Last winter a friend of mine came up with the suggestion that I write a blog-post about what he termed "dead-ends of evolution"; meaning evolutionary adaptations that seem kind of counterproductive for today's environment (e.g. craving fatty foods in a supersize environment).
The idea of such a post was to address the commonly held -but false- believe that evolution means "improvement" of organisms. I still hope to get around to doing the research for this blog post, but after watching an outright awful video by the anti-evolution camp, I decided to start off with something else. The video I am talking about is truly amazing, in that a group of elderly men tries to seriously convince the viewer that
"evolution must be false, because else we should find new life forms in peanut butter jars"
(you can watch the video for yourself at Eric Johnson's excellent blog). As ridiculous as this sounds, I am always afraid that there are people out there who are confused enough about evolution and the conflicting messages they receive to take such arguments seriously. Indeed, there are quite a few popular misconceptions about evolution that I find repeated far too often, and so I've decided to address these in a couple of posts. I am of course not the first to write such a post (more like the 800thousandth), and given the general interest in evolutionary psychology among many readers of this blog, I might be preaching to the choir here, but perhaps there is one thing or the other in here which you had forgotten since your biology 101 class. So here we go:
- Evolution is not a theory about the origin of life (and this is possibly the least reason why the video linked to above is so stupid). Instead, evolution addresses how organisms change over time. More precisely actually evolution describes how genes and the frequency in which they appear in populations change over time. Hence, if you are skeptical about the possibility for spontaneous origination of life, this does not make you a skeptic about evolution, but a skeptic about abiogenesis.
- The Theory in evolutionary theory is not the theory that we use in our everyday language. Instead, it is - as your Webster's dictionary will confirm "a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain a phenomena <e.g. the wave theory of light, relativity theory, number theory>.
Sadly, we often use the word theory to mean something that is awaiting confirmation, and I've certainly heard people make this argument about evolutionary theory. There's usually not much I can respond to this, except for pulling out the dictionary and pointing to the difference between hypothesis and theory the way the terms are used in scientific contexts. - People sometimes ask why we don't see any evolution in humans today, but this is mainly because they are ignoring the relevant scales that we are dealing with here. However, and people too often neglect this, it is actually possible to observe evolution of organisms with much shorter replication cycles, such as E.Coli bacteria. In this sense, we can actually observe evolution in the lab.
- Humans did not evolve from todays monkeys. indeed, this should maybe been up at number one, but the frequency that people argue against evolution by pointing out that there should be no more monkeys since they should have all evolved into humans. The true relation between modern primates (e.g. humans and chimpanzees) is that we share a common ancestor more than 5 million years ago. That's a 5 with 6 zeros, and in a way takes you back to point 3.
- Evolution is not survival of the strongest and it is not "might is right". (Evolution is also not "social Darwinism" or "nazi ideology" as some conspiracy theorists would have you believe). Especially in its translation to other languages the often quoted phrase "survival of the fittest" often loses its true meaning. When evolutionary scholars speak of fitness, they do not mean strength, speed, particularly shiny feathers, sharp claws or even a particularly large prefrontal cortex. Instead, fitness simply means that an organism possesses traits which are particularly adaptive for its specific surroundings. In this sense, placing an organism into a different environment also changes its fitness, and in some environments strength can be advantageous, while in others it is totally insignificant...
After these five statements about what evolution is not, I guess I should write a statement about what evolution is, but I think that will work especially well with the planned "dead-ends post". Also, I plan to append the above misconceptions by a couple more in a second post in the near future, wherefore I'll just leave it at this for the time being. However, I'm very interested in your comments and in hearing about possible misconceptions you may have encountered and would like to see addressed in the next post. Even send your harshest criticism this way, as long as it's not based on experiments with peanut butter jars, that "prove" pasteurization has its merits.
