Perspectives on Evolution

[Anomalocaris]

Evolution is one of the areas in science that bother me.  It's not that I don't believe in it-- in fact, I think evolution is a fundamental property of any system with complexity, bonded interactions, and time.

My problem is that when we talk about the evolution of a species, we are talking about a species as though it's a thing.  This strikes me as somewhat mythological: humans cannot evolve (except in a different sense intellectually perhaps), but what it means to be human is slowly shifting-- there's a kind of Archetypal Man who is changing over time, both genetically and memetically (if I can coin that term).


So what, exactly, is changing over time?  Nothing, in fact, is changing, at all, ever, in evolution, any more than colors change from red to blue in a rainbow.  Nothing is developed, and yet it obviously IS developed.

Think of a specie as a large collection of lights of different colors.   Most lights don’t change colors before they burnout.  But very few may contains a random defect and would change their color once before burning out. Every time a light burns out, there is a chance another one or more light of similar color to the color of the burnt out bulb replaces it.  

Now imagine the chance that a burnout bulk will be replaced depends on the color of the burnt out bulb.

Now you can see how over time, the average color of the total collection of the lights will change.


The individual lights don’t evolve.  They just come on, and burn out.  Maybe once in a great while something happens and a bulb changes color.  That’s not evolution,  that’s defect.

Evolution is when the average color of all the lights taken together gradually change over time.