Perspectives on Evolution

[Whateverist]

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.

Heck, the only thing separating one species from another is the inability to interbreed.  That means that, over enough time, a species becomes an entirely different species in the sense that it could no longer breed with the species it had been before.  Sometimes one population of a species isolated from the rest will evolve to the point where it can no longer breed with the rest of the population which remains largely unchanged.

I don't think that really poses any big problem though.  Very little is really static, certainly not amongst living things.  

That's my initial take, now I'll go see where the discussion has gone.

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Philosophy? Religion for atheists.

Not if you do it right.