Perspectives on Evolution

[The Grand Nudger]

My view is that evolution is a statistical descriptive term, not an actual process.  Members of the set of "Human" drop and get added, and the sum DNA must shift this way and that; to me, evolution isn't "happening," and cannot be said to be a process.  

Failing to object to a gene pool being a thing, you're now quibbling about whether or not evolution is a process...that happens to that thing.  

You're quibbling with what can be and has been demonstrated.......the theory of evolution...is not the idea that change occurs in a gene pool........that's one of the supporting facts.

Let's say you were driving a spaceship, and as you passed between galaxies, you had different readings of the materials within scanner range of your ship.  You could say that the composition is "changing," but is it?  Yes, in a relative sense, no in an absolute sense: because none of the things you are measuring are in a state of flux.

Just yes, Benny.  The composition of the material outside of your spaceship changes.....as your spaceship goes to different locations...with different shit in them. Just as if you drive your car through a city, there are different people all around your car. The people around you, like the rocks around you..aren't "changing in a relative sense" unless this is a weasel term with no specific meaning in context other than what was already implied in being in a moving vehicle. A useless deepity if ever there were one...and not even remotely competent as an objection to evolution being a process of change.

Or if you take a core sample from the Earth, you can say how the mineral composition "changes" as you go deeper and deeper.  But it isn't, really, because it's your perspective that changes, not the actual thing.

If you say so.

Evolution is much like this-- we are taking completely new samples, and comparing them to previous samples.  The change is perceptual.

You're right, it's perceptual..it's not like anything grew wings and flew or anything......jesus fucking christ. Is the difference between me and my children "perceptual"..or are you willing to allow that they are not clones?

But I think in the end the thing you and I are now talking about that is the semantics of "thing."  It seems you think a thing is whatever a person chooses to imagine.  If I start talking about "all red Smarties," then that is now a thing.  Okay, we can say all genes, or all human genes, are a thing in that sense.  But I'd still say that thing isn't undergoing a process.  Each time the membership of that set changes, we have a new thing: Red-Smarties-Set-1, Red-Smarties-Set-2, and so on, and that what we are really talking about is a meta-thing: Smarties-ness or whatever.  That is a metaphorical God-of-Red-Smarties, much like the Archetypal Man I mentioned in the OP.

In short, a species doesn't "adapt," it just gets replaced by a new set of members of the species which are better adapted.

You -started- with loon semantics..and haven't stopped.  Yes, species adapt.  Being replaced by better adapted members is -how- that species adapts. This is natural selection..part of the process we call evolution.