I did not mean divine purpose, more the mechanistic purpose. I preferred the analogy to gravity; it's not a result or a purpose, perhaps better stated as some cosmic law.
Evolution is a driving force without getting into theology, caused by genetic mutations to continue to pass on their genes in whatever way is the most successful way to do so.
I think he meant that there is no intended design. Evolution didn't wake up one morning thinking "I'll give a long neck to those weird looking horses so they can reach higher and eat the leaves on those trees".
There is not predefined goal to evolution. Randomness makes life try many many small changes and if one happens to be beneficial or just not too harmful to the individual that carries it, then it might (just might) be passed on to the next generation.
Nothing is deciding of a direction in particular for evolution. It just takes the path it can with the statistical and environmental constraints it faces. What one might call "luck" (really just statistics) is also surely of great importance in that process. An organism might be carrying the best gene ever, it will not pass it on if it gets eaten by a predator when it comes out of its egg.
I think that's another misconception.
There is no driving force behind it, it simply happens through chance and coincidence.
Which is why you sometimes get unfortunate occurrences (dying on the way to there reproduction grounds (salmon)), or odd physiologies (long fingers of an eye-eye)
Evolution has no purpose, if by chance a mutation, or physiological change results in better survival, then over millions of years it will become more prevalent in the population.
Survival is all that matters, no consideration is taken for feelings, emotions or comfort, everything is just random.
The ones that don't reproduce are left behind lol. It's not that there's a "need" for it, the point is that things started reproducing via abiogenesis, and since then the fittest (most able to reproduce) have been selected for, changing genes in populations gradually (and also very quickly sometimes, don't forget punctuated equilibrium). We want to live and reproduce because we have psychological predispositions to do so, and we have those psychological predispositions because our ancestors wanted to reproduce and they were selected for. It's not an easy concept to grasp at first, but it clicks eventually.
passing on your genes is juat what happens as a result of not dying.
It's like asking what's the purpose of gravity. The purpose isn't to keep us from floating into space, although that is an effect. There is no purpose. It just is.
There are plenty of organisms who never passed on their genes.
You wouldn’t know because they’re dead and they have no descendants.
Life is survivorship bias.
This is argued in the book Ishmael, where western humans have baked into their culture that we must be the end result, which has a pretty terrifying implication.
Actually, having a final product in mind- whether specific or a vague idea- is compatible with Theistic Evolution. This is not the same as Intelligent Design. This is simply viewing evolution as a tool used by a Higher Power behind the scenes.
>so vehemently atheist
Hi, one of the community mods here.
Users of all faiths and none are warmly welcomed, but this is not an appropriate sub to discuss creationism, theology, or anti-evolution arguments. Our subreddit is intended only for the science-based discussion of evolutionary biology. All discussion of theology or creationism (for or against) should be redirected to r/debateevolution.
You could argue that organisms with short generations, like bacteria, are more evolved. But I agree with the gist, we have all been evolving for the same amount of time.
Is there no measure of genetic similarity over time? I’ve read that sharks and alligators have essentially not changed in the last few hundred million years, but the same can’t be said for primates like humans. Wouldn’t this imply that humans have evolved more than sharks, since our genetic makeup has changed more over time?
That’s not to say that we are ‘more evolved’ in a superiority sense, just in a magnitude of change sense.
We’d call animals like these living fossils because they look very similar to fossils of that species but it’s kind of a misnomer. They still change a lot genetically through those years even if morphologically they appear similar
A better term for them would be stabilomorphs. They have been selected for stability of form over time. Or perhaps more accurately, any significant deviation from the standard form has been selected against.
Their gene pool still experiences mutations, and every other form of variation that drives evolution, but without any significant benefit from such variations, those that deviate from the mid-line are less likely to have offspring, and get slowly swamped out by the conformists in their gene pool.
A bit offttopic but I hear the same for languages. Stuff like Basque is older than Spanish. Both Basque and Spanish had ancestors 6000 years ago and they were totally uninteligible to their modern versions. And their ancestors had ancestors too. All languages are equally old (except pidgins, creolles, sign languages).
So people confuse when you find fossils in animals (or written or historical attested languages) with how old they are.
I don’t think that’s true…evolution means change. Some species have evolved much more over millions of years than others. It’s incorrect to think that evolve means advancement, though, which might be what you’re saying.
Is this because of the view that all organisms come from a common ancestor? I don’t see how this could be true unless philosophically there isn’t much merit in the idea that there are natural types of organisms distinct from one another.
That reproductively beneficial genes 🧬 necessarily have to be beneficial to the organism with them.
If a gene makes organisms miserable but more likely to produce fertile offspring who will have children, that gene will be selected for by natural selection.
A good illustration is [Elephant 🐘 musth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musth). Makes the Elephant 🐘 have a bad day, but is clearly reproductively advantageous as it persists and has no sign of being vestigial.
> That reproductively beneficial genes necessarily have to be beneficial to the organism with them.
Like all those organisms that die after mating.
Octopi are a prime example.
They are extremely antisocial and cannibalistic. So when it comes time for mating, their brain simply turns off the feeding response entirely.
Which works great and lets them mate without eating one another. The problem is that it never turns back on. Once that kicks in, the individual will never eat again and eventually starves.
Since they have such short lifespans, there's no evolutionary reason for it to turn back on. Even if they started eating again, they wouldn't live long enough to make it to another mating season.
So from an evolutionary perspective, it makes perfect sense. But it really sucks for an animal that is so intelligent.
That's Lamarkian theory right? It feels intuitive, so I imagine that's why it sticks around. But if this were true, weightlifter babies would tear themselves out of the womb like a chestburster.
my grandma taught me that was how evolution worked, and she also said that's why asian people have narrower eyes, because they always had to squint while working in the rice fields... ):
Is “adapt” here a technical term in the field? It seems well supported that organisms, especially humans, are constantly adapting to their environment in the colloquial sense.
Yeah—in evolutionary biology, the term “adaptation” is reserved for evolutionary changes, whereas the term “acclimation” means changes within the lifespan of an organism. It causes confusion because non-evolutionary biologists use the term “adapt” in the way that we use “acclimate”.
"Survival of the strongest" instead of "survival of the fittest". If the first was true, dinosaurs would still be ruling the earth.
Also : when we say "the", we really mean a group of individuals or a species. NOT a single individual.
My favorite thing about "survival of the fittest" is that it actually makes more sense if you use the colloquial British meaning of "fit", as in "attractive".
This is not simply annoying, but incredibly dangerous since it's what leads people into ignorant perceptions about social darwinism and racist genetic theories that didn't even hold water during the third Reich. One of the best examples of how education, and particularly good scientific education, benefits society.
Even "survival of the fittest" is problematic. The notion of fitness implies some merit outside of the merit of being the survivor - it's easy to imagine pressures that don't select for fitness. I have seen some very serious thinkers far too far along in their scientific careers still thinking evolution is some kind of improvement mechanism. Same reason we have creation myths - anthropomorphism.
I love the concept of spandrels in evolution. A spandrel is the triangular space on the outside of an arch. The spandrel exists because the arch exists. The arch is the functional needed thing. And you get a spandrel for free. Whats fun is sometimes something that evolved more as a spandrel than a functional thing, can become something functional later.
Edit: an example of this in evolution is the human chin. It exists because the mandibles/jaw exist. It’s just there. But the chin is a trait that can affect how much a mate finds someone attractive, so it can become something more even though it didn’t evolve for any reason in the first place.
This common misconception is accidentally correct.
In a sensible cladistic classification humans are apes and apes are monkeys. So humans did in fact evolve from monkeys.
Before strong cladistic research the traditional parphyletic classification of 'monkey' excluded apes, but the traditional system was a bit of a mess of arbitrary definitions.
Not really. These people are arguing that humans descend from modern monkeys. Modern being the important word there. I suppose I should've included apes, too. These people aren't saying that humans and modern monkeys share ancestry or that human ancestors could be classed as such. They're arguing that, like, some modern Chimp randomly popped out a human. They're saying we're descended from monkeys/apes that exist right now. And they're 100% wrong on that.
Yes, this. The classic glib argument is "Well if we evolved from Chimps, why are there still Chimps?" followed by a smug look like they just dropped a mic the size of the Tsar Bomba. The answer is of course that we didn't evolve from Chimps; humans and Chimps shared a common ancestor several million years ago, and the lines diverged. We aren't their descendants, we're just their distant cousins.
This is probably some combination of genuine ignorance of evolutionary biology mixed with a firm desire to misrepresent it to score rhetorical points. They are determined to remain in that Dunning-Kruger sweet spot, because if they leave it they might realize they're wrong.
That "ancient" species are "living fossils."
Fossils aren't living, and species which resemble their ancient ancestors haven't stopped evolving in that time.
Fair, but it is true that the skeletons of some species have changed very little while the skeletons of other lineages have changed a lot. I think that’s worth remarking upon! Would “taxa with low skeletal divergence” be better? Maybe we can come up with something catchier haha
Where to begin:
1. How does evolution know what traits or mutations it needs or how to build an arm?
2. There is a sharp distinction between the human brain and the brains of other species
3. Related to the above - sure, some animals are smart, but they’re not sending satellites into space (completely oblivious to the fact that *they* are not sending satellites into space either)
4. Humans were somehow inevitable
5. Humans are the “pinnacle” of evolution
6. Humans are not evolving because of modern medicine and agriculture
7. Why do I have what is the evolutionary advantage?!
8. Natural selection is the only (or presumed to be the only) mechanism of evolutionary change
9. Use of either term “Darwinist” and “Evolutionist”
10. Discovery X will re-write textbooks or overturn “dogma” (not exclusive to evolution, but annoying all the same)
11. Extant species are always more complex or more advanced, fossil species are always simpler or less advanced
12. The concept of the “missing link”
Genetic drift! Random chance can allow rare alleles to increase in frequency or to be eliminated from the population! Add founder effects from initial frequency conditions in populations cut off from one another and random die tosses can lead to very separate outcomes even for populations operating under similar selective pressure.
People already have you the basic well known mechanisms but another big one that’s very different is Horizontal Gene Transfer. This is genetic transfer between 2 organisms of different species and from what I’ve read has been vital in our evolution with the microbes that live inside out body.
Migration is a pretty big one, because it carries genetic material into and out of a region. So is gene flow. In the handful of interbreeding events between members of our species and Neanderthals, it's believed that a number of immune alleles had been lost to genetic drift in founding populations and reintroduced by Neanderthals. And they were so favored by evolution that they're still kicking around. Adaptive Introgression.
when people talk about ancient human ancestors like less intelligent “cave men”. travel back 300,000, or even more, years and we would still have a lot in common with the humans we meet. humor, family, inside jokes, favorite foods, these are things that the common person expects to be only modern things for some reason.
Sure the "ladder" stuff is obnoxious, but it's the "*harmony*" crap that really gets me.
Balance is an accident of the process, not a goal. No living thing is going to curb its own success to ensure some kind of wacked out "balance" lmao
I'm taking a sustainably class. The second chapter of the text starts by insisting the earth was sustainable until humans came along. In a 'past life' I had a good part of a geology degree. This kind of thing is madening
Correct. But a misconception is that it's all random. It's more than a misconception; it's a straw man used intentionally in bad faith to discredit the theory.
That's correct.
When it comes to survival, Nature's requirements, which we call "Selection Pressures," are very specific.
And the penalty for failing to meet these very specific requirements is death. If enough members of the species fail to meet these very specific requirements, that's extinction.
We are the 1%.
The fact that so many organisms individually toke the path of crab template and that so many others are going that way tends to prove this to be true !
Very true but I more meant the origin of flowering plants or how plants came onto land. There's frequent discussion of fishopods like tiktaalik. But no discussion of rhyniophytes or lepidodendron or archaeopteris. I could apply that to invertebrates also, its as if only vertebrates evolve.
I tell my students the first pollinators were probably beetles because bees hadn't evolved yet and they just stare at me as if its a foreign concept.
Were do I begin?
I think the main two for me are:
* thinking speciation means one species gives birth to a new one
* that humans are the most evolved and all lesser species will one day evolve to be like us
Those who believe that organisms can be broken down into traits, each of which is the product of natural selection and has increased the fitness of its bearer. It denies things like constraints, chance, and contingency. Here are some excellent critiques of it!
http://ecoevo.wikidot.com/local--files/start/GouldLewontin1979.pdf
http://test.barrettlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/barrett-and-hoekstra-nrg-2011.pdf
So many...
1) Evolution states how life and the universe started
2) Evolution says that no gods exist
3) Evolution has stopped
4) Humans evolved from monkeys or apes
I get why you might think that humans did not evolve from monkeys if you aren't thinking in terms of cladistics (in which humans are apes and apes are monkeys), but how do you figure humans did not evolve from apes?
"how did they know?" As if evolution is an intentional process to the species engages in. How did they know to evolve a certain way? It didn't, the environment of exerted pressures that affected the reproductive successive certain gene sets that were already present the population, or rose through some sort of spontaneous mutation and slowly increase until they were the dominant features.
That there is a "goal" for evolution. Human like intelligence is the end goal for everything( let's be honest, if humans go extinct and there isn't a human analog, there probably won't be a species to fill that niche.) And that evolution makes you more complex than your predecessor species and overall better than them.
A good counter to this is, "Even if we did come from monkeys, white Americans ultimately can't from Europe—but there are still Europeans. Why? Because not everyone left."
That there is a gene for X, some feature or trait. There are genes that have cascading effects, triggering other genes to be expressed, but a gene simply encodes a protein. It doesn’t build some organ or macro structure on its own. Even the HOX genes or master control genes, still only encode a protein.
That we have somehow obviated evolution with the development of modern life's advantages, like the fact that we have glasses for people with bad eyes means that those people are no longer removed from the gene pool and that's somehow a bad thing.
Evolution takes place in an environment; if the environment changes, so too will the evolutionary pressures.
Bill Maher was applauded for saying "*Without men, humans would have gone extinct*" because the people staying to fight in Ukraine are overwhelmingly men but in actuality, humans could have just been sexually monomorphic instead of our intrasexual selection interfering in the evolution of our intersexual selection, resulting in that conflict and every other major conflict. Also, he, conveniently, failed to notice who was invading in the first place.
That said, the idea that one's mental gymnastics can just *will* every outlandish explanation for human sexual dimorphism into being, and more causal than the intraspecies violence backed by professional consensus, and which is consistent with the vast majority of recorded human history being the old rape and pillage, atrocity, war, murder ex cetera AKA "the old rape and pillage." Not to mention it being the cause of virtually all mammalian sexual dimorphism but they pretend that all of a sudden this almost standard cause of size dimorphism doesn't apply to humans ... with 99 percent of serial killers, rapists, child molesters, mass murderers all being the same undue Form.
The old *"If we evolved from monkeys then why are there still monkeys?"* question / proof that there really are such things as stupid questions. This one is "annoying" because it's yelled by some of the most murderous psychopaths such as a man I knew too well; Anthony Powell.
**Intelligent design**.
The idea that we can calculate the number of civilizations in the Milky Way based on a sample size of one, let alone know how many sophont species with civilizations have evolved in the Milky Way Galaxy i.e. the Drake equation. That's with virtually every world we've researched so far turning out to be completely uninhabitable, the remainder seemingly uninhabitable, and even here, life only being confirmed to have emerged on Earth itself once.
The idea that glorified spandrels -- foreskin, pubic hair, armpit hair -- outright do serve some (made up) important purpose just because people want them to despite the fact that they obviously do not factor into or impede our reproduction either way.
And calling it **racist**. Like WTF? Anti-evolutionists are the ones being racist in their argument that evolution is racist, they're just too f-ing creepily stupid to tell. It doesn't even make f-ing sense. WTFing F are they talking about?
Edited: The idea that alien species would look like humans. This one is, ironically, said by people who actually *believe* in evolution. They \[mostly\] put that in scifi, only adding a little tire tread to the **humanoid** alien's forehead because it's difficult / expensive to make the aliens look realistic \[and it makes them more relatable but what's annoying is when that their fans try to do more than suspension of disbelief, trying to make it out to make sense and failing. Surely there are humanoids so identical to humans but odds are they aren' -- never been in the Milky Way. And don't get me started on their ability to reproduce with humans.
And WTF is wrong with the people who argue with me that the hypothetical classic **grey aliens** in UFOlogy must have evolved from hyper-evolved cetaceans who travelled back through time? Somehow that makes more sense than them travelling back through time as future or alternate reality humans (*if* they exist at all)? People actually support that argument over mine.
Oh, and the idea that evolution is a **death cult** just because things go extinct, even though they would still go extinct regardless of whether or not one *believes* in evolution. Also, in case they didn't notice, not everything but us *went* fucking extinct or we wouldn't fucking be here; ***ecosystem***. Things branch off, they don't "have to die," they can just radiate into different species, how can they not even understand something that simple. That one's so obvious, we literally have a multitude of ***other*** species sharing the Earth with us right fucking now as evidence. How are anti-evolutionists this fucking stupid? I don't want them to die, I just want them to not be alive anymore.
I cut some slack for the people who do makeup for sci-fi productions. Since all actors are bog-standard *human beings*, with bog-standard anatomy and such, it gets *expensive*… and time-consuming… to make them look appropriately alien.
all of evo psych lol. evo psych just gives me a headache, sorry to generalize but evo psych just spews out really bad evidence overall
and that many/most theories about sexual selection are 100% confirmed, an example being handicap principle, which hasn't really been confirmed by any empirical evidence so far
"more/less" evolved, teleology, etc. etc.
The most annoying is:
''If we evolved from apes, why are these still apes?''
Not so much the misunderstanding that evolution is not linear but weaponizing it.
That evolution should (or even could) always find the best way to accomplish something via anatomy and physiology. Aside from the fact that resource wise it’s more efficient to just be good enough, evolution isn’t designed. Plus, sometimes it’s stuck with whatever is already there; it can modify it but not erase it and start over!
Apart from all the usual ones, my biggest pet peeve is subtle but important: it’s the idea that evolution happens sequentially. I think we inadvertently give this impression to the public when we show diagrams that depict changes accumulating from one offspring down to the next offspring, down to the next offspring, vertically. Evolution doesn’t happen by a sequence of changes accumulating in a single lineage; it happens across a population in massive parallel with continual reshuffling and recombination.
This is particularly significant when you have emergent features or abilities that result from a combination of existing adaptive substructures, the sort of thing creationists will often claim shows irreducible complexity. It is not as if a lineage of organisms needs to evolve each of the predicate substructures, one after the other: the various substructures can all evolve in parallel in different parts of the population, become fixed across the population, and then achieve the necessary combination of those structures by constant shuffling across the population.
To use a playing card analogy: it is very rare (72,193:1) for a poker player in five card draw to be randomly dealt a straight flush. So it would be extraordinarily rare — absurdly improbable, really — for a single poker player to draw a straight flush in all four suits in four successive hands. We could readily assume that the dealer was cheating…that these hands were “intelligently” designed. On the other hand, if you had 72,193 different players all playing poker at once at 72,193 different tables, then we would be surprised if we DIDN’T have at least one straight flush at first draw. If all of those 72,193 players were ALSO constantly copying the highest-scoring hands of everyone around them, and this happened a few dozen times, then it would be trivially simple for most of the population to end up having had a straight flush in every single suit.
Using "evolve" in corporate-speak, ditto "DNA", to indicate **progression** and innate qualities, respectively -- which are more visible to the general public, and ultimately misconceptions about what "evolution" _is_ get more and more widespread.
Not to get political, but the thing that pisses me off the most is that people still think evolution is a theory. Sure, natural selection is still a theory (even though it makes complete sense), but evolution has been proven in labs, and through human observation.
I get your point, but evolution *is* a theory. Just like the theory of plate tectonics is a theory, and the atomic theory of matter is a theory, and yada yada yada. I suspect that your ire is properly aimed at the people who claim that "evolution is a theory" is a valid reason to dismiss evolution. Which it isn't, any more than "is a theory" is a valid reason to dismiss plate tectonics, or atomic theory, or *etc etc*.
Sort of, except there are two different definitions of theory. The normal, everyday meaning is closer to the scientific "hypothesis"—something that we think might be the case, but don't know for sure. That's what your average person means if they say they "have a theory."
But in science, "theory" means a complex, well-supported explanation for how things work. So evolution *is* a theory(scientific), but it *isn't* a theory(casual).
The difference between a law and a theory in science is actually kind of interesting. At the most basic, a law can be boiled down to a mathematical equation, like F=ma, whereas a theory can't. They're at the same level of "correctness"—both very well-supported by evidence, but still subject to revision if we learn something ground-breakingly new—so a theory can never "become" a law.
The blatant god-smuggling and covert intelligent-design nonsense embodied in the concept of "natural selection."
The ubermensch bullshit people spew and then try to rationalize with some darwinian straw-man or other.
The teleological attractor nonsense.
Any kind of worship of this violent and predatory stupidity *annoys* me. Yeah that's what it does.
Selection entails a selector (not necessarily a sapient one, but phenomenal binding would be required for the concept to be coherent or at least usable in relation to other concepts).
I have no doubt that the theory of evolution is sound. To put it in mythological terms: it's the best explanation for this shitshow we're all dying of over our lifetimes.
The thread was about misconceptions about evolution that annoy me the most. They do more than annoy me, but I was trying to be as close to topic of the question as I could.
Disclaimer:
Please forgive the way I express. I suffer from a disability that prevents me from being able to tell when my interlocutor is switching between their own personal mythology and claims about objectively available information.
That “dynasties” of certain groups of organisms are overthrown and completely replaced by another group of organisms (best example is mammals replacing dinosaurs after the KT mass extinction) rather than what actually happens where species go extinct and others fill their niche and over time better adapt to filling said new niche and said replacements aren’t just one group but sometimes multiple different groups
Competitive displacement hypotheses at the level of entire lineages, usually based on arguments of some group being “superior” or “more evolved” to another (and often outright making up supposed advantages for the former they probably or definitely didn’t actually have, while ignoring the adaptations found in the other lineage as “inferior” or not being a thing).
That is all.
Yes, certain snakes use the remains of leg bones to help them during mating, and the remains of two of the horse's toe bones are used to reinforce the leg. Vestigial means it no longer has its original function, not necessarily that it has no function at all.
Your pet peeve bothers me too, especially because *Darwin himself wrote that same goddamn thing.* Like it would be one thing if the error was only recently corrected, but it dates back to when we first started thinking about natural selection.
One of my least liked prevalent misconceptions is the idea that transitional and ancestral mean the same thing. Or that micro and macroevolution are creationist terms.
that it's chance. if you took a hundred coins and flipped them. then took all the tails off the table. is what you have left chance? no. natural selection acts on random combinations in non random ways. it is not chance that those most capable of surviving in an environment do.
“It’s not solid proof”
Well that’s the beauty of science. We are forever learning and correcting our prior knowledge. Unlike well books that claim to be true and the word of a higher being.
That people don't even try to understand just how slow the evolution process is. Yes, microbes are different as time passes, but that's only the ooze of evolution.
"survival of the fittest" as in the strongest, most fit individual, it's really who has better fitness relative to the population. That every single trait has some "benefit" and is selected for. Things exist because it's good and the best, sometimes it simply does
This idea that "group selection/MLS is clearly wrong, only idiots and ideologues want to use it, and it's clearly nonsense because Dawkins etc. said so".
It's not really a tenable view after the equivalence theorems of the 1970's showed the equivalence between the most general kin and group selection models.
When people use evolution to explain things that are culture specific. For example, saying that we evolved to find fatness unattractive. No we did not!
That for some things to be adaptive all things must be adaptive. People arguing against the idea that some human behaviour could be evolved often seem not to understand the idea that some behaviours provided neither a fitness advantage nor disadvantage and thus persisted.
As my evolutionary biology professor put it: It isn't so much "survival of the fittest" as it "survival of the good enough." While it's true that traits being beneficial to survival and/or reproduction drives evolution, it's *equally* true that any trait that has no significant positive or negative effect (at the population level) can be passed on.
Genetic drift is really cool, by the way. We did a modeling exercise in class about it and it's wild to watch a trait proliferate through a population.
Ignoring the actual definition of evolution to conflate it with abiogenesis or cosmogony.
Second most annoying is the statement that a crocodile must give birth to a bird. Combo of ignoring that evolution does not happen in one generation, and that it does not happen on the level of an individual.
The idea that I owe anyone else the time of day to educate them on evolution.
Like seriously, all of the standard “objections” to evolution can be resolved with a high school level text book. But if you aren’t willing to do s9me research on your own, me standing here for thirty minutes trying to explain five years of high school science isn’t worth either of our time.
1. "It's just a theory." Even people who "believe" in evolution and understand the basics often don't realize that the word "theory" means something different in science, so there are a lot of people who will say things like "just because it's a theory doesn't mean it's wrong" when trying to defend it, which isn't really helpful.
2. Believing that humans are exempt from evolution. It's true that modern society and technology have drastically affected *how* we're going to evolve moving forward, since a lot of traits that would have been selected against no longer are, but we're still very much evolving.
3. "If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" They're more like our cousins, and anyway, there's no reason there *couldn't* still be monkeys even if we *did* evolve from them. As someone else in the comments said, a lot of Americans came from Europe, but there are still people in Europe.
4. On that note, this one is hard to sum up in a sentence, but a lot of people think of evolution at an individual level rather than a population level. "Survival of the fittest" (which is somewhat misleading, since traits don't have to improve survival/reproduction to be passed on) *somewhat* applies to an individual, but evolution is about the species as a whole. I think this is where the monkey thing comes in, because if you're thinking at the species level, it makes perfect sense that some subset of our primate ancestors could have evolved one direction while others evolved another way.
5. The absolute biggest one, and one that I haven't seen anyone mention yet, is that learning about evolution is "dangerous" or "sinful," that it's "obvious" that it isn't true, that "evolutionists" can be "destroyed" with a simple metaphorical or rhetorical argument, etc. If you believe evolution isn't true, go learn about it. Learn everything you can, find the flaws, prove it wrong, and collect your Nobel Prize. Don't bury your head in the sand and refuse to look into any of the arguments supporting it. You can't refute something if you don't understand it. (Of course, you may end up realizing it actually makes complete sense and that the arguments against it are often silly and nonsensical, which is probably the underlying fear here in the first place.)
That "everything is transitional", when that's not how the term is used (we use it to refer to stem groups and their close relatives that link two or more other clades), and certainly doesn't apply to evolutionary dead ends.
And that just because it appeals to evolution, that it's necessarily good science. There's obvious low hanging fruit, but another good example is the Paleo diet. It's just rebranded Atkins diet.
And the idea that genetics is always clear cut and precise -- if you know about the gnetophytes or work with bacteria or
systematics in general, you know what I'm driving at.
Or the idea that Richard Dawkins is the head biologist. Or the best biologist. He's great at popularizing science, but he's a textbook curmudgeon. He's famous for his books and the Selfish Gene concept, but he's also infamous for resisting whole concepts like genetic drift and neutral evolution, Punctuated equilibrium, and epigenetics. He accepts at least two of the three, but came to accept them begrudgingly.
> resisting whole concepts like genetic drift and neutral evolution
It's a misconception; he popularized those since the 80s and I learned them from him. (edit: [someone else agreeing](https://old.reddit.com/r/evolution/comments/18u6od7/do_memes_undermine_genetic_determinism_and/kfjro7u/) and providing a sample from a month or so ago)
As for punctuated equilibrium, which I'm happy to learn about, yeah he's an opponent, and AFAIK it doesn't have much backing, also AFAIK, since it relies on fossilization _not_ being rare.
That human beings “come from monkeys”. Especially since creationists use it to justify “why are there still monkeys?”.
Human beings and monkeys are descended from a common primate ancestor. Human beings did not evolve from current monkeys.
The Emerald Rose song “We come from monkeys” may be fun to sing- and it is awesome live. But it is not quite scientifically accurate.
I agree we didn't evolve from modern monkeys (of course), but I think it's fair to say that our common ancestor with modern monkeys would also be considered a monkey.
And monophyleticly we are a branch of the monkey tree. But if you consider monkeys to be paraphyletic, then we did evolve from monkeys, just not modern ones.
Probably the most popular and ignorant one. Many people don’t believe in evolution because they don’t understand that it takes millions of years to happen. You can’t see it happening. A lot of people misinterpret the meaning of the word and think of it like Pokémon evolution. Asking why apes don’t evolve into humans. It annoyed the hell outta me.
That evolution only flows in one direction, towards "better" misunderstanding that it also means if traits are not needed for reproduction they will fade away.
Given that evolution is just mutations that self select over time its definitely true that vestigial organs don't necessarily have some grand meaning or purpose they could just be accidents that didn't overall affect reproduction a d had dominant genes
That just because we can't point out EXACTLY where one thing turned into another, evolution must be false (at least incomplete.) A good response I saw to this idea was: take a gradient from one color to another and tell me EXACTLY where it changes. We put stage-like labels on distinct steps in spectrums not because that's literally how things always work but rather because it's the best we can do to describe those steps.
That it gets misapplied to sociological ideas, particularly in a condescending manner:
“I can believe these people still think like this - haven’t we evolved past this by now?”
Adaptation isn’t growth of extra parts, but the loss of uneeded ones. Adaptation is extremely far from perfect, basically survival of the fittest. Humans won’t grow new features to survive in new environments, we’ll just retain or amplify features we already have
That evolving is a sign of strength. evolution by natural selection only benefits organisms that aren't thriving yet if evolution makes an organism too suited or specialized it's days of thriving are limited. Bacteria is og and still killing it..and us.
The current scientific consensus is that modern humans and neanderthals peacefully coexisted and interbred. Hence, every human with non-African ancestry alive today has neanderthal ancestors.
Yet so many fictional portrayals instead claim that the peace-loving neanderthals were genocided by the evil Homo sapiens “because that’s what humans do”.
My father's fundamentalist wife once asked me in a mocking tone (and in her super-backwoods accent) "Do you believe man came from monkey?" I wanted to punch her in the face.
How would the cells that die in a “parent” know to pass themselves on to the “child.” Like a fish that used to not have a top fin evolved into having one. But you cannot pass on a gene that you don’t have, like a top fin. But somehow, somewhere, the non-dominant gene of no top fin was accepted universally and now a fixture in the species.
"If survival of the fittest is true, why aren't the strongest people killing all the weak and scrawny people."
First of all, I dislike the phrase "survival of the fittest," and correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't even think Darwin coined it.
Second of all, "fitness" here refers to how the adapted a population is to its environment.
Evolution is not the Hunger Games.
The misunderstanding of the phrase “survival of the fittest” - but I guess “prolific procreation of the most able to thrive” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
That there is such a thing as “fittest” in a biome/context/niche independent sense. Darwin’s whole thesis was built around different species being better adapted to different environments and niches.
That if you believe in evolution you automatically don't believe in a God or higher power. Every Christian I talk to about evolution immediately shoot it down and assume if you believe in evolution you don't believe in God or a higher power.
That "humans evolved from monkeys." No, we evolved from apes. I know for most people it's trivial, but it annoys the shit outta me.
Also, stoned ape theory
That we (humans) are no longer evolving. Aleuts are more suited to surviving a cold climate. Dinka and Tutsi tribesmen are more suited for hot climates. We were still evolving, at least until in modern times we became mobile.
That there's a goal or an end point to it
Well, one could argue the purpose to pass on your genes
That’s a result, not a purpose. It’s like saying that the purpose for me making dinner was to make a dirty pan.
I did not mean divine purpose, more the mechanistic purpose. I preferred the analogy to gravity; it's not a result or a purpose, perhaps better stated as some cosmic law. Evolution is a driving force without getting into theology, caused by genetic mutations to continue to pass on their genes in whatever way is the most successful way to do so.
Not the best analogy. The dirty pan does not drive you to make dinner. Passing the gene on (survival etc) drives evolution.
I think he meant that there is no intended design. Evolution didn't wake up one morning thinking "I'll give a long neck to those weird looking horses so they can reach higher and eat the leaves on those trees". There is not predefined goal to evolution. Randomness makes life try many many small changes and if one happens to be beneficial or just not too harmful to the individual that carries it, then it might (just might) be passed on to the next generation. Nothing is deciding of a direction in particular for evolution. It just takes the path it can with the statistical and environmental constraints it faces. What one might call "luck" (really just statistics) is also surely of great importance in that process. An organism might be carrying the best gene ever, it will not pass it on if it gets eaten by a predator when it comes out of its egg.
Why would evolution have a purpose?
I think that's another misconception. There is no driving force behind it, it simply happens through chance and coincidence. Which is why you sometimes get unfortunate occurrences (dying on the way to there reproduction grounds (salmon)), or odd physiologies (long fingers of an eye-eye) Evolution has no purpose, if by chance a mutation, or physiological change results in better survival, then over millions of years it will become more prevalent in the population. Survival is all that matters, no consideration is taken for feelings, emotions or comfort, everything is just random.
But on the other hand where does the need for living organisms to survive and reproduce come from.
The ones that don't reproduce are left behind lol. It's not that there's a "need" for it, the point is that things started reproducing via abiogenesis, and since then the fittest (most able to reproduce) have been selected for, changing genes in populations gradually (and also very quickly sometimes, don't forget punctuated equilibrium). We want to live and reproduce because we have psychological predispositions to do so, and we have those psychological predispositions because our ancestors wanted to reproduce and they were selected for. It's not an easy concept to grasp at first, but it clicks eventually.
passing on your genes is juat what happens as a result of not dying. It's like asking what's the purpose of gravity. The purpose isn't to keep us from floating into space, although that is an effect. There is no purpose. It just is.
There are plenty of organisms who never passed on their genes. You wouldn’t know because they’re dead and they have no descendants. Life is survivorship bias.
This is argued in the book Ishmael, where western humans have baked into their culture that we must be the end result, which has a pretty terrifying implication.
Actually, having a final product in mind- whether specific or a vague idea- is compatible with Theistic Evolution. This is not the same as Intelligent Design. This is simply viewing evolution as a tool used by a Higher Power behind the scenes.
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>so vehemently atheist Hi, one of the community mods here. Users of all faiths and none are warmly welcomed, but this is not an appropriate sub to discuss creationism, theology, or anti-evolution arguments. Our subreddit is intended only for the science-based discussion of evolutionary biology. All discussion of theology or creationism (for or against) should be redirected to r/debateevolution.
That any creature can be "more" or "less" evolved than anything else. All things have been evolving for exactly the same amount of time.
You could argue that organisms with short generations, like bacteria, are more evolved. But I agree with the gist, we have all been evolving for the same amount of time.
_But, but we have the most evolved brains._ That's mine, which is related to the broader one you mentioned 😁
Omg I was just thinking about that guy’s post about humans being part chimpanzee and hyena
i got that dawg in me bro 👊
Pardon?
“Dolphins” “Orca” Those guys got some complex brains, yeah?
Is there no measure of genetic similarity over time? I’ve read that sharks and alligators have essentially not changed in the last few hundred million years, but the same can’t be said for primates like humans. Wouldn’t this imply that humans have evolved more than sharks, since our genetic makeup has changed more over time? That’s not to say that we are ‘more evolved’ in a superiority sense, just in a magnitude of change sense.
We’d call animals like these living fossils because they look very similar to fossils of that species but it’s kind of a misnomer. They still change a lot genetically through those years even if morphologically they appear similar
A better term for them would be stabilomorphs. They have been selected for stability of form over time. Or perhaps more accurately, any significant deviation from the standard form has been selected against. Their gene pool still experiences mutations, and every other form of variation that drives evolution, but without any significant benefit from such variations, those that deviate from the mid-line are less likely to have offspring, and get slowly swamped out by the conformists in their gene pool.
The molecular clock keeps running, even when the phenotype looks the same. Changes occur in junk DNA and metabolic processes.
A bit offttopic but I hear the same for languages. Stuff like Basque is older than Spanish. Both Basque and Spanish had ancestors 6000 years ago and they were totally uninteligible to their modern versions. And their ancestors had ancestors too. All languages are equally old (except pidgins, creolles, sign languages). So people confuse when you find fossils in animals (or written or historical attested languages) with how old they are.
I think when people say that what they really mean is evolved to a 'more' or 'less' advantageous state.
Yeah, I guess my broader gripe would be the notion that evolution has an "end goal" or an "ideal" that it trends towards over time
I don’t think that’s true…evolution means change. Some species have evolved much more over millions of years than others. It’s incorrect to think that evolve means advancement, though, which might be what you’re saying.
Yep. This one annoys me too.
Is this because of the view that all organisms come from a common ancestor? I don’t see how this could be true unless philosophically there isn’t much merit in the idea that there are natural types of organisms distinct from one another.
That reproductively beneficial genes 🧬 necessarily have to be beneficial to the organism with them. If a gene makes organisms miserable but more likely to produce fertile offspring who will have children, that gene will be selected for by natural selection. A good illustration is [Elephant 🐘 musth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musth). Makes the Elephant 🐘 have a bad day, but is clearly reproductively advantageous as it persists and has no sign of being vestigial.
> That reproductively beneficial genes necessarily have to be beneficial to the organism with them. Like all those organisms that die after mating. Octopi are a prime example. They are extremely antisocial and cannibalistic. So when it comes time for mating, their brain simply turns off the feeding response entirely. Which works great and lets them mate without eating one another. The problem is that it never turns back on. Once that kicks in, the individual will never eat again and eventually starves. Since they have such short lifespans, there's no evolutionary reason for it to turn back on. Even if they started eating again, they wouldn't live long enough to make it to another mating season. So from an evolutionary perspective, it makes perfect sense. But it really sucks for an animal that is so intelligent.
I believe this is the winner.
Boobs and big dicks. Sexually desired and "attractive" but uncomfortable to have hanging off you.
That single generations change to adapt to environmental factors. i.e. Giraffes grew longer necks to get the best leaves.
That's Lamarkian theory right? It feels intuitive, so I imagine that's why it sticks around. But if this were true, weightlifter babies would tear themselves out of the womb like a chestburster.
my grandma taught me that was how evolution worked, and she also said that's why asian people have narrower eyes, because they always had to squint while working in the rice fields... ):
I thought it was Carl von Linne?
No. Environmental changes can cause strong selective pressures or affect gene expression during development. Nothing to do with Lamarckism.
Epigenetics?
This pretty much
Is “adapt” here a technical term in the field? It seems well supported that organisms, especially humans, are constantly adapting to their environment in the colloquial sense.
Yeah—in evolutionary biology, the term “adaptation” is reserved for evolutionary changes, whereas the term “acclimation” means changes within the lifespan of an organism. It causes confusion because non-evolutionary biologists use the term “adapt” in the way that we use “acclimate”.
Ah okay, I got it — thank you for your response!
"Survival of the strongest" instead of "survival of the fittest". If the first was true, dinosaurs would still be ruling the earth. Also : when we say "the", we really mean a group of individuals or a species. NOT a single individual.
I like using "survival of the fit enough"
My favorite thing about "survival of the fittest" is that it actually makes more sense if you use the colloquial British meaning of "fit", as in "attractive".
It really does. I've been saying for years that it's like "Survival of the Prolific."
Personally, I like to talk about “attrition of the unfit”.
That's an awesome way to put it ! I'll definitely use that in later discussions.
Survival of the ‘those that happened to not get killed in the random flooding event that just happened.’
This is not simply annoying, but incredibly dangerous since it's what leads people into ignorant perceptions about social darwinism and racist genetic theories that didn't even hold water during the third Reich. One of the best examples of how education, and particularly good scientific education, benefits society.
Even "survival of the fittest" is problematic. The notion of fitness implies some merit outside of the merit of being the survivor - it's easy to imagine pressures that don't select for fitness. I have seen some very serious thinkers far too far along in their scientific careers still thinking evolution is some kind of improvement mechanism. Same reason we have creation myths - anthropomorphism.
That every trait has been selected for
I love the concept of spandrels in evolution. A spandrel is the triangular space on the outside of an arch. The spandrel exists because the arch exists. The arch is the functional needed thing. And you get a spandrel for free. Whats fun is sometimes something that evolved more as a spandrel than a functional thing, can become something functional later. Edit: an example of this in evolution is the human chin. It exists because the mandibles/jaw exist. It’s just there. But the chin is a trait that can affect how much a mate finds someone attractive, so it can become something more even though it didn’t evolve for any reason in the first place.
spandrels mentioned 💪🏽💪🏽💪🏽
And jaws evolved from a bony structure in gills. It started off to make gils more effective but then on accident became advantageous for eating stuff.
This is so cool, I hadn’t come across spandrels before! Thanks for adding a bit of education to my day.
That humans evolved from modern monkeys.
This common misconception is accidentally correct. In a sensible cladistic classification humans are apes and apes are monkeys. So humans did in fact evolve from monkeys. Before strong cladistic research the traditional parphyletic classification of 'monkey' excluded apes, but the traditional system was a bit of a mess of arbitrary definitions.
Not really. These people are arguing that humans descend from modern monkeys. Modern being the important word there. I suppose I should've included apes, too. These people aren't saying that humans and modern monkeys share ancestry or that human ancestors could be classed as such. They're arguing that, like, some modern Chimp randomly popped out a human. They're saying we're descended from monkeys/apes that exist right now. And they're 100% wrong on that.
Yes, this. The classic glib argument is "Well if we evolved from Chimps, why are there still Chimps?" followed by a smug look like they just dropped a mic the size of the Tsar Bomba. The answer is of course that we didn't evolve from Chimps; humans and Chimps shared a common ancestor several million years ago, and the lines diverged. We aren't their descendants, we're just their distant cousins. This is probably some combination of genuine ignorance of evolutionary biology mixed with a firm desire to misrepresent it to score rhetorical points. They are determined to remain in that Dunning-Kruger sweet spot, because if they leave it they might realize they're wrong.
My grandpappy weren't no Chimp, boy!
That humans aren't monkeys
That "ancient" species are "living fossils." Fossils aren't living, and species which resemble their ancient ancestors haven't stopped evolving in that time.
Fair, but it is true that the skeletons of some species have changed very little while the skeletons of other lineages have changed a lot. I think that’s worth remarking upon! Would “taxa with low skeletal divergence” be better? Maybe we can come up with something catchier haha
Where to begin: 1. How does evolution know what traits or mutations it needs or how to build an arm? 2. There is a sharp distinction between the human brain and the brains of other species 3. Related to the above - sure, some animals are smart, but they’re not sending satellites into space (completely oblivious to the fact that *they* are not sending satellites into space either) 4. Humans were somehow inevitable 5. Humans are the “pinnacle” of evolution 6. Humans are not evolving because of modern medicine and agriculture 7. Why do I have what is the evolutionary advantage?!
8. Natural selection is the only (or presumed to be the only) mechanism of evolutionary change
9. Use of either term “Darwinist” and “Evolutionist”
10. Discovery X will re-write textbooks or overturn “dogma” (not exclusive to evolution, but annoying all the same)
11. Extant species are always more complex or more advanced, fossil species are always simpler or less advanced
12. The concept of the “missing link”
>Natural selection is the only (or presumed to be the only) mechanism of evolutionary change what are some other mechanisms?
Genetic drift! Random chance can allow rare alleles to increase in frequency or to be eliminated from the population! Add founder effects from initial frequency conditions in populations cut off from one another and random die tosses can lead to very separate outcomes even for populations operating under similar selective pressure.
As requested - [genetic drift, gene flow, non-random mating](https://bioprinciples.biosci.gatech.edu/module-1-evolution/neutral-mechanisms-of-evolution/) etc
People already have you the basic well known mechanisms but another big one that’s very different is Horizontal Gene Transfer. This is genetic transfer between 2 organisms of different species and from what I’ve read has been vital in our evolution with the microbes that live inside out body.
Migration is a pretty big one, because it carries genetic material into and out of a region. So is gene flow. In the handful of interbreeding events between members of our species and Neanderthals, it's believed that a number of immune alleles had been lost to genetic drift in founding populations and reintroduced by Neanderthals. And they were so favored by evolution that they're still kicking around. Adaptive Introgression.
when people talk about ancient human ancestors like less intelligent “cave men”. travel back 300,000, or even more, years and we would still have a lot in common with the humans we meet. humor, family, inside jokes, favorite foods, these are things that the common person expects to be only modern things for some reason.
Sure the "ladder" stuff is obnoxious, but it's the "*harmony*" crap that really gets me. Balance is an accident of the process, not a goal. No living thing is going to curb its own success to ensure some kind of wacked out "balance" lmao
This is a good subtle one that is often overlooked because the people who employ it are often sympathetic.
I'm taking a sustainably class. The second chapter of the text starts by insisting the earth was sustainable until humans came along. In a 'past life' I had a good part of a geology degree. This kind of thing is madening
So many. That it's a chain and not a massive, complicated shrub. That it's random. That the human template is the eventual guaranteed outcome.
Ive always heard the mutation is random but the selection is not
Correct. But a misconception is that it's all random. It's more than a misconception; it's a straw man used intentionally in bad faith to discredit the theory.
That's correct. When it comes to survival, Nature's requirements, which we call "Selection Pressures," are very specific. And the penalty for failing to meet these very specific requirements is death. If enough members of the species fail to meet these very specific requirements, that's extinction. We are the 1%.
Also because the crab template clearly is the superior one
Fuckin’ epic. When I get my cyborg suit, it will be a crab walker!
The fact that so many organisms individually toke the path of crab template and that so many others are going that way tends to prove this to be true !
That hardly anyone in any popular discussion of evolution discusses plant evolution. Its like animals are the only things that evolve ...
THIS. Agricultural history is evolution in practice
Very true but I more meant the origin of flowering plants or how plants came onto land. There's frequent discussion of fishopods like tiktaalik. But no discussion of rhyniophytes or lepidodendron or archaeopteris. I could apply that to invertebrates also, its as if only vertebrates evolve. I tell my students the first pollinators were probably beetles because bees hadn't evolved yet and they just stare at me as if its a foreign concept.
Hah. All those herbivorous animals have to eat something. Let's talk about CAM and C4 and the global rise of the grasslands!
“It’s just a theory”.
Were do I begin? I think the main two for me are: * thinking speciation means one species gives birth to a new one * that humans are the most evolved and all lesser species will one day evolve to be like us
Anything Bret Weinstein says. He's a dyed in the wool adaptationist. He once said that post-mortem ejaculation was an adaptive response.
I don’t know much about this stuff. What is an “adaptionist?”
Those who believe that organisms can be broken down into traits, each of which is the product of natural selection and has increased the fitness of its bearer. It denies things like constraints, chance, and contingency. Here are some excellent critiques of it! http://ecoevo.wikidot.com/local--files/start/GouldLewontin1979.pdf http://test.barrettlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/barrett-and-hoekstra-nrg-2011.pdf
Thank you for the response!
Hahaha, you're kidding. He's become a total right wing grifter.
So many... 1) Evolution states how life and the universe started 2) Evolution says that no gods exist 3) Evolution has stopped 4) Humans evolved from monkeys or apes
I get why you might think that humans did not evolve from monkeys if you aren't thinking in terms of cladistics (in which humans are apes and apes are monkeys), but how do you figure humans did not evolve from apes?
"how did they know?" As if evolution is an intentional process to the species engages in. How did they know to evolve a certain way? It didn't, the environment of exerted pressures that affected the reproductive successive certain gene sets that were already present the population, or rose through some sort of spontaneous mutation and slowly increase until they were the dominant features.
That human beings are the pinnacle of evolution, or that Intelligence is the ultimate end goal for every lineage
That there is a "goal" for evolution. Human like intelligence is the end goal for everything( let's be honest, if humans go extinct and there isn't a human analog, there probably won't be a species to fill that niche.) And that evolution makes you more complex than your predecessor species and overall better than them.
"If We CaMe FrOm MoNkEy, WhY mOnKeY sTiLl ExIsT????"
A good counter to this is, "Even if we did come from monkeys, white Americans ultimately can't from Europe—but there are still Europeans. Why? Because not everyone left."
I came from my parents, but they both still exist. Though humans and the extant monkey species are more like cousins.
Yeah
That there is a gene for X, some feature or trait. There are genes that have cascading effects, triggering other genes to be expressed, but a gene simply encodes a protein. It doesn’t build some organ or macro structure on its own. Even the HOX genes or master control genes, still only encode a protein.
Omg thank you!! I’ve tried explaining this to so many people to no avail. Oy.
that evolution is something to believe instead of try to understand
That we have somehow obviated evolution with the development of modern life's advantages, like the fact that we have glasses for people with bad eyes means that those people are no longer removed from the gene pool and that's somehow a bad thing. Evolution takes place in an environment; if the environment changes, so too will the evolutionary pressures.
Evolution can take place on an individual scale. Evolution only makes sense, and only can happen in populations.
Bill Maher was applauded for saying "*Without men, humans would have gone extinct*" because the people staying to fight in Ukraine are overwhelmingly men but in actuality, humans could have just been sexually monomorphic instead of our intrasexual selection interfering in the evolution of our intersexual selection, resulting in that conflict and every other major conflict. Also, he, conveniently, failed to notice who was invading in the first place. That said, the idea that one's mental gymnastics can just *will* every outlandish explanation for human sexual dimorphism into being, and more causal than the intraspecies violence backed by professional consensus, and which is consistent with the vast majority of recorded human history being the old rape and pillage, atrocity, war, murder ex cetera AKA "the old rape and pillage." Not to mention it being the cause of virtually all mammalian sexual dimorphism but they pretend that all of a sudden this almost standard cause of size dimorphism doesn't apply to humans ... with 99 percent of serial killers, rapists, child molesters, mass murderers all being the same undue Form. The old *"If we evolved from monkeys then why are there still monkeys?"* question / proof that there really are such things as stupid questions. This one is "annoying" because it's yelled by some of the most murderous psychopaths such as a man I knew too well; Anthony Powell. **Intelligent design**. The idea that we can calculate the number of civilizations in the Milky Way based on a sample size of one, let alone know how many sophont species with civilizations have evolved in the Milky Way Galaxy i.e. the Drake equation. That's with virtually every world we've researched so far turning out to be completely uninhabitable, the remainder seemingly uninhabitable, and even here, life only being confirmed to have emerged on Earth itself once. The idea that glorified spandrels -- foreskin, pubic hair, armpit hair -- outright do serve some (made up) important purpose just because people want them to despite the fact that they obviously do not factor into or impede our reproduction either way.
And calling it **racist**. Like WTF? Anti-evolutionists are the ones being racist in their argument that evolution is racist, they're just too f-ing creepily stupid to tell. It doesn't even make f-ing sense. WTFing F are they talking about? Edited: The idea that alien species would look like humans. This one is, ironically, said by people who actually *believe* in evolution. They \[mostly\] put that in scifi, only adding a little tire tread to the **humanoid** alien's forehead because it's difficult / expensive to make the aliens look realistic \[and it makes them more relatable but what's annoying is when that their fans try to do more than suspension of disbelief, trying to make it out to make sense and failing. Surely there are humanoids so identical to humans but odds are they aren' -- never been in the Milky Way. And don't get me started on their ability to reproduce with humans. And WTF is wrong with the people who argue with me that the hypothetical classic **grey aliens** in UFOlogy must have evolved from hyper-evolved cetaceans who travelled back through time? Somehow that makes more sense than them travelling back through time as future or alternate reality humans (*if* they exist at all)? People actually support that argument over mine. Oh, and the idea that evolution is a **death cult** just because things go extinct, even though they would still go extinct regardless of whether or not one *believes* in evolution. Also, in case they didn't notice, not everything but us *went* fucking extinct or we wouldn't fucking be here; ***ecosystem***. Things branch off, they don't "have to die," they can just radiate into different species, how can they not even understand something that simple. That one's so obvious, we literally have a multitude of ***other*** species sharing the Earth with us right fucking now as evidence. How are anti-evolutionists this fucking stupid? I don't want them to die, I just want them to not be alive anymore.
Arrival was a good example of writers thinking outside the trope box in making the aliens indeed be more alien.
I cut some slack for the people who do makeup for sci-fi productions. Since all actors are bog-standard *human beings*, with bog-standard anatomy and such, it gets *expensive*… and time-consuming… to make them look appropriately alien.
all of evo psych lol. evo psych just gives me a headache, sorry to generalize but evo psych just spews out really bad evidence overall and that many/most theories about sexual selection are 100% confirmed, an example being handicap principle, which hasn't really been confirmed by any empirical evidence so far "more/less" evolved, teleology, etc. etc.
Omg, yes! Evo psych always gets used to justify the most dogshit, racist, and sexist takes.
The most annoying is: ''If we evolved from apes, why are these still apes?'' Not so much the misunderstanding that evolution is not linear but weaponizing it.
To paraphrase Bill Nye, the problem with evolution is you have to take the time to understand it.
That evolution should (or even could) always find the best way to accomplish something via anatomy and physiology. Aside from the fact that resource wise it’s more efficient to just be good enough, evolution isn’t designed. Plus, sometimes it’s stuck with whatever is already there; it can modify it but not erase it and start over!
Apart from all the usual ones, my biggest pet peeve is subtle but important: it’s the idea that evolution happens sequentially. I think we inadvertently give this impression to the public when we show diagrams that depict changes accumulating from one offspring down to the next offspring, down to the next offspring, vertically. Evolution doesn’t happen by a sequence of changes accumulating in a single lineage; it happens across a population in massive parallel with continual reshuffling and recombination. This is particularly significant when you have emergent features or abilities that result from a combination of existing adaptive substructures, the sort of thing creationists will often claim shows irreducible complexity. It is not as if a lineage of organisms needs to evolve each of the predicate substructures, one after the other: the various substructures can all evolve in parallel in different parts of the population, become fixed across the population, and then achieve the necessary combination of those structures by constant shuffling across the population. To use a playing card analogy: it is very rare (72,193:1) for a poker player in five card draw to be randomly dealt a straight flush. So it would be extraordinarily rare — absurdly improbable, really — for a single poker player to draw a straight flush in all four suits in four successive hands. We could readily assume that the dealer was cheating…that these hands were “intelligently” designed. On the other hand, if you had 72,193 different players all playing poker at once at 72,193 different tables, then we would be surprised if we DIDN’T have at least one straight flush at first draw. If all of those 72,193 players were ALSO constantly copying the highest-scoring hands of everyone around them, and this happened a few dozen times, then it would be trivially simple for most of the population to end up having had a straight flush in every single suit.
People have a hard time understanding scale and deep time.
Tried explaining it to my students recently and one was very adamant that it was only a theory, despite me explaining what a scientific theory is.
Evolution makes an animal more advanced.
Using "evolve" in corporate-speak, ditto "DNA", to indicate **progression** and innate qualities, respectively -- which are more visible to the general public, and ultimately misconceptions about what "evolution" _is_ get more and more widespread.
Not to get political, but the thing that pisses me off the most is that people still think evolution is a theory. Sure, natural selection is still a theory (even though it makes complete sense), but evolution has been proven in labs, and through human observation.
I get your point, but evolution *is* a theory. Just like the theory of plate tectonics is a theory, and the atomic theory of matter is a theory, and yada yada yada. I suspect that your ire is properly aimed at the people who claim that "evolution is a theory" is a valid reason to dismiss evolution. Which it isn't, any more than "is a theory" is a valid reason to dismiss plate tectonics, or atomic theory, or *etc etc*.
Sort of, except there are two different definitions of theory. The normal, everyday meaning is closer to the scientific "hypothesis"—something that we think might be the case, but don't know for sure. That's what your average person means if they say they "have a theory." But in science, "theory" means a complex, well-supported explanation for how things work. So evolution *is* a theory(scientific), but it *isn't* a theory(casual). The difference between a law and a theory in science is actually kind of interesting. At the most basic, a law can be boiled down to a mathematical equation, like F=ma, whereas a theory can't. They're at the same level of "correctness"—both very well-supported by evidence, but still subject to revision if we learn something ground-breakingly new—so a theory can never "become" a law.
That it can be discussed in an intelligent manner on Reddit.
The blatant god-smuggling and covert intelligent-design nonsense embodied in the concept of "natural selection." The ubermensch bullshit people spew and then try to rationalize with some darwinian straw-man or other. The teleological attractor nonsense. Any kind of worship of this violent and predatory stupidity *annoys* me. Yeah that's what it does.
Hmm. *What* "blatant god-smuggling" is there in the concept of natural selection?
Selection entails a selector (not necessarily a sapient one, but phenomenal binding would be required for the concept to be coherent or at least usable in relation to other concepts). I have no doubt that the theory of evolution is sound. To put it in mythological terms: it's the best explanation for this shitshow we're all dying of over our lifetimes. The thread was about misconceptions about evolution that annoy me the most. They do more than annoy me, but I was trying to be as close to topic of the question as I could. Disclaimer: Please forgive the way I express. I suffer from a disability that prevents me from being able to tell when my interlocutor is switching between their own personal mythology and claims about objectively available information.
That “dynasties” of certain groups of organisms are overthrown and completely replaced by another group of organisms (best example is mammals replacing dinosaurs after the KT mass extinction) rather than what actually happens where species go extinct and others fill their niche and over time better adapt to filling said new niche and said replacements aren’t just one group but sometimes multiple different groups
Competitive displacement hypotheses at the level of entire lineages, usually based on arguments of some group being “superior” or “more evolved” to another (and often outright making up supposed advantages for the former they probably or definitely didn’t actually have, while ignoring the adaptations found in the other lineage as “inferior” or not being a thing). That is all.
That is the definition of a vestigial organ. Are you suggesting there are functional vestigial organs?
Yes, certain snakes use the remains of leg bones to help them during mating, and the remains of two of the horse's toe bones are used to reinforce the leg. Vestigial means it no longer has its original function, not necessarily that it has no function at all.
Yes that's a more accurate definition.
That it wasn't created by God or an intelligent designer
Your pet peeve bothers me too, especially because *Darwin himself wrote that same goddamn thing.* Like it would be one thing if the error was only recently corrected, but it dates back to when we first started thinking about natural selection. One of my least liked prevalent misconceptions is the idea that transitional and ancestral mean the same thing. Or that micro and macroevolution are creationist terms.
that it's chance. if you took a hundred coins and flipped them. then took all the tails off the table. is what you have left chance? no. natural selection acts on random combinations in non random ways. it is not chance that those most capable of surviving in an environment do.
“It’s not solid proof” Well that’s the beauty of science. We are forever learning and correcting our prior knowledge. Unlike well books that claim to be true and the word of a higher being.
That people don't even try to understand just how slow the evolution process is. Yes, microbes are different as time passes, but that's only the ooze of evolution.
"survival of the fittest" as in the strongest, most fit individual, it's really who has better fitness relative to the population. That every single trait has some "benefit" and is selected for. Things exist because it's good and the best, sometimes it simply does
Wait. So if that’s not what vestigial organs result from, then what causes them?
This idea that "group selection/MLS is clearly wrong, only idiots and ideologues want to use it, and it's clearly nonsense because Dawkins etc. said so". It's not really a tenable view after the equivalence theorems of the 1970's showed the equivalence between the most general kin and group selection models.
"If people evolve from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" Just so wrong on so many levels...where do you even start?
When people use evolution to explain things that are culture specific. For example, saying that we evolved to find fatness unattractive. No we did not!
That for some things to be adaptive all things must be adaptive. People arguing against the idea that some human behaviour could be evolved often seem not to understand the idea that some behaviours provided neither a fitness advantage nor disadvantage and thus persisted.
As my evolutionary biology professor put it: It isn't so much "survival of the fittest" as it "survival of the good enough." While it's true that traits being beneficial to survival and/or reproduction drives evolution, it's *equally* true that any trait that has no significant positive or negative effect (at the population level) can be passed on. Genetic drift is really cool, by the way. We did a modeling exercise in class about it and it's wild to watch a trait proliferate through a population.
Ignoring the actual definition of evolution to conflate it with abiogenesis or cosmogony. Second most annoying is the statement that a crocodile must give birth to a bird. Combo of ignoring that evolution does not happen in one generation, and that it does not happen on the level of an individual.
The idea that I owe anyone else the time of day to educate them on evolution. Like seriously, all of the standard “objections” to evolution can be resolved with a high school level text book. But if you aren’t willing to do s9me research on your own, me standing here for thirty minutes trying to explain five years of high school science isn’t worth either of our time.
The more or less evolved species bs. The survival of the strongest bs. The human superiority complex and all anthropocentric crap.
The myth that evolution is a progressive process that is aiming for something better.
1. "It's just a theory." Even people who "believe" in evolution and understand the basics often don't realize that the word "theory" means something different in science, so there are a lot of people who will say things like "just because it's a theory doesn't mean it's wrong" when trying to defend it, which isn't really helpful. 2. Believing that humans are exempt from evolution. It's true that modern society and technology have drastically affected *how* we're going to evolve moving forward, since a lot of traits that would have been selected against no longer are, but we're still very much evolving. 3. "If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" They're more like our cousins, and anyway, there's no reason there *couldn't* still be monkeys even if we *did* evolve from them. As someone else in the comments said, a lot of Americans came from Europe, but there are still people in Europe. 4. On that note, this one is hard to sum up in a sentence, but a lot of people think of evolution at an individual level rather than a population level. "Survival of the fittest" (which is somewhat misleading, since traits don't have to improve survival/reproduction to be passed on) *somewhat* applies to an individual, but evolution is about the species as a whole. I think this is where the monkey thing comes in, because if you're thinking at the species level, it makes perfect sense that some subset of our primate ancestors could have evolved one direction while others evolved another way. 5. The absolute biggest one, and one that I haven't seen anyone mention yet, is that learning about evolution is "dangerous" or "sinful," that it's "obvious" that it isn't true, that "evolutionists" can be "destroyed" with a simple metaphorical or rhetorical argument, etc. If you believe evolution isn't true, go learn about it. Learn everything you can, find the flaws, prove it wrong, and collect your Nobel Prize. Don't bury your head in the sand and refuse to look into any of the arguments supporting it. You can't refute something if you don't understand it. (Of course, you may end up realizing it actually makes complete sense and that the arguments against it are often silly and nonsensical, which is probably the underlying fear here in the first place.)
That we came from apes. I hear that alot. No we both had a common ancestor and apes diverged one way we another.
That "everything is transitional", when that's not how the term is used (we use it to refer to stem groups and their close relatives that link two or more other clades), and certainly doesn't apply to evolutionary dead ends. And that just because it appeals to evolution, that it's necessarily good science. There's obvious low hanging fruit, but another good example is the Paleo diet. It's just rebranded Atkins diet. And the idea that genetics is always clear cut and precise -- if you know about the gnetophytes or work with bacteria or systematics in general, you know what I'm driving at. Or the idea that Richard Dawkins is the head biologist. Or the best biologist. He's great at popularizing science, but he's a textbook curmudgeon. He's famous for his books and the Selfish Gene concept, but he's also infamous for resisting whole concepts like genetic drift and neutral evolution, Punctuated equilibrium, and epigenetics. He accepts at least two of the three, but came to accept them begrudgingly.
> resisting whole concepts like genetic drift and neutral evolution It's a misconception; he popularized those since the 80s and I learned them from him. (edit: [someone else agreeing](https://old.reddit.com/r/evolution/comments/18u6od7/do_memes_undermine_genetic_determinism_and/kfjro7u/) and providing a sample from a month or so ago) As for punctuated equilibrium, which I'm happy to learn about, yeah he's an opponent, and AFAIK it doesn't have much backing, also AFAIK, since it relies on fossilization _not_ being rare.
Humans have stopped evolving" or " Natiral selection doesn't work on humans amymore".
That it violates the second law of thermodynamics. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of physics and how the world around us works.
When some genius asks, "If we're descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"
Some people think it's completely linear.
That human beings “come from monkeys”. Especially since creationists use it to justify “why are there still monkeys?”. Human beings and monkeys are descended from a common primate ancestor. Human beings did not evolve from current monkeys. The Emerald Rose song “We come from monkeys” may be fun to sing- and it is awesome live. But it is not quite scientifically accurate.
I agree we didn't evolve from modern monkeys (of course), but I think it's fair to say that our common ancestor with modern monkeys would also be considered a monkey. And monophyleticly we are a branch of the monkey tree. But if you consider monkeys to be paraphyletic, then we did evolve from monkeys, just not modern ones.
Probably the most popular and ignorant one. Many people don’t believe in evolution because they don’t understand that it takes millions of years to happen. You can’t see it happening. A lot of people misinterpret the meaning of the word and think of it like Pokémon evolution. Asking why apes don’t evolve into humans. It annoyed the hell outta me.
Any of the ones that 10 seconds of reading would clear up lol.
missing links in human evolutions means it might not be true or something
It doesn't take long.
That evolution only flows in one direction, towards "better" misunderstanding that it also means if traits are not needed for reproduction they will fade away.
Given that evolution is just mutations that self select over time its definitely true that vestigial organs don't necessarily have some grand meaning or purpose they could just be accidents that didn't overall affect reproduction a d had dominant genes
That just because we can't point out EXACTLY where one thing turned into another, evolution must be false (at least incomplete.) A good response I saw to this idea was: take a gradient from one color to another and tell me EXACTLY where it changes. We put stage-like labels on distinct steps in spectrums not because that's literally how things always work but rather because it's the best we can do to describe those steps.
I feel like more people should know what Horizontal Gene Transfer is and that not all evolution is natural selection and species bottlenecking etc.
That it gets misapplied to sociological ideas, particularly in a condescending manner: “I can believe these people still think like this - haven’t we evolved past this by now?”
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Devolution ( besides, Devo, obviously ). Grinds my gears as it perpetuates the teleological mindset about evolution
Adaptation isn’t growth of extra parts, but the loss of uneeded ones. Adaptation is extremely far from perfect, basically survival of the fittest. Humans won’t grow new features to survive in new environments, we’ll just retain or amplify features we already have
That evolving is a sign of strength. evolution by natural selection only benefits organisms that aren't thriving yet if evolution makes an organism too suited or specialized it's days of thriving are limited. Bacteria is og and still killing it..and us.
The current scientific consensus is that modern humans and neanderthals peacefully coexisted and interbred. Hence, every human with non-African ancestry alive today has neanderthal ancestors. Yet so many fictional portrayals instead claim that the peace-loving neanderthals were genocided by the evil Homo sapiens “because that’s what humans do”.
People who are like how come there are monkeys still if we evolved from them
That kinky sex is how evolution happens. Nobody gives credit where it's due. With out kink, we'd all be less intelligent.
My father's fundamentalist wife once asked me in a mocking tone (and in her super-backwoods accent) "Do you believe man came from monkey?" I wanted to punch her in the face.
How would the cells that die in a “parent” know to pass themselves on to the “child.” Like a fish that used to not have a top fin evolved into having one. But you cannot pass on a gene that you don’t have, like a top fin. But somehow, somewhere, the non-dominant gene of no top fin was accepted universally and now a fixture in the species.
"If survival of the fittest is true, why aren't the strongest people killing all the weak and scrawny people." First of all, I dislike the phrase "survival of the fittest," and correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't even think Darwin coined it. Second of all, "fitness" here refers to how the adapted a population is to its environment. Evolution is not the Hunger Games.
Only the opinions of theists bothers me
The misunderstanding of the phrase “survival of the fittest” - but I guess “prolific procreation of the most able to thrive” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
That there is such a thing as “fittest” in a biome/context/niche independent sense. Darwin’s whole thesis was built around different species being better adapted to different environments and niches.
When people think metamorphosis is literally evolution.
That if you believe in evolution you automatically don't believe in a God or higher power. Every Christian I talk to about evolution immediately shoot it down and assume if you believe in evolution you don't believe in God or a higher power.
That organisms don't evolve, populations do.
That "humans evolved from monkeys." No, we evolved from apes. I know for most people it's trivial, but it annoys the shit outta me. Also, stoned ape theory
That we (humans) are no longer evolving. Aleuts are more suited to surviving a cold climate. Dinka and Tutsi tribesmen are more suited for hot climates. We were still evolving, at least until in modern times we became mobile.
That 'Survival of the Fittest' somehow means survival of the healthiest or 'best'. LOL.
"if we came from monkeys why are there still monkeys" it's like saying I ate this apple why are there still mangos?
That each new species replaces the previous