History UsefulNotes / Evolution

* This is one of the central tenets of Evolutionary Psychology, a field awash with, if not completely dominated by, pseudoscience. They take a common trait (eg. girls prefer pink and boys prefer blue [[note]] In fact, as recently as Victorian times this was the other way around with blue being the "female" colour and pink being "male" [[/note]].), assume it's a universal trait, and then find a post hoc rationalization (eg. boys were hunters, girls were gatherers that needed to be able to see berries). The field is mostly false because 1) those traits usually aren't universal (girls don't universally prefer pink and boys don't universally prefer blue), 2) there's no reason to suppose such a thing evolved rather than being a cultural issue (in China, everyone prefers pink because it's a shade of red and red is lucky, whereas in some places red is unlucky and associate with death because of blood), and 3) there's no way to test their random rationalizations. That's not to say that perhaps Evo Psych couldn't someday be a field worth studying, but right now it's a haven of racism, and misogyny.

* The first incorrect assumption is a somewhat pedantic one: modern humans did not evolve evolve from modern monkeys, or at least from ancestors that would be fully classed as monkeys; in fact, both humans and monkeys evolved from some common antecedent that pre-dated the emergence of the first monkeys. It would be more correct to ask "If people evolved from ''apes''...", except that we're still apes. One of our closest relative is the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo bonobo]], which [[SexTropes may explain a lot]].

An alternative terminology is "monophyletic" and "paraphyletic". A monophyletic group is (by definition) a clade. A group of organisms which is not monophyletic is paraphyletic. For example, "fish" is a paraphyletic group, because there exist organisms (e.g. all land vertebrates) which are descended from fish but are not fish. However "cat" is monophyletic (a clade) - all current cat species are descended from a single ancestral proto-cat, and all descendents of the proto-cat are in the group "cat". The classification of some groups is surprising - zebras are paraphyletic (any clade including all zebras also includes horses) as are brown (grizzly) bears (any clade including all brown bears also includes polar bears.)

* Evolution tells us how life changes once it's already here, not how it formed in the first place. The latter is known as abiogenesis and is the realm of biochemists and organic chemists. Not evolutionary biologists.

* The second incorrect assumption is that evolution is a ladder of progress, and that an entire species must evolve into a different species that ''supplants'' the original species, leaving no members of it behind. Evolution, in fact, is not a ladder so much as a ''branching tree'' of contingency. Speciation usually occurs when a ''small group'' from a much larger population is ''reproductively isolated'' from the rest of that population, most often through geographic isolation. This smaller population continues to breed amongst themselves, and will generally be operating under different selection pressures than the population they came from. Eventually, so many genetic differences will accrue that the members of this new population can no longer interbreed with the other population, and it's at this point that we say a new species has arisen. We started with ''one species'', and ended up with ''two species.''\\

This same mechanism happened with our ancient ancestors: We started with one large population pool in Africa that was pretty much chimp-like, then about 4-6 million years ago some of those chimp-like ancestors got separated from the rest of them and began exploiting a slightly different biological niche in a different part of Africa, until they'd diverged far enough from their ancestors that they could no longer interbreed with the rest of the chimp-like creatures. Meanwhile, because those original chimp-like creatures were now isolated from ''us'', they went on to become modern chimps.

** Evolutionary arms races can lead to adaptations that through cost of having it outways the benefits it provides will cause one or both species to go extinct and if a predator causes it's food source to go extinct it will go extinct too.

** Added on to this idea is the idea of competitive altruism. Where organisms have to find the right balance between being cooperative and beinng choosy. If they are too cooperative than they can easily get taken advantage of. If they are too choosy then they won't be trusted because they barely help out.

** Memetics is the theory that ideas are alive just like organisms. While bacteria reproduce through dividing and many animals reproduce through sex ideas reproduce by getting their host to use language to implant them into another hosts brain. In theory they can do this even at the cost of genetic fitness to the host organism. For instance the Shakers of the 1800's were able to survive for a while despite one of their doctrines being that adherents can't ever reproduce. They did this by taking in the many orphans and widows of Victorian society.

Added on to this idea is the idea of competitive altruism. Where organisms have to find the right balance between being cooperative and beinng choosy. If they are too cooperative than they can easily get taken advantage of. If they are too choosy then they won't be trusted because they barely help out.

The word "evolution" in its most basic terms simply means "change over time". In biological terms, it is the inheritance of genetic traits within populations of organisms through successive generations. Evolution is one of the most strongly supported scientific theories, and is in fact the cornerstone of modern biology.

-> "''One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die."''
--> -- '''CharlesDarwin''', ''On the Origin of Species''

-->''"I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection."''
-->-'''Charles Darwin''', ''On the Origin of Species''

-->''"Of course, like every other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised."''
-->-'''UsefulNotes/WoodrowWilson'''. In 1922.

-->''"In any developing science there are disagreements. But scientists — and here is what separates real scientists from the pseudoscientists of the school of intelligent design — always know what evidence it would take to change their minds."''
-->-'''UsefulNotes/RichardDawkins''', "The Illusion of Design"

-->''"'''D'''ear '''K'''ing '''P'''hilip '''C'''ame '''O'''ver '''F'''or '''G'''ood '''S'''oup"''[[note]](Motherfucker ''loved'' [[Literature/TheTaleOfDespereaux soup]].)[[/note]]
-->-''Mnemonic''

-->''"Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually, as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology."''
-->-'''Jacques Monod''', ''On the Molecular Theory of Evolution''

-->''"[Natural Selection] has not vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to be play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker."''
-->-'''UsefulNotes/RichardDawkins''', ''The Blind Watchmaker''

-->''"Darwinian man though well behaved, is at best just a monkey shaved!"''
-->-'''GilbertAndSullivan''', ''Princess Ida''

-->''"Mere chance ... alone would never account for so habitual and large an amount of difference as that between varieties of the same species and species of the same genus."''
-->-'''Charles Darwin'''

-->''"Organisms [...] are directed and limited by their past. They must remain imperfect in their form and function, and to that extent unpredictable since they are not optimal machines. We cannot know their future with certainty, if only because a myriad of quirky functional shifts lie within the capacity of any feature, however well adapted to a present role."''
-->-'''Steven Jay Gould''', ''Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes''

-->''"The important point is that since the origin of life belongs in the category of at-least-once phenomena, time is on its side. However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once. And for life as we know it, with its capacity for growth and reproduction, once may be enough."''
-->-'''George Wald'''

-->''"Let’s say upfront that asking 'if humans/apes evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?' is exactly the same as saying 'if there are snakes, why are there still lizards?', 'if there are tetrapods, why are there still fish', or 'if there are European Americans, why are there still Europeans?'."''
-->-'''[[Blog/TetrapodZoology Darren Naish]]'''

-->''"The tautology attack is an attack against wording, not substance"''
-->-'''talk.origins''', [[http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/tautology.html here]]

-->''"One of the most prominent icons of modern day Christianity, the Crocoduck is capable of dispelling all arguments in favour of Atheism and Darwinism simply by not existing. Its sworn enemy is the platypus, which, in harsh contrast, is capable of proving god does not exist by existing.”''
-->-'''UrbanDictionary'''

-->''"What? Charmander is evolving!..Congratulations! Your Charmander evolved into Charmeleon!"''
-->-'''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'''

-->''"Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring."''
-->- '''Charles Darwin''', ''On the Origin of Species''

-->''"The second law of thermodynamics argument is one of the hoariest, silliest claims in the creationist collection. It's self-refuting. Point to the creationist: ask whether he was a baby once. Has he grown? Has he become larger and more complex? Isn't he standing there in violation of the second law himself? Demand that he immediately regress to a slimy puddle of mingled menses and semen."''
-->-'''PZ Meyers'''

-->''"In fact, there is not a population on the planet that is free from the forces of nature in this way, and in fact it is hard to imagine how there ever could be."''
-->-'''Ian Rickard'''

-->''"In those days, the first everything was crawling up out of the sea: the first snake. The first chicken. Crab grass. The first real estate salesman."''
-->-''WesternAnimation/GarfieldHis9Lives''

-->'''Cueball''': ''Look, I'm doing my best, but the fact is your Savannah ancestors just didn't prepare you for doing abstract math.''
-->'''Megan''': ''That's just the kind of sexism that discredits evo-psych! Your "evolutionary histories" always seem tuned to produce 1950s gender roles!''
-->'''Cueball''': ''Evolutionary wha-? I meant Savannah, ''Georgia.
-->'''Megan''': ''Hey! Leave my mom out of this!''
-->-''Webcomic/{{xkcd}}''

-->''"[Creationists] make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night."''
-->-'''Creator/IsaacAsimov'''

-->''"People sometimes try to score debating points by saying, "Evolution is only a theory." That is correct, but it's important to understand what that means. It is also only a theory that the world goes round the Sun -- it's just a theory for which there is an immense amount of evidence."''
-->-'''Richard Dawkins'''

-->''"In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense — not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species''"
-->'''Peter Kropotkin''', ''Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution''

-> ''"It is no accident that we see green almost wherever we look. It is no accident that we find ourselves perched on one tiny twig in the midst of a blossoming and flourishing tree of life; no accident that we are surrounded by millions of other species, eating, growing, rotting, swimming, walking, flying, burrowing, stalking, chasing, fleeing, outpacing, outwitting. Without green plants to outnumber us at least ten to one there would be no energy to power us. Without the ever-escalating arms races between predators and prey, parasites and hosts, without Darwin’s ‘war of nature’, without his ‘famine and death’ there would be no nervous systems capable of seeing anything at all, let alone of appreciating and understanding it. We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection – the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth."''
-->-'''UsefulNotes/RichardDawkins''', ''The Greatest Show on Earth''

-->-'''IsaacAsimov'''

* Firstly, the law actually states that entropy, a measure of randomness, cannot decrease in an '''isolated system'''--i.e., things in an isolated system tend to even out: hotter areas lose heat to cooler areas, friction takes energy from motion, and so on until the system achieves equilibrium. Hence, why there is no such thing as perpetual motion. However, biological processes take place in our planet, which is '''not''' an isolated system. Earth receives energy and material from the Sun and other space debris and phenomena, so applying this law to evolution as a whole is based on a faulty premise.
* Secondly, if the Earth actually was a closed system, then it is true that evolution would not happen--but neither would life in the first place. Life is just the distribution of energy from one lifeform to another in the form of several processes of conversion (photosynthesis, digestion, decomposition etc.), and that process would need a constant supply of energy or it would peter down to equilibrium instead of encouraging growth. The lowest rungs of most food (energy) chains usually begin with something requiring photosynthesis, which takes energy from an outside source, the Sun. Yes, some life does take its energy from geothermal energy, but that will eventually run down[[note]]Assuming that the Earth first doesn't get consumed when the Sun goes gigantic in its death throes or something large enough to affect the inner geothermal movements of Earth hits it[[/note]] as has already happened inside Mars.

* There are not "more evolved" (humans and apes) and "less evolved" (frogs, insects, plants) species. All living things are descended from a common ancestor, and have the same three or so billion years of evolution between then and now. (While species aren't more or less evolved, they can be more or less complex. Lineages can evolve from high to low complexity - think of lizards losing legs to become snakes.) If you really pressed an evolutionary biologist to pick "more evolved" organisms, they'd reason that natural selection is most effective with short generation times and large populations, and therefore choose bacteria.

The Linnaean Taxonomy has precedents stretching back to antiquity, organizing life by kind and in a kind of ladder. God above man above animals above plants. However the hierarchy breaks down in the face of history, as single-celled organisms are more numerous and diverse than multi-cellular organisms. They had three billion years plus to evolve, so this makes sense, but it flies in the face of the anthropocentric world-view that holds life in a hierarchy with ourselves at the top. Further, the divisions between groups break down when you consider, for example, the monotremes and marsupials, animals with characteristics common to reptiles and mammals, or when you learn that the birds are closely related to and recently descended from reptiles, making them closer cousins to crocodiles than crocodiles are to turtles, even though both of the latter are clearly reptiles!

In the same fashion, you have the clade Dinosauria, which includes birds and non-avian dinosaurs. Go back to an earlier ancestor and you have the Archosauria, which clade includes dinosaurs (including birds), pterosaurs and pseudosuchians (crocodiles and friends). Go back further and your clade includes Archosauria, Lepidosauria (the lizards and snakes) and maybe Testudines (turtles). At that point your clade includes all living reptiles and, under the Linnaean system, would have been considered Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Cordata, Class Reptilia. However, your clade ''also'' includes the birds, which under Linnaeus were sorted into the separate Class of Aves.

In the same fashion, you have the clade of all dinosauria, which includes birds and non-avian dinosaurs. Go back to an earlier ancestor and you have the archosauria, which clade includes the birds, non-avian dinosaurs, and crocodylomorphs (crocodiles). Go back further and your clade includes both archosauria and squamata, the lizards and snakes. Further still, and your clade includes the testudines, the turtles. At that point your clade includes all living reptiles and, under the Linnaean system, would have been considered Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Cordata, Class Reptilia. However, your clade ''also'' includes the birds, which under Linnaeus were sorted into the separate Class of Aves.

-->''"'''K'''ing '''P'''hilip '''C'''ame '''O'''ver '''F'''or '''G'''ood '''S'''oup"''[[note]](Motherfucker ''loved'' [[Literature/TheTaleOfDespereaux soup]].)[[/note]]

Linnaean taxonomy classifies organisms based on their morphological characteristics into a hierarchical system. For example, humans are in '''K'''ingdom Animalia, '''P'''hylum Chordata, '''C'''lass Mammalia, '''O'''rder Primates, '''F'''amily Hominidae, '''G'''enus ''Homo'', '''S'''pecies ''sapiens''. Unfortunately, not everything fits into this neat arrangement, especially once common descent is taken into account.

Linnaean taxonomy classifies organisms based on their morphological characteristics into a hierarchical system. For example, humans are in '''K'''ingdom Animalia, '''P'''hylum Chordata, '''C'''lass Mammalia, '''O'''rder Primates, '''F'''amily Hominidae, '''G'''enus Homo, '''S'''pecies Sapiens. Unfortunately, not everything fits into this neat arrangement, especially once common descent is taken into account.

* The first incorrect assumption is a somewhat pedantic one: modern humans did not evolve evolve from modern monkeys, or at least from ancestors that would be fully classed as monkeys; in fact, both humans and monkeys evolved from some common antecedent that pre-dated the emergence of the first monkeys. It would be more correct to ask "If people evolved from ''apes''...", except that we're still apes. (Our closest relative is the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo bonobo]], which [[SexTropes may explain a lot]].)

* Want something that'll blow your mind? The closest living relatives of the bears today are the pinnipeds; the seals, walruses, and sea lions. The hyena isn't a caniform at all! They're descended from a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded_Palm_Civet civet-like creature]], making them feliforms more closely related to the mongoose! This is an example of convergent evolution and explains why biology is such a difficult and complex science; also, why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover and the power of genetic studies.

-->''"If Americans came from Britain, why are there still British people?" ''

!!!Myth: [[EvolutionaryLevels Evolution is leading somewhere, or knows where it's going, and that place is human intelligence.]]

!!!Myth: Evolution is something that can occur to a single organism.

!!!Myth: Evolutionary processes can regress.

!!!Myth: Evolution is not a very scientific theory

!!!Myth: Evolution is '''just''' a theory

!!!Myth: Evolution implies social Darwinism

* Evolution tells us how life changes once it's already here, not how it formed in the first place. The latter is known as abiogenesis and is the realm of biochemists,organic chemists, computer scientists, and information scientists. Not evolutionary biologists.

-->-'''RichardDawkins''', ''The Blind Watchmaker''

** There are two schools of thought in the field of biology. The first, represented by RichardDawkins is that if you were to rewind history prior to the emergence of our hominid ancestors, you ''would'' see the rise of bipedal, intelligent apes. They wouldn't be precisely human; the details would be different, but the overall organism would be very similar. The other, represented by Stephen J Gould, is that evolution is essentially stochastic (non-deterministic) and our hominid ancestors could easily go in another direction and intelligence might never appear.

-->-'''RichardDawkins''', ''The Greatest Show on Earth''

-->-'''RichardDawkins''', "The Illusion of Design"

-->-''{{xkcd}}''