea of a show portraying our distant future as one where we turn into weird salamandery things. It's both more fun and plausible than going from humanoid straight to little balls of light. And Tosk, you are absolutely correct!
What's the environment inside the box? Even if I could make the argument for eyes, the arms and legs piece is odd, and even more so is the fact that Tom becomes allergic to an oxygen environment. Though, I would imagine oxygen would be present inside that box. Honest, I would think something more like Species 8472 would occur.
Is it going to have the same forearm bones and remnants of hind legs after another 50 million years? Why do they have remnants of those limbs instead of the limbs themselves? Who cares about the squid? What does that have to do with anything about this? You said there was "no going back".... I presume you mean that once traits has evolved, the organisnm doesn't ever lose them, and I'm telling you that it does. Mole rats live underground and have lost thier fur and their eyes... eyes are very complex organs, and they lost the use of them. They are disappearing. This isn't "going backwards" it's going forwards.The mole rat does not need eyes or fur, so evolution is getting rid of them. Whales don't need limbs in the water, they need flippers. Tom and Capt. Janeway hyper-evolved to adapt to whatever environments they found themselves in while they were everywhere, at every time. I don't know what that was. Perhaps billions of years ago, the universe was inhospitable. And in 50 billion years, the universe is inhospitable again. Perhaps a 50 billion years after that, life is possible again. Tom and Capt. Janeway were there, because they were everywhere in the universe, at every point in the past and future.
Squid and choking problem are examples where evo doesn't get rid of a problem cause it can't revert them. New things evolve, no old things re-evolve. Whales didn't go back to flippers, they evolved new flippers. So infinity is a swamp? I guess you could actually say that amphibians are the best adapted vertebrate form in a timey-wimey environment. But we can perhaps come to a solution here: They left Warp 10 at a specific place and time, and if they were in the distant future before, they'll morph into whatever Tom was changing to at first. Then just before he returned to normal space and time with Janeway, they were in the distant past, which is why they morphed into earlier Earth lifeforms (similar to TNG Genesis). In the end, the only ones who can understand non-linear time like that are the prophets
This isn't what you said. You said that once something evolved, there was "no going back". I never said anything de-evolved, I said that the organisms adapt to changes in their environment. Whales lost their arms and legs, they were replaced with things more suitable for getting around in the water. Mole rats don't need eyes underground, they are mostly blind now and are losing their eyes altogether. I don't have the evolutionary history of the squid commited to memory, but I do know that epigenetics and natural selection will continue to adapt them to their environments. The conversation started because of the evolution of Tom and Janeway into those lizard like things. A 100 million years of compressed evolution in the environment of that planet might do that to a human, based on what a few million years of evolution do to animals on earth. Please, lets move on.
I think it's fair to say the writers either didn't know how evolution works or didn't think it matters.
It wasn't evolution. It was mutation. Tom had a defect that exacerbated into a weird mutation, that was either transferable via kissing, or Janeway was such a close relative of Toms, that she mutated identically when stimulated by the same external forces. I'm wondering if they were siblings, rather than mother and child. Consider if Tom had sex with Sarah Silverman in a very uncomfortable place? Like the back of a Volkswagen. Tom's deformity could be present in a third of the human race after 400 years, if Rain got knocked up in the 20th century.