(September 27, 2017 at 9:46 am)bennyboy Wrote: 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.
Maybe it would help you to think of a persistent pattern that's changing. After all, you can't step into the same river twice because it contains different water molecules the second time. Even the shape of the river is changing slowly over time. Same with a cloud above a hill. The cells in our body get replaced over time as well. So the pattern that we call human is changing over time because of evolution.
