In Euphrictus, why would the lack of a clypeus be an evolutionary advantage?

Bugmom

Arachnolord
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May 28, 2012
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Where are you finding/seeing it stated that it's an evolutionary advantage?
 

Megaraptor12345

Arachnopeon
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Nov 8, 2016
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Where are you finding/seeing it stated that it's an evolutionary advantage?
Let me rephrase the question: Why would the lack of a clypeus evolve over other members with clypeuses (actually, what is the plural of clypeus?); what would let species without clypeae (maybe the plural? :)) survive whilst it's close relatives with clypei (another guess...) died out?
 

EulersK

Arachnonomicon
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Just because an animal developed a trait through evolution doesn't mean it was advantageous. It could be a matter of correlation rather than causation.
 

Marijan2

Arachnobaron
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Oct 21, 2012
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Just because an animal developed a trait through evolution doesn't mean it was advantageous. It could be a matter of correlation rather than causation.
Agreed, evolution is series of RANDOM transformations. Unadvantegeous ones usually fail to reproduce and pass in the long term, but neutral and good ones comes to pass(again, usually). There is no need for clypeus difference to be useful, it just happened and those animals with smaller and smaller gap(and in the end without it) just kept reproducing more than the ones with it.
 

awiec

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Evolution is merely a change in frequency of alleles in a population over a period of time. Sometimes those traits are selected upon and sometimes they are not. A lot is also up to chance, sometimes some sort of disaster wipes out a population entirely or leaves survivors that have a certain trait that now will increase in frequency in the population as they breed. So it's very possible that they had some other advantage that their relatives didn't but not due to the trait that you're interested in.
 
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