Perspectives on Evolution

[FatAndFaithless]

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.

Afaik evolution is not defined via species or speciation, but by changes of gene frequencies in a population. Speciation (splitting up of populations into groups that don't mate anymore) is a higher level outcome of that..?

Yearp.  Changes in gene frequency over time is evolution, and evolution + a shit ton of time = speciation.