Blog Dilemma

To write about genetics and health insurance, or to blast people for abusing the word "evolved"...what a dilemma. My time is short.
For the sake of my readership, who prefers I spout about science, I'll go after the abuse of the word evolve.

Evolution, as argued by Darwin, is a noun. The verb is natural selection, by which randomness, competitiveness, and self-interest produce ever changing individuals in a species, until a time at which a new species exists with new, unique characteristics.

Quickly, my point is that evolution occurs because individuals in a species are either randomly lucky and happen to have a unique mutation that enables them to thrive better than their peers. Or it occurs because one member of a species is more effective at mating than its peers. Or it happens because one member of a species is more effective at preventing its peers from mating.

But as Matt Ridley argued in his book The Selfish Gene, individuals for the most part are not interested in the well-being of the rest of their species outside the members of their species that share some or all of that individual's genetic code. "Why should I help you," an individual asks, "you might rob me of my future mate!"

Anyway, humans helping each other, and sharing ideas, I have argued before, acts against the pressures of evolution, and it is telling that our modern species has probably existed for 200,000 years without a major evolutionary change. Most species 200,000 years ago looked very different than they do today, if they existed at all. You could almost say that social interaction, language, and the ability to "plan, do, review" is what has allowed us to rise as the dominant species on this planet.

It bothers me when people misuse the term evolution like "evolution of society" or "evolution of modern computers" because the laws of evolution really haven't been in play in most of these cases. The users of this phrase "evolution of (noun)" are mostly arguing that evolution is a movement from simplicity to complexity, however in many cases, evolution does quite the opposite.
Whales, at some point, were complex mammals roaming on land, with four legs, and probably looked something like a large dog or rat. Then they, for some reason, evolved back into the water, lost their legs and evolved very simple arms. The modern whale is much less complex than it used to be. Many insects are smaller, simpler versions of their ancestors who were giants, living in a past that had a lot more atmospheric oxygen than today.

Something people have trouble wrapping their heads around is that we are basically no more intelligent than we were 100,000 years ago when we could barely start a fire, lived in caves and crude shelters, and communicated with grunts and gestures. Somehow when people think of humans of the past, they imagine the GEICO caveman.


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