Monday 17 October 2011

Evolution: 'nuff said!

This picture was posted on Facebook and made so many points which I end up making repeatedly, and it did so succinctly. I may just use this over and over:


My only slight quibble would be the claim that life does not improve, though to be precise on that matter would have required a lot more text on the poster. Improvement is often subjective, and the way this poster means it is that things don't become "better" over time in the sense most of us would think. Evolution does, however, involve improvement in another way, because populations adapt to their environment and can be said to become "better fit" or "adaptively improved". This is, of course, dependent on the environment, so what is "better" or an "improvement" in one environment is not automatically so in another. Sadly all of the words we could use seem to be loaded in such a way which gives the wrong impression. A lot of what I just typed felt wrong because I know those words give the wrong idea about evolution.

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