Perspectives on Evolution

[bennyboy]

Aging is the evolution of the individual physical constitution, not the evolution of the population gene pool.

One could apply the word evolution to any process of change involving anything, whether it appears to have a direction or goal or not.   In fact the word evolution was made popular first when it was used to refer to the step by step process of change in troops or naval ship formation as they deploy from March to battle during the 16-18th centuries.

But biological evolution refers specifically to the evolution of population gene pool.

Very interesting etymology, thanks for that.

Yeah, it's metaphors like "gene pool" that I was talking about.  I don't think there IS a gene pool, i.e. as a thing which is undergoing a process over time.  Clearly, those words are a mathematical shorthand for a theoretical sum of the DNA of organisms who match our ideas of what "human" means, either in a subset or overall.

However, people do often end up saying things like, "This species evolved fur to adapt to the polar temperatures during the Ice Age" or whatever, and I'd suggest that may semantically be a pseudo-religious idea: that the archetypal Man-god or Elephant God, as an individual entity, is an active agent in this process, rather than "long-toothed tiger" being just a label for a phenotype seen in fossil records.

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The female peacock is a drab brown color for more effective camouflage, but males are brightly colored and quite large.

Male brilliance as a distraction for predators. I've never thought of it that way, and that's really making me ROFL. Some things seem so immediately true that I wonder why I didn't already see them that way.