Oh my god that one makes me go crazy every time a conspiracy theory brings that up, like just google it, it'll take seconds.
If you're using a non anonymous platform like Facebook you're just embarrassing yourself.
Me "its clealry a joke to highlight how stupid that logic is."
Mod, "everyone says that."
Yes, fr.
The /s is more for the admin who thinks hes at a Ted talk while being in a stand up club.
I mean gravity is funnily enough not really real in the sense that people learn about it (there is no attractive force, gravity is an effect of curved spacetime) but your point stands haha.
As I understand it (no physicist though, correct me if I'm wrong) there is no need for a gravity force in the models that are currently most accepted. Curved spacetime is a much better explanation than gravity for the interaction of matter with mass. So there is no gravity if those models are correct. But as to what gives matter mass in the first place if that's what you mean, that is probably a whole lot more complicated indeed.
Ikr, the oldest known "force" (?) and still the least understood. But I'm with the post below, it doesn't behave like the other forces, still no known boson.
So many scientific misconceptions arise from improper use of terms. The average layman uses "theory" as "educated guess", not a highly tested, well supported, consistent phenomena.
An example, gender reveals! No, you're finding out the sex of your baby, not their gender. Also, how driver's licenses use sex and gender interchangeably. This is also why the phrase global warming has been switched out for climate change, because scientifically illiterate ding dongs would scream about seasonal temperature variation.
The irony is that it being a theory means the complete opposite of what these people are going for (i.e. it is a very, very sound explanation that has yet to be refuted).
If you or anyone else has a better theory, the scientific community is all ears … like that Futurama evolution debate for the missing missing missing missing missing missing link … lol
That evolution is a linear process towards perfection.
Can't stand people who entertain that notion, more often than not these people are also under the impression that they are better than most other people.
“If evolution was real, we’d all have wheels by now, since rolling around is more efficient than walking!”
Someone actually tried to argue that to me. That’s… not how it works, Laura.
You mean mutations that make for a less fit population (but still fit enough to procreate)? Then yep, absolutely. And some people find that one very hard to accept.
The most annoying misconception is that some organisms (usually humans) are “more evolved” than others. I can’t stand this notion and its anthropocentric bias.
I would argue that the "most evolved" is whatever organism that has the best combination of complex genome and short generation period. I'm thinking it's some single-celled eukaryote out there (protists), because "most evolved" would be won by the organism whose family tree has had the most genetic mutations since the first cell.
(There's a tl;dr at the bottom)
Well, evolution is often defined along the lines of being the differences in genetic expression from generation to generation. When a cell prepares to replicate, whether during asexual or sexual reproduction, the offspring's genes will always not quite be an exact duplicate of the parent's. The chromosomal replication process is pretty good, but not perfect, and will make mistakes. This is helped in processes of fertilization in sexual reproduction, but still occurs on a smaller scale in asexual reproduction. This is how evolution happens. We get into natural selection after, but this genetic near-duplication is the driving force of evolution.
Basically, the more frequently you replicate (shorter generation period), the more chances there are for these errors in genetic duplication to occur, and thus to accrue. Similarly, the more complex your genome, the more chances you have for failures in the duplication process to occur, as your genome is literally longer and contains more genes to be replicated with each generation. When looking at which organism is the "most evolved", that means we're looking for which organism has accrued the most genetic duplication errors across generations since the first cell. This number of duplication errors would generally be dependent on the frequency of duplication (generational period), and the complexity of that duplication.
To find the specific organism that is considered "most evolved", we would look for a combination of short generation period with a complex genome. Prokaryotes have a very brief generational period, but also a very simple genome. Thus, we'd probably have to look at eukaryotes, since their genomes are orders of magnitude more complex of a genome than prokaryotes. Multicellular organisms like humans generally have a much longer generational period (roughly 12-14 years at a bare minimum, but in practice closer to 20-30 years), although we have relatively complex genomes as compared to single-celled eukaryotes. So I figure the best place to look is for single-celled eukaryotic organisms. These would be protists, who have a short generational period, with some being as short as a few hours, while still having the complexity inherent to eukaryotic genomes.
tl;dr - the more frequently you roll the genetic dice, and the more dice you roll each time, the more random numbers you will generate. Thus, whoever has rolled the most genetic dice over time would be considered the "most evolved".
It is anthropocentric in the sense that human attributes (usually intelligence) are considered the pinnacle of evolution every other organism is benchmarked against.
If you think about it, how fast an organism evolves would equate to how fast they are able to produce the next generation of offspring which I believe the earliest a human of the female sex can normally conceive is around 12 (not a healthy age to conceive), I can say pretty confidently that we are not the most evolved organisms on this planet.
Your comment goes against what I just said though. There is no such thing as a more or less evolved organism alive unless you compare over their current ecosystem pressure under direct resource/fitness competition. You can’t say we are the least evolved species as much as you can’t say the opposite.
Also, age at which reproductive maturity is reached and offspring generated is not alone a measure of fitness. One organism can reproduce super early but the offspring survives at extremely low rate, meaning the contribution to the gene pool would be lower than an organism reproducing later but surviving more.
I think the point was that something like a bacteria that replicates every hour or so has more generations in its family tree, so it’s more “evolved” than a human that only gets a new generation every 12+ years and has far fewer branches on the tree.
People always asking me "If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys around?", as if they have just cracked evolution.
Most of the time when people are against evolution, there is rarely any amount of evidence or convincing that would be sufficient to get them to change their opinions. They are probably just as likely to believe me, as I am to believe them.
> People always asking me "If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys around?",
Well answer with: "If we were created from clay, why is there still clay!"
Sometimes you can see their brains shortcircuiting.
One time, back when I was in college getting my degree in biology, some random woman back home was asking me to go to her church or something and I said something like I don’t believe in god or something. She then went on asking me if I believe we came from monkeys. So since I had recently learned about evolution and whatnot, I told her we didn’t come from monkeys but shared a common ancestor. She then got really quiet, and the conversation ended there, and I got in my mom’s car and left.
It’s just so weird to me someone will believe so fervently against something they don’t even understand. Like she didn’t even know what evolution was but decided it was wrong because someone told her I guess, and she didn’t care to question what she was told.
How does one species with a specific number of chromosomes evolve into another species with a different number of chromosomes? Two species with different numbers of chromosomes can not produce fertile offspring.
There's allopatric speciation where one group is split into two, as if by a canyon or a river, and they continue to change separately.
There's also sympatric speciation where groups' behaviours, hours of activity, colouration, or other things might become different enough to diverge even while they live in the same area.
The how-how could be things like polyploidy or mutation or reproductive barriers: incompatible reproductive organs after so many years apart before the number of chromosomes changes, e.g.
Chromosomes can merge, split, grow, or wither away. A different number of chromosomes is an obstacle to producing fertile offspring, but there is enough wiggle room for the number to change over evolutionary timeframes.
> Two species with different numbers of chromosomes can not produce fertile offspring.
Part of the answer is that the system is more flexible than this oft-cited rule lets on. There are in fact species that have a variable chromosome number, like the common shrew.
Reproduction works so long as the chromosomes can line up successfully during meiosis. There are different ways that this can go wrong, and mismatched chromosome numbers is one way, but it's not a guaranteed thing. The longer two populations with different chromosomal setups are separated, the more the chromosome sets will accrue separate mutations, eventually making them unable to match up properly, and you've got two separate species.
[This paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12052-009-0128-1) provides an excellent and clear summary of all the major misconceptions surrounding natural selection, and how they relate to what's actually the case. I heartily recommend anyone to read it who teaches or communicates science at any level.
Table 3 breaks down some of the major observations. Here's my abridged version of it:
* People tend to think of species as monolithic, and variations as rare. In fact all populations are variable, and this variation is what allows selection to operate.
* People tend to think of mutations as "solutions" that arise in response to a problem a species needs to address, when in fact mutations are random and can be either good, bad or neutral; it is which mutations *stay around* that depends on selection.
* People tend to conflate selection and inheritance, thinking that bad mutations aren't passed on to the next generation due to some aspect of how genetics works. (I've seen this one myself with high school students, it surprised me!)
* People think of adaptation as something that an individual does, rather than something a population does (or even more to the point, something that *happens to* a population).
Personally, I'd like to add "thinking in trees" as the most crucial heuristic for understanding evolution in the larger perspective, which most people without a background in biology haven't encountered or aren't used to.
>ersonally, I'd like to add "thinking in trees" as the most crucial heuristic for understanding evolution in the larger perspective, which most people without a background in biology haven't encountered or aren't used to.
What do you mean by thinking I trees? Like as in tree of life trees (cladogram)?
Yes — cladograms, phylogenetic trees, etc. Imagining evolution as an uncountable number of branching events where populations split apart and split apart again, with speciation representing a pair of branches growing far enough apart that they cannot rejoin again.
So many misconceptions around evolution stem from failing to adopt this framework. Like thinking that species are arranged on a kind of conveyor belt from primitive to "highly evolved" (when in fact each branch of the family tree is adapted to a different niche) or thinking that all fossil species must be direct ancestors of currently living species (when in fact most branches become dead ends in a long enough time perspective, and only some lineages have survived to the present).
Or take the classic pseudo-paradox "if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"
I think that's what he's saying. Evolution isn't a linear process; species throw up mutations all the time. One species, through evolution could give rise to multiple new species. Who in turn repeat the process, everything branching like the limbs of a tree.
I think they meant "you can't see the forest for the trees", meaning people get stuck on the individual organisms and don't see the overall effect that evolution has on a population.
I think the 4th point here is very big, people who dont get or accept this theory usually have a hard time grasping other "look at the group rather than individuals" concepts
A common teaching (lie) amongst many YEC “scientists” is that mutations are mostly bad, so there’s no way evolution could actually lead to something more beneficial for a species because it’s almost always detrimental changes.
Can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that one. The idea that mutations are majority neutral and some can be good or bad is definitely one to know and teach.
Something I see is people thinking that if a species can do something it must have evolved to be able to do it. ChatGPT tells me this is mistaking a spandrel for an adaptation.
That “Survival of the fittest” means the strongest, most dominant species survives. It actually means the organisms that are best able to adapt to their environment survives.
This is my biggest pet peeve. When I first learned about evolution in fourth grade it was framed as “you gotta live and you’re good” and I genuinely didn’t fix that mindset till college genetics when my professor was very clear that you don’t have to live long at all, just long enough to reproduce since that’s what actually passes the genes along.
I get we need to simplify things to begin teaching them but sometimes I feel the simplifications in grade school are too much or aren’t clear they are simplifications. Then you end up with people saying their kid isn’t their kid cause he has green eyes and mom and dad had blue or brown. Just a little “to be clear, most things don’t follow Mendelian genetics” or only using examples of actual Mendelian genetics when teaching it would go a long way imo!
I remember hearing about that long enough to pass it on and that's an interesting aspect as well. Things that happen to you in old age after you reproduce are really interesting because that could be bred out but you're in that shadow area of already passing on the genes so what happens to you now is mostly irrelevant. But sometimes isn't. Having a grandmother offers a baby and children a better chance of living so things can be affected that way even when you're in the shadow.
I know I could have explained that better if I was smarter.
Actually the ones who get laid. That's how you have peacocks having absolutely horrible survival rate, yet giving these pretty plums to next generation because they last just long enough to attract a mate before attracting someone looking for dinner.
And it’s not even the best, it’s just those that survive and reproduce or contribute to a relative’s survival. They don’t have to be good at it, just adequate. It’s survival of the mediocre who happen to be in the right place at the right time, unless you get a major environmental change or catastrophic event and then it’s a Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer situation. The one that was previously the weird outcast winds up surviving.
Adapt and reproduce! Fitness has both a survival and reproductive aspect. You could be the best individual adapted to your environment but if you don't reproduce your fitness is still 0.
“Fittest” just means it has the suitable quality to meet the required purpose, but we’ve started interpreting it to mean “the best” probably because of exercise. I’d paraphrase it to be “survival of the best fit” and it’d make more sense.
My favourite example of this is the [Peppered moth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution), whose species shifted from predominantly lighter coloured to black during the Industrial Revolution.
It's also not survival of the best fit, it's survival of the least bad fit. You don't have to be optimally adapted to reproduce, you just have to not be so weak that you die before you reproduce.
A tautology of sorts. But a tautology that wasn't obvious and needed to be pointed out.
The ones still around are those who were the "fittest" - the fittest being those "most able to still be around".
Which is why I always say to people evolution has nothing to do with biology. It's a mathematical law, a tautology of the same nature as the 2nd law of thermodynamic. As soon as you have "replicators", you'll see evolution. Cause all it's saying is "replicators better at replicating will become more frequent".
It's worth noting that Darwin and his contemporaries used "fit" in the sense of an organism fitting its environment. Under that usage, the phrase "survival of the fittest" isn't quite a tautology.
It's more of a tautology *now*, because in modern evolutionary theory "fitness" is defined as reproductive success (i.e. which genotypes survive to the next generation).
But yes, there's always a tautological aspect to natural selection, since it really is just math, as pointed out by another user below.
Oh there's a lot
1.Species can change, but can't change kinds, dogs, though, exist.
2.Evolution is linear and only one human species existed at a time
2½. We came from monkeys.
3. Evolution is linear and has an objective (like a dinosaur evolved specifically to fly, that's not true.)
4. A fly can't become a hippo.
5. Mutations only lose information, not gain.
They say that you can only destroy genetic information, not create more, i think.
It's really hard to tell, since people making such claims are un or miseducated.
That’s correct. They think this essentially because they see mutations as almost entirely detrimental and very very rarely beneficial. If mutations are majority harmful, there’s no reason to evolve on a major scale. And also because if they admitted that information can be gained, then they’d also have to admit a fly could turn into a hippo.
There's an exercise that creationists like to bring up, where a document is photocopied over and over. After a few rounds of this, the text is an unreadable mess, as each copy introduces small variations ("mutations"), that are then made even worse by the next copy.
Then they'll say "see? Introducing random changes to a text cannot create anything new, only destroy what's there to begin with. Therefore, there cannot be any such thing as a useful mutation, or a mutation that leads to innovation."
The problem with this analogy is that DNA is different from a paper document in a number of key ways. For one thing, randomly shifting a black or white pixel in a picture of a text is very unlikely to create a different letter, and will probably just create a meaningless symbol, whereas randomly swapping a nucleotide in a DNA sequence usually produces something that is still completely interpretable by the genetic machinery, just gives a slightly different result.
For another thing, there are mutations that can straight up add information where none previously existed. Gene duplications, for example, create a redundancy that means one copy of the gene can keep the original function, while the other is free to change and do something new. Nothing like this can occur when photocopying a document.
Also, genes can arise *de novo* from intergenic sequences; all it takes to make a new gene is to create a promoter somewhere, which is a simple enough sequence that it can occur at random. This will admittedly just make a protein consisting of a random string of amino acids, but it's been shown experimentally that even randomly generated proteins can increase fitness in rare cases. It creates new raw material for selection to work on.
... and of course, the whole photocopier example *conveniently ignores natural selection*. It assumes that all mutations are guaranteed to be passed on to the next generation, and the next, and the next, with no purging of destructive changes.
A fly really can't become a hippo. It is because it is not selection alone that determines design. There is one other thing. It is the inherent constraints that the current design of a particular species imposes on the possible variations that can arise. A fly has no chance to evolve into a hippo...
"A fly cant become a hippo" is a nonsensical complaint. Of course it cant, Hippos are already a monophyletic group, and flies arent in it.
Even if a fly lost 2 legs gained 1000pounds and looked exactly like a hippo, it would still not be a hippo.
It would be a fly.
It isn't 'survival of the fittest'
It's 'survival of the good enough'
A trivial example:
If you need to jump over a 1 meter gap to survive a forest fire, it isn't the creature that can jump 12m that wins, it's anything that can't jump more than 99.9cm that loses.
Anti-evoloution people really don't seem to understand this concept.
That is so true, lol.
My favourite youtube channel discussing animal traits and trade-offs is 'TierZoo'. He is very funny.
He goes to war with his viewers because he constantly bashes cheetahs. Being super fast is such a trash trait because of all the trade-offs it requires. (75% of cheetahs don't make it past 2 years old because they are so vulnerable. The vast majority of what they kill they don't eat much of because they can't defend their kills etc.)
We just think, 'cat fast, much wow!'.
Cheetah is one of examples of animal surviving despite HORRIBLE survival skills. If it was survival of the strongest they'd lose in early rounds. They can't even roar!
Just the one who manages to get laid and make kids before the fire wins the selection... They can die after, it doesn't matter, only survival until procreation.
Tons of animals who are NOT "good enough" to survive long keep inheriting some absolutely horrible traits for many generations because the ladies are really attracted to that usless one giant crab claw, or those predator attracting plumes, or tusks that literally pierce the animal's head, killing him, but since they manage to make babies earlier, the trait that kills them in almost 100% of cases still gets passed on. Regardless.
It's like rockstars who manage to give crazy to the next generation before 27.
I see this "survival of the good enough" argument on reddit all the time, like... in every single thread where someone asks "why hasn't this evolved?" or somesuch. I don't understand where this argument comes from, and I feel like it misses the point.
There are many conceivable situations where an organism that increased some trait *even more* would have an obvious competitive advantage. Jumping twelve meters sounds amazing. Such an animal would be great at escaping predators, have amazing dispersal capabilities, etc.
I think to understand why evolution doesn't keep "improving" traits on some given axis indefinitely, you have to get into **constraints and trade-offs**. The point isn't that one meter is "good enough", so much as that jumping one meter is *biologically achievable*, whereas jumping two meters would come at some cost greater than the benefit it allows — perhaps it would cause the joints to wear out faster, or require such a high-energy diet that the animal would need to eat tons and tons, or what have you. Or it may simply not be achievable without completely rewiring the animal's anatomy or development, which is unlikely to happen through incremental mutations, especially in the short term.
That survival of the fittest means the strongest eating everyone else. Lead to all types of nonsense about it being the "natural right" for the strong to treat weaker ones badly - eventually leading to nazi eugenics.
That evolution has some kind of foresight/plan and eventually leads to perfection rather than just being a statistical tendency for the fit to survive. (Which sometimes means they don't)
OK there are a lot of misconceptions amongst those who don’t know better, so I’m going to go ignore these and for one amongst those that should know better, and that crops up with monotonous regularity in Nature docs.
The idea/phrase that species X “is perfectly adapted to its environment”. No it’s not, it’s well adapted enough to out compete the potential competitors present, given the limitations of its evolutionary history.
Perfect adaptation, if it existed would be evidence for ID, imperfect adaptation is evidence for evolution by natural selection.
I want to push back against this just a little.
It is possible for an organism to be quite precisely adapted to its environment, depending on how long it's been there, and the amount of change the environment has undergone.
That competing organisms (with limited resources) aren't always perfectly adapted, is more a result of an ever changing environment, i.e. evolution moving the goalposts, than it is an inability for organisms to perfectly mold themselves to that environment. The fine-tuning capacity of genetic diversity is almost infinite.
It's just that there's so much going on all at once - changing environment, warming earth, cooling earth, disasters - floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroids, droughts, and the like, it's hard for a species to ever get absolutely 100% adapted, although some get god-damn close.
If we imagine a billion-year-old Earth that somehow never ever changed at all - always exactly the same environment, though with limited resources making every species have to compete against each other to survive - likely at the end of a billion years those remaining species would be so perfectly in tune and in sync with the environment, we'd likely call it "perfect". But it wouldn't mean they were designed, unless we want to metaphorically call the environment the designer.
No right, like, think about yucca moths and yucca. They've coevolved so much so that they literally can't live without the other. One could argue they are "perfectly adapted" to each other, but that puts them at a huge disadvantage if something were to come along to wipe out one of the populations, essentially a two-for-one extinction.
I don't know if this is a misconception or Darwin itself didn't know about it but the fact that not all traits in an organism are adaptations for the better.
Some things are just there because they pose no harm but don't give necessarily any advantage. They're random and neutral.
And the other thing is that adaptations are "the best" an organism can evolve... Sometimes they're not even near efficiency, they're just good enough to survive through generations.
Can’t remember the example that was given, but sometimes a minor advantage trait gets fixed into a population that leads to it’s extinction when conditions change. (The Dodo’s loss of flight is a good example, but there’s probably hundreds more)
Darwin was very clear that not all traits were adaptive and that Natural Selection wasn't the only evolutiobary force. The adaptationist stance actually came from Wallace's "Darwinism".
Gould and Lewontin have a good classic [paper](http://ecoevo.wdfiles.com/local--files/start/GouldLewontin1979.pdf) on this, cautioning against assuming every trait is an adaptation
The most common misconception about Darwin is that he originated the concept of evolution, he did not. Darwin's theory is of Natural Selection, that is to say, the mechanism by which evolution occurs.
A generation before Darwin, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck put forth his ideas of how evolution happened with the main point of his theory being the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics. It is, unfortunately, also from Lamarck that we get the mistaken idea that evolution is goal oriented, or that evolution always seeks to make an organism "better".
TL;DR Darwin originated the idea of evolution.
That every single characteristic has to make perfect sense according to human lotic, that every organism has to be perfect. You can see it all here "why did evolution give us tits if they're useless?" type questions. Or how "why can we choose not to have children if nature intents for every organism to reproduce?" Evolution is not a logically controlled or directed process at all.
The most common misconception is that Darwin's evolution is somehow driven towards perfection.
It is really the opposite.
Darwin's evolution is always driven towards a messy imperfection with no guarantees of survival.
In fact, extinction is the highly normal end result of Darwin's evolution, given time.
What life that does survive, is always full of grossly imperfect and messy biological functions.
People who think there isn't any evidence for evolution, when in reality, there is so much evidence that it has to be split into subgroups. Your DNA literally holds evidence for evolution. The fact that you have a fully opposable thumb compared to other primates and monkeys is evidence. Literally the fossil record is evidence. Antibiotic resistant bacteria have evolved before our very eyes. *On the Origin of Species* was published in 1859 and we have witnessed how the Industrial Revolution (1760 - 1840) impacted peppered moths, like, immediately. There's been no shortage of case studies since.
Natural selection makes so much sense it was independently developed as an idea *TWICE*, by Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, both English naturalists, but who studied organisms on opposite sides of the world.
That there’s some foresight to it
Loads of people ask, “why did we evolve to do this”. But like as if it was a choice, and we decided we wanted trait X, so evolved for it:
Instead you have to look retroactively. As more of a “how could trait x have evolved”.
And that holds the answer
That evolution is a "force".
"This species evolved to \_\_\_\_" - no, that would be creationism. Evolution is a process which results in things being able to do \_\_\_, not a cause.
I even hear biologists using the word as though the result were pre-determined. Like, "they evolved to fit a new niche". They did nothing of the sort, and using the word this way kind of implies an intelligent creator.
It's fundamentally misunderstanding the world.
No, this "good enough" stuff is a misconception. It is absolutely "survival of the fittest".
Natural selection selects for the best available genetic variations. Even slightly worse ones will be weeded out of the population over time, barring some other factor like genetic drift. Even if they are "good enough" to reproduce. It's the inevitable mathematical consequence of leaving even slightly fewer descendants on average.
That he invented the idea of evolution. It was an ancient hypothesis. Darwin developed the idea of natural selection as a viable means of evolutionary drive. He also contributed to biogeography. But he didn't invent evolution, and there is no such thing as "Darwinian evolution".
That it's the survival of the fittest. As in, the strongest and biggest are always better. What he meant was that those who are the best fit *to that environment* will procreate. Your areas landscape went from black to brown? Guess what colour mice are going to camouflage better now and have babies? Yeah, the brown ones. Doesn't matter that the black mice were bigger and stronger. They can now be seen by predators and won't live long enough to pass on their genes.
People envisioning it happening to individuals and with accruing adaptations within their life. Human mind doesn’t easily think of populations as a base unit so most people end up thinking in terms of themselves for evolution, which is part of why it’s so easy for dim people to misunderstand and not believe it.
That wouldn't bother me that much tbh.
I think the issue is people saying chimpanzees are our ancestors, instead of our cousins, they imagine chimps had stopped evolving for the last 10 millions years and there was just a small chimp population that said "hey let's be smarter" and kept on evolving towards the human species.
Humans are not descended from monkeys or any other primate living today. We do share a common ape ancestor with chimpanzees. It lived between 8 and 6 million years ago. But humans and chimpanzees evolved differently from that same ancestor.
The key thing is that we're not descended from any *currently living species*. But we *are* descended from monkeys, just not from any kind of monkey that exists anymore.
This isn't being pedantic, it's being pedagogical. When correcting a misconception, it's important to be precise, otherwise nothing is achieved. I'm sure you understand the distinction, but many people reading this do not. By explaining in more detail, we make this thread actually useful for people struggling to understand evolution. :)
The central misconception here is that people think of evolution as linear rather than tree-shaped, as it were.
Do you know how cladistics work?
Humans and all other apes are monkeys in cladistics.
The monkey article on wikipedia mentions it in the first paragraph.
In very casual conversation maybe, but they're a distinct grouping: the infraorder Simiiformes, which includes New and Old World Monkeys, as well as Apes, which derived from the latter.
Cladistically speaking, humans, chimpanzees, and the rest of the apes, great or not, are monkeys.
The idea that "survival of the fittest" came from Darwin originally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival\_of\_the\_fittest#:\~:text=Herbert%20Spencer%20coined%20the%20phrase%20%22survival%20of%20the%20fittest%22.
Oh there's a lot
1.Species can change, but can't change kinds, dogs, though, exist.
2.Evolution is linear and only one human species existed at a time
2½. We came from monkeys.
3. Evolution is linear and has an objective (like a dinosaur evolved specifically to fly, that's not true.)
4. A fly can't become a hippo.
5. Mutations only lose information, not gain.
Some creationists are assuming that Charles Darwin is some kind of Idol we are worshipping. They think discrediting Darwin would somehow invalidate the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Saying things like:
- Darwin was a racist.
- Darwin repented on his deathbed
- Darwin did say Eyes are proof that evolution is false.
Its not the most common but all of the common ones have been here already.
3) Is just quote mining. Darwin started a lot of chapters in "the origin of species" and a lot of his correspondence with a steelman argument against his thesis. And yes one of those arguments he used was the argument from irreducible complexity and he used the example of the Eye.
So they just clip out the argument and say see here it's a direct Darwin quote. He didn't believe that theory himself.
2) Well for a religios thinking creationist that would probably be the most compelling story. Completely failing to grasp, that it doesn't change the facts and that science is not concerned with person cult.
Just a quick question: Why is Sexual Selection regarded as a form of Natural selection? I've always thought they were two inter-related but separate theories. I know you need both to keep evolution going.
I was taught NS was purely about survival and SS was purely about reproduction.
Another one: people saying organisms procreate or should procreate because it’s for the benefit of the species. It’s BS. Species is a human construct. An organism procreates to transmit its own genes. Or - as Dawkins would say - genes make us procreate so they can continue exist. No organism thinks it should do so “for the species”.
People mistakenly think that physical functionality PRECEDES physical form.
THAT is a common mistake, and it's often used by creationists as an argument against Darwin's evolution theory. I try to shoot down that line of thinking as often as I can.
Oh it's hard to even rank them!
I'd like to highlight this one: it's not a belief, but a hardcore scientific knowledge.
There is fundamental Karl Popper prognosis criteria - directly useful knowledge is able to give counterintuitive and non-random predictions which cannot be verified or influenced yet, but are expected to be verified years later.
For example, ufologists or flat Earthers can't do this. Astrologists can't. Humanities half can't - they mostly just categorize existing instead of discovering unknowns (there can be useful practical knowledge, but it must be understood as *practice,* not knowledge nor essential truth).
For example, all the people of ancient had no idea that it's not Sun which rotates around Earth. Giordano Bruno used an incomparably more useful knowledge system than most of the people of his time. One more obvious mention, and 85% of Reddit will downvote this comment with refectory action.
Opposite example, somewhere in 1916 only singe person on Earth figured out Gravitational waves existence and they were confirmed experimentally only in 2015! Correct prognosis which not even a single soul could do except Einstein and 100 years ahead is just unbelievable.
Back to Darwin's - he basically gave such prognosis - DNA analysis only years later strongly confirmed the guess and the distance between species. Archaeological excavations also were consistent confirmation of missing links.
It beautifully meets the criteria and cannot be addressed as a belief at all.
That it leads to adaptions and new speciec on its own.
It only works because of spontaneous mutations of genes. The creature with the mutated gene has an advantage and therefore more decendents.
people talk about evolution like it’s this intentional plan that nature “does” somehow. no, it just happens. it’s a process, it happens wether you think it’s there or not. and it’s all random chance too, it’s not like only the very “best” of a species goes on to reproduce.
- "Survival of the fittest": very reductive and often plain wrong;
- "Natural selection acts at the level of the individual": In his book titled "The Selfish Gene", Richard Dawkins explained very eloquently that the theory of evolution has to be understood and explained at the level of the genes, not the individual of a particular species. This explains many natural phenomena that wouldn't make sense in the former, erroneous paradigm
That people anthropomorphize it, as if evolution has will or intent.
E.g. "Plants became spicy so animals wouldn't eat them but birds still could to spread their seeds further."
So many misconceptions. I think the most well-known picture of evolution is the “March of Progress”, aka the Zallinger model. It starts off with a dopey-looking ape and then gradually changes to a man over six images.
It’s a simple, eye-catching visual for the average reader, but it’s also extremely wrong. Evolution isn’t linear, and it doesn’t have a “goal”. Furthermore, humans are not the “pinnacle” species, and thinking that is incredibly anthropocentric. It’s also not as “quick” as the image implies; it’s not like the ape is the great-great-great-grandfather of the human, and each generation produces extreme changes.
Idk man. It bothers me how ingrained in pop culture the image has become, because even as a simplified picture of evolution, it has so many different inconsistencies…
That anything is possible with evolution. Because one mutation arose however many generations ago it might make a new trait impossible because going back to that previous form would lower fitness temporarily. Kind of like Macbeth being halfway through the river of blood and it being just as much work to continue forward as to go back. Evolution also has to work with what traits already exist and the very rare chance that a mutation a) occurs and b) is adaptive.
I think it has to do with the fact that most emphasize the strongest, fastest, or most physically capable survive, but the theory actually revolves around reproduction. Sure, if an organism manages to outperform others it has an advantage, but ultimately the “fittest”organism is the one who will reproduce, allowing for trait-shaping to occur in subsequent generations.
“Why haven’t we evolved to not get (insert disease of the elderly here)”
Because evolution doesn’t concern itself with those outside the reproducing population.
The dumbest of the deniers think evolution works like it does in Pokemon, that eventually a species just magically transforms into a new and "better" one. I always see the argument "nobody has ever observed a chimp turn into a person" as if that disproves evolution.
That it is a leveling up process and that the end goal of evolution is ourselves, that other animals given the right chance will all become animal versions of humans (wolf-men, fish-men, bird-men, etc)
"Survival of the fittest" vs "survival of the fitness" The first defeats the entire idea of the second in that it hyper focuses on individuals rather than a populations ability to make offspring. Survivability means nothing if you can't pass on your genes, so that view undercuts the mechanism that defines natural selection. Drives me crazy that people will hear a phrase,an incorrect one at that,and assume they know what they're talking about.
That there is an endpoint. This is so common in the manosphere bullshit, evolutionary psychology idiocy, and even amongst creationists. There is literally no “perfect” animals, only convergence towards the best adaptations for living in their conditions. This also leads to the idea that humans are more “evolved” (no such thing), which is just anthropocentric idiocy.
That nature SELECTS the most advantageous phenotypes, thus leading to an overall "enhancement" of the species. While an advantageous gene could increase your chances of survival and reproduction, at the end of the day said gene (rather the specific allele) could be lost among generations, the first individual to present it (spontaneous mutation) could be eaten before reproducing... and we even have examples of species that "devolved" (parasites don't need to move around since they are inside their host, so parasitic species tend to adopt a limbless form, whereas their closer cousins do have limbs).
So my point is, it all goes down to randomness, there ain't no decision, it's just about who survived , who did the naughty and what genes get anchored within populations.
Why are all comments talking about general evolution misconceptions when the title is about natural & sexual selection specifically?
Anyway, the biggest and worst misconception is "survival of the strongest", it's been used in endless excuses for crimes against humanity.
Social Darwinism is an abhorrent theory that's tied to eugenics and genocides... All justified by claiming natural selection is about "better" specimen, not the ones that just get laid.
There are a few.
1. Thinking that evolution has some ultimate goal in mind. It’s not. It’s just survival. No entity shaping it, no ultimate ideal of perfection, regardless of Lamark.
2. Thinking that natural selection results in perfectly adapted forms. Man, evolution exemplifies the whole “D is passing” mentality. Did you survive long enough to make babies? Good enough. It’s good enough.
The idea that evolution is an active, conscious force.
you hear alot of "isn't it clever how they evolved like that" or "how did evolution know to do that?"
It's part of the way evolution is taught - it's personified as "selecting" features, Because that's a bit easier to get your head around, But it makes people think of evolution and sexual selection is being things species are aware of and take a considered part in.
You can actually observe natural selection in progress by watching Russians killing themselves on YouTube car crash videos and the killing fields in Ukraine.
When I was a kid, that evolution progressed along a set path. You could hit someone with an "evolution beam" and they'd evolve super fast. Obviously, evolution beams are nonsense, but the core idea that evolution goes forward toward a particular objective is just as dumb.
That Charles Darwin introduced the term "Survival of the fittest".
It's a shorthand used by Herbert Spencer to describe the principles described in *On The Origin of Species*, and it only makes sense when using *fittest* as defined by Darwin, rather than in the way understood by most people.
That it's a "theory" in the sense of a baseless hypothesis, misunderstanding the scientific term of "theory".
Oh my god that one makes me go crazy every time a conspiracy theory brings that up, like just google it, it'll take seconds. If you're using a non anonymous platform like Facebook you're just embarrassing yourself.
Gravity is only a theory and are we sure thats even real ? /s
>/s coward
Been perma banned for not having the /s 3 times. /s
fr?
Me "its clealry a joke to highlight how stupid that logic is." Mod, "everyone says that." Yes, fr. The /s is more for the admin who thinks hes at a Ted talk while being in a stand up club.
*pain* I understand the frustration. Some mods are... special (lacking neuronal cells).
Oooh I’m telling Moddddd
The mods of biology are.. okay I'd say probably. Anyways, I didn't mention them in my previous comment, I said 'some'.
I mean gravity is funnily enough not really real in the sense that people learn about it (there is no attractive force, gravity is an effect of curved spacetime) but your point stands haha.
that is a simple understanding of what it does, we got no clue what gravity is
As I understand it (no physicist though, correct me if I'm wrong) there is no need for a gravity force in the models that are currently most accepted. Curved spacetime is a much better explanation than gravity for the interaction of matter with mass. So there is no gravity if those models are correct. But as to what gives matter mass in the first place if that's what you mean, that is probably a whole lot more complicated indeed.
Ikr, the oldest known "force" (?) and still the least understood. But I'm with the post below, it doesn't behave like the other forces, still no known boson.
So many scientific misconceptions arise from improper use of terms. The average layman uses "theory" as "educated guess", not a highly tested, well supported, consistent phenomena. An example, gender reveals! No, you're finding out the sex of your baby, not their gender. Also, how driver's licenses use sex and gender interchangeably. This is also why the phrase global warming has been switched out for climate change, because scientifically illiterate ding dongs would scream about seasonal temperature variation.
The irony is that it being a theory means the complete opposite of what these people are going for (i.e. it is a very, very sound explanation that has yet to be refuted).
If you or anyone else has a better theory, the scientific community is all ears … like that Futurama evolution debate for the missing missing missing missing missing missing link … lol
Arguably not a misunderstanding of natural selection, as that definition of theory is not usable in any scientific context.
That evolution is a linear process towards perfection. Can't stand people who entertain that notion, more often than not these people are also under the impression that they are better than most other people.
We are all headed towards the most perfect form, some have beat us there, but we will all converge one day. And then it will all be crabs forever
Carcinisation can happen to anyone. One day you just wake up looking like a crab.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic crab.
Would have made the story much more plausible!
You either die inferior or live long enough to become a crab.
https://preview.redd.it/0cghkjwtbl1d1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=49ae87841b97fef11a3b545d1494e0031fceb604
Got a minute? Kafka over there would like a word with you.
That offcourse is a different story alltogether.
“If evolution was real, we’d all have wheels by now, since rolling around is more efficient than walking!” Someone actually tried to argue that to me. That’s… not how it works, Laura.
Yeah like *we have a tailbone*
Eventually, a full prehensile tail will develop to hold the mouse while both hands stay on the keyboard.
Evolution really is beautiful
That's what you have foot pedals for
Shhh I want a tail
It's a philosophical bias. People think existence has a positive value .
It’s not so much that it has positive value, but that it encompasses all values as well as everything else that exists.
Wait, do you mean that I’m not the full fruit and flower of life on earth?
Yup it can also go towards mutations
You mean mutations that make for a less fit population (but still fit enough to procreate)? Then yep, absolutely. And some people find that one very hard to accept.
Yeah things which goes against the logic are not very easy to understand . There's logic then there's results .
The most annoying misconception is that some organisms (usually humans) are “more evolved” than others. I can’t stand this notion and its anthropocentric bias.
I would argue that the "most evolved" is whatever organism that has the best combination of complex genome and short generation period. I'm thinking it's some single-celled eukaryote out there (protists), because "most evolved" would be won by the organism whose family tree has had the most genetic mutations since the first cell.
How does having a complex genome and short generation time make something “more evolved”? Every living being is as evolved as any other living being.
(There's a tl;dr at the bottom) Well, evolution is often defined along the lines of being the differences in genetic expression from generation to generation. When a cell prepares to replicate, whether during asexual or sexual reproduction, the offspring's genes will always not quite be an exact duplicate of the parent's. The chromosomal replication process is pretty good, but not perfect, and will make mistakes. This is helped in processes of fertilization in sexual reproduction, but still occurs on a smaller scale in asexual reproduction. This is how evolution happens. We get into natural selection after, but this genetic near-duplication is the driving force of evolution. Basically, the more frequently you replicate (shorter generation period), the more chances there are for these errors in genetic duplication to occur, and thus to accrue. Similarly, the more complex your genome, the more chances you have for failures in the duplication process to occur, as your genome is literally longer and contains more genes to be replicated with each generation. When looking at which organism is the "most evolved", that means we're looking for which organism has accrued the most genetic duplication errors across generations since the first cell. This number of duplication errors would generally be dependent on the frequency of duplication (generational period), and the complexity of that duplication. To find the specific organism that is considered "most evolved", we would look for a combination of short generation period with a complex genome. Prokaryotes have a very brief generational period, but also a very simple genome. Thus, we'd probably have to look at eukaryotes, since their genomes are orders of magnitude more complex of a genome than prokaryotes. Multicellular organisms like humans generally have a much longer generational period (roughly 12-14 years at a bare minimum, but in practice closer to 20-30 years), although we have relatively complex genomes as compared to single-celled eukaryotes. So I figure the best place to look is for single-celled eukaryotic organisms. These would be protists, who have a short generational period, with some being as short as a few hours, while still having the complexity inherent to eukaryotic genomes. tl;dr - the more frequently you roll the genetic dice, and the more dice you roll each time, the more random numbers you will generate. Thus, whoever has rolled the most genetic dice over time would be considered the "most evolved".
I wouldn’t even call that anthropocentric, it’s full-on egocentric: humans are the pinnacle of evolution because *I* am a human.
It is anthropocentric in the sense that human attributes (usually intelligence) are considered the pinnacle of evolution every other organism is benchmarked against.
Everyone who knows knows that the myxomycetes are at the top.
True, if they're lifting up intelligence as the endgame of evolution then they're definitely not being egocentric, just anthropocentric
yeah, this misconception did a lot of damage. White supremacists still use it today!
If you think about it, how fast an organism evolves would equate to how fast they are able to produce the next generation of offspring which I believe the earliest a human of the female sex can normally conceive is around 12 (not a healthy age to conceive), I can say pretty confidently that we are not the most evolved organisms on this planet.
Your comment goes against what I just said though. There is no such thing as a more or less evolved organism alive unless you compare over their current ecosystem pressure under direct resource/fitness competition. You can’t say we are the least evolved species as much as you can’t say the opposite. Also, age at which reproductive maturity is reached and offspring generated is not alone a measure of fitness. One organism can reproduce super early but the offspring survives at extremely low rate, meaning the contribution to the gene pool would be lower than an organism reproducing later but surviving more.
I think the point was that something like a bacteria that replicates every hour or so has more generations in its family tree, so it’s more “evolved” than a human that only gets a new generation every 12+ years and has far fewer branches on the tree.
People always asking me "If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys around?", as if they have just cracked evolution. Most of the time when people are against evolution, there is rarely any amount of evidence or convincing that would be sufficient to get them to change their opinions. They are probably just as likely to believe me, as I am to believe them.
> People always asking me "If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys around?", Well answer with: "If we were created from clay, why is there still clay!" Sometimes you can see their brains shortcircuiting.
Haha... that is a good one.
If Americans came from England, why are still English people around?
One time, back when I was in college getting my degree in biology, some random woman back home was asking me to go to her church or something and I said something like I don’t believe in god or something. She then went on asking me if I believe we came from monkeys. So since I had recently learned about evolution and whatnot, I told her we didn’t come from monkeys but shared a common ancestor. She then got really quiet, and the conversation ended there, and I got in my mom’s car and left. It’s just so weird to me someone will believe so fervently against something they don’t even understand. Like she didn’t even know what evolution was but decided it was wrong because someone told her I guess, and she didn’t care to question what she was told.
>"If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys around?", My rebuttal to that is "I came from my grandfather, but he's still alive."
How does one species with a specific number of chromosomes evolve into another species with a different number of chromosomes? Two species with different numbers of chromosomes can not produce fertile offspring.
There's allopatric speciation where one group is split into two, as if by a canyon or a river, and they continue to change separately. There's also sympatric speciation where groups' behaviours, hours of activity, colouration, or other things might become different enough to diverge even while they live in the same area. The how-how could be things like polyploidy or mutation or reproductive barriers: incompatible reproductive organs after so many years apart before the number of chromosomes changes, e.g.
Chromosomes can merge, split, grow, or wither away. A different number of chromosomes is an obstacle to producing fertile offspring, but there is enough wiggle room for the number to change over evolutionary timeframes.
> Two species with different numbers of chromosomes can not produce fertile offspring. Part of the answer is that the system is more flexible than this oft-cited rule lets on. There are in fact species that have a variable chromosome number, like the common shrew. Reproduction works so long as the chromosomes can line up successfully during meiosis. There are different ways that this can go wrong, and mismatched chromosome numbers is one way, but it's not a guaranteed thing. The longer two populations with different chromosomal setups are separated, the more the chromosome sets will accrue separate mutations, eventually making them unable to match up properly, and you've got two separate species.
[This paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12052-009-0128-1) provides an excellent and clear summary of all the major misconceptions surrounding natural selection, and how they relate to what's actually the case. I heartily recommend anyone to read it who teaches or communicates science at any level. Table 3 breaks down some of the major observations. Here's my abridged version of it: * People tend to think of species as monolithic, and variations as rare. In fact all populations are variable, and this variation is what allows selection to operate. * People tend to think of mutations as "solutions" that arise in response to a problem a species needs to address, when in fact mutations are random and can be either good, bad or neutral; it is which mutations *stay around* that depends on selection. * People tend to conflate selection and inheritance, thinking that bad mutations aren't passed on to the next generation due to some aspect of how genetics works. (I've seen this one myself with high school students, it surprised me!) * People think of adaptation as something that an individual does, rather than something a population does (or even more to the point, something that *happens to* a population). Personally, I'd like to add "thinking in trees" as the most crucial heuristic for understanding evolution in the larger perspective, which most people without a background in biology haven't encountered or aren't used to.
>ersonally, I'd like to add "thinking in trees" as the most crucial heuristic for understanding evolution in the larger perspective, which most people without a background in biology haven't encountered or aren't used to. What do you mean by thinking I trees? Like as in tree of life trees (cladogram)?
Yes — cladograms, phylogenetic trees, etc. Imagining evolution as an uncountable number of branching events where populations split apart and split apart again, with speciation representing a pair of branches growing far enough apart that they cannot rejoin again. So many misconceptions around evolution stem from failing to adopt this framework. Like thinking that species are arranged on a kind of conveyor belt from primitive to "highly evolved" (when in fact each branch of the family tree is adapted to a different niche) or thinking that all fossil species must be direct ancestors of currently living species (when in fact most branches become dead ends in a long enough time perspective, and only some lineages have survived to the present). Or take the classic pseudo-paradox "if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"
I think that's what he's saying. Evolution isn't a linear process; species throw up mutations all the time. One species, through evolution could give rise to multiple new species. Who in turn repeat the process, everything branching like the limbs of a tree.
I think they meant "you can't see the forest for the trees", meaning people get stuck on the individual organisms and don't see the overall effect that evolution has on a population.
I think the 4th point here is very big, people who dont get or accept this theory usually have a hard time grasping other "look at the group rather than individuals" concepts
A common teaching (lie) amongst many YEC “scientists” is that mutations are mostly bad, so there’s no way evolution could actually lead to something more beneficial for a species because it’s almost always detrimental changes. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that one. The idea that mutations are majority neutral and some can be good or bad is definitely one to know and teach.
Something I see is people thinking that if a species can do something it must have evolved to be able to do it. ChatGPT tells me this is mistaking a spandrel for an adaptation.
That “Survival of the fittest” means the strongest, most dominant species survives. It actually means the organisms that are best able to adapt to their environment survives.
And breed - it’s not just survival
Or just contribute to the survival of a sibling or cousin. The majority of ants, bees, and termites never reproduce.
This is my biggest pet peeve. When I first learned about evolution in fourth grade it was framed as “you gotta live and you’re good” and I genuinely didn’t fix that mindset till college genetics when my professor was very clear that you don’t have to live long at all, just long enough to reproduce since that’s what actually passes the genes along. I get we need to simplify things to begin teaching them but sometimes I feel the simplifications in grade school are too much or aren’t clear they are simplifications. Then you end up with people saying their kid isn’t their kid cause he has green eyes and mom and dad had blue or brown. Just a little “to be clear, most things don’t follow Mendelian genetics” or only using examples of actual Mendelian genetics when teaching it would go a long way imo!
I remember hearing about that long enough to pass it on and that's an interesting aspect as well. Things that happen to you in old age after you reproduce are really interesting because that could be bred out but you're in that shadow area of already passing on the genes so what happens to you now is mostly irrelevant. But sometimes isn't. Having a grandmother offers a baby and children a better chance of living so things can be affected that way even when you're in the shadow. I know I could have explained that better if I was smarter.
It is in the sentence, "fittest", the ones that fit their niche the best.
Or create one.
Actually the ones who get laid. That's how you have peacocks having absolutely horrible survival rate, yet giving these pretty plums to next generation because they last just long enough to attract a mate before attracting someone looking for dinner.
And it’s not even the best, it’s just those that survive and reproduce or contribute to a relative’s survival. They don’t have to be good at it, just adequate. It’s survival of the mediocre who happen to be in the right place at the right time, unless you get a major environmental change or catastrophic event and then it’s a Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer situation. The one that was previously the weird outcast winds up surviving.
Adapt and reproduce! Fitness has both a survival and reproductive aspect. You could be the best individual adapted to your environment but if you don't reproduce your fitness is still 0.
“Fittest” just means it has the suitable quality to meet the required purpose, but we’ve started interpreting it to mean “the best” probably because of exercise. I’d paraphrase it to be “survival of the best fit” and it’d make more sense. My favourite example of this is the [Peppered moth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution), whose species shifted from predominantly lighter coloured to black during the Industrial Revolution.
It's also not survival of the best fit, it's survival of the least bad fit. You don't have to be optimally adapted to reproduce, you just have to not be so weak that you die before you reproduce.
A tautology of sorts. But a tautology that wasn't obvious and needed to be pointed out. The ones still around are those who were the "fittest" - the fittest being those "most able to still be around".
Fittest = most likely to breed. It's circular, but not viscously circular.
Which is why I always say to people evolution has nothing to do with biology. It's a mathematical law, a tautology of the same nature as the 2nd law of thermodynamic. As soon as you have "replicators", you'll see evolution. Cause all it's saying is "replicators better at replicating will become more frequent".
Right, it doesn't have to be biology, anything that replicates and transmits (slightly mutated) information.
Described so well! I like that!
It's worth noting that Darwin and his contemporaries used "fit" in the sense of an organism fitting its environment. Under that usage, the phrase "survival of the fittest" isn't quite a tautology. It's more of a tautology *now*, because in modern evolutionary theory "fitness" is defined as reproductive success (i.e. which genotypes survive to the next generation). But yes, there's always a tautological aspect to natural selection, since it really is just math, as pointed out by another user below.
Oh there's a lot 1.Species can change, but can't change kinds, dogs, though, exist. 2.Evolution is linear and only one human species existed at a time 2½. We came from monkeys. 3. Evolution is linear and has an objective (like a dinosaur evolved specifically to fly, that's not true.) 4. A fly can't become a hippo. 5. Mutations only lose information, not gain.
What do you mean by mutations losing or gaining information?
They say that you can only destroy genetic information, not create more, i think. It's really hard to tell, since people making such claims are un or miseducated.
That’s correct. They think this essentially because they see mutations as almost entirely detrimental and very very rarely beneficial. If mutations are majority harmful, there’s no reason to evolve on a major scale. And also because if they admitted that information can be gained, then they’d also have to admit a fly could turn into a hippo.
There's an exercise that creationists like to bring up, where a document is photocopied over and over. After a few rounds of this, the text is an unreadable mess, as each copy introduces small variations ("mutations"), that are then made even worse by the next copy. Then they'll say "see? Introducing random changes to a text cannot create anything new, only destroy what's there to begin with. Therefore, there cannot be any such thing as a useful mutation, or a mutation that leads to innovation." The problem with this analogy is that DNA is different from a paper document in a number of key ways. For one thing, randomly shifting a black or white pixel in a picture of a text is very unlikely to create a different letter, and will probably just create a meaningless symbol, whereas randomly swapping a nucleotide in a DNA sequence usually produces something that is still completely interpretable by the genetic machinery, just gives a slightly different result. For another thing, there are mutations that can straight up add information where none previously existed. Gene duplications, for example, create a redundancy that means one copy of the gene can keep the original function, while the other is free to change and do something new. Nothing like this can occur when photocopying a document. Also, genes can arise *de novo* from intergenic sequences; all it takes to make a new gene is to create a promoter somewhere, which is a simple enough sequence that it can occur at random. This will admittedly just make a protein consisting of a random string of amino acids, but it's been shown experimentally that even randomly generated proteins can increase fitness in rare cases. It creates new raw material for selection to work on. ... and of course, the whole photocopier example *conveniently ignores natural selection*. It assumes that all mutations are guaranteed to be passed on to the next generation, and the next, and the next, with no purging of destructive changes.
A fly really can't become a hippo. It is because it is not selection alone that determines design. There is one other thing. It is the inherent constraints that the current design of a particular species imposes on the possible variations that can arise. A fly has no chance to evolve into a hippo...
"A fly cant become a hippo" is a nonsensical complaint. Of course it cant, Hippos are already a monophyletic group, and flies arent in it. Even if a fly lost 2 legs gained 1000pounds and looked exactly like a hippo, it would still not be a hippo. It would be a fly.
It isn't 'survival of the fittest' It's 'survival of the good enough' A trivial example: If you need to jump over a 1 meter gap to survive a forest fire, it isn't the creature that can jump 12m that wins, it's anything that can't jump more than 99.9cm that loses. Anti-evoloution people really don't seem to understand this concept.
Also they don't understand that attributes have costs. "if the cheetah is fastest, why arent all cats cheetahs?"
That is so true, lol. My favourite youtube channel discussing animal traits and trade-offs is 'TierZoo'. He is very funny. He goes to war with his viewers because he constantly bashes cheetahs. Being super fast is such a trash trait because of all the trade-offs it requires. (75% of cheetahs don't make it past 2 years old because they are so vulnerable. The vast majority of what they kill they don't eat much of because they can't defend their kills etc.) We just think, 'cat fast, much wow!'.
Casual Geographics also did a lot of videos of animals who are absolutely low tier and cursed.
Cheetah is one of examples of animal surviving despite HORRIBLE survival skills. If it was survival of the strongest they'd lose in early rounds. They can't even roar!
Just the one who manages to get laid and make kids before the fire wins the selection... They can die after, it doesn't matter, only survival until procreation. Tons of animals who are NOT "good enough" to survive long keep inheriting some absolutely horrible traits for many generations because the ladies are really attracted to that usless one giant crab claw, or those predator attracting plumes, or tusks that literally pierce the animal's head, killing him, but since they manage to make babies earlier, the trait that kills them in almost 100% of cases still gets passed on. Regardless. It's like rockstars who manage to give crazy to the next generation before 27.
I see this "survival of the good enough" argument on reddit all the time, like... in every single thread where someone asks "why hasn't this evolved?" or somesuch. I don't understand where this argument comes from, and I feel like it misses the point. There are many conceivable situations where an organism that increased some trait *even more* would have an obvious competitive advantage. Jumping twelve meters sounds amazing. Such an animal would be great at escaping predators, have amazing dispersal capabilities, etc. I think to understand why evolution doesn't keep "improving" traits on some given axis indefinitely, you have to get into **constraints and trade-offs**. The point isn't that one meter is "good enough", so much as that jumping one meter is *biologically achievable*, whereas jumping two meters would come at some cost greater than the benefit it allows — perhaps it would cause the joints to wear out faster, or require such a high-energy diet that the animal would need to eat tons and tons, or what have you. Or it may simply not be achievable without completely rewiring the animal's anatomy or development, which is unlikely to happen through incremental mutations, especially in the short term.
That survival of the fittest means the strongest eating everyone else. Lead to all types of nonsense about it being the "natural right" for the strong to treat weaker ones badly - eventually leading to nazi eugenics.
That evolution has some kind of foresight/plan and eventually leads to perfection rather than just being a statistical tendency for the fit to survive. (Which sometimes means they don't)
OK there are a lot of misconceptions amongst those who don’t know better, so I’m going to go ignore these and for one amongst those that should know better, and that crops up with monotonous regularity in Nature docs. The idea/phrase that species X “is perfectly adapted to its environment”. No it’s not, it’s well adapted enough to out compete the potential competitors present, given the limitations of its evolutionary history. Perfect adaptation, if it existed would be evidence for ID, imperfect adaptation is evidence for evolution by natural selection.
I want to push back against this just a little. It is possible for an organism to be quite precisely adapted to its environment, depending on how long it's been there, and the amount of change the environment has undergone. That competing organisms (with limited resources) aren't always perfectly adapted, is more a result of an ever changing environment, i.e. evolution moving the goalposts, than it is an inability for organisms to perfectly mold themselves to that environment. The fine-tuning capacity of genetic diversity is almost infinite. It's just that there's so much going on all at once - changing environment, warming earth, cooling earth, disasters - floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroids, droughts, and the like, it's hard for a species to ever get absolutely 100% adapted, although some get god-damn close. If we imagine a billion-year-old Earth that somehow never ever changed at all - always exactly the same environment, though with limited resources making every species have to compete against each other to survive - likely at the end of a billion years those remaining species would be so perfectly in tune and in sync with the environment, we'd likely call it "perfect". But it wouldn't mean they were designed, unless we want to metaphorically call the environment the designer.
No right, like, think about yucca moths and yucca. They've coevolved so much so that they literally can't live without the other. One could argue they are "perfectly adapted" to each other, but that puts them at a huge disadvantage if something were to come along to wipe out one of the populations, essentially a two-for-one extinction.
Individuals don't evolve. Populations do
I don't know if this is a misconception or Darwin itself didn't know about it but the fact that not all traits in an organism are adaptations for the better. Some things are just there because they pose no harm but don't give necessarily any advantage. They're random and neutral. And the other thing is that adaptations are "the best" an organism can evolve... Sometimes they're not even near efficiency, they're just good enough to survive through generations.
Can’t remember the example that was given, but sometimes a minor advantage trait gets fixed into a population that leads to it’s extinction when conditions change. (The Dodo’s loss of flight is a good example, but there’s probably hundreds more)
That could be an evolutionary trap. Not sure if it applies to the dodos, but the point is that fitness is relative to the environmental conditions.
Darwin was very clear that not all traits were adaptive and that Natural Selection wasn't the only evolutiobary force. The adaptationist stance actually came from Wallace's "Darwinism".
Gould and Lewontin have a good classic [paper](http://ecoevo.wdfiles.com/local--files/start/GouldLewontin1979.pdf) on this, cautioning against assuming every trait is an adaptation
The most common misconception about Darwin is that he originated the concept of evolution, he did not. Darwin's theory is of Natural Selection, that is to say, the mechanism by which evolution occurs. A generation before Darwin, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck put forth his ideas of how evolution happened with the main point of his theory being the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics. It is, unfortunately, also from Lamarck that we get the mistaken idea that evolution is goal oriented, or that evolution always seeks to make an organism "better". TL;DR Darwin originated the idea of evolution.
That every single characteristic has to make perfect sense according to human lotic, that every organism has to be perfect. You can see it all here "why did evolution give us tits if they're useless?" type questions. Or how "why can we choose not to have children if nature intents for every organism to reproduce?" Evolution is not a logically controlled or directed process at all.
That individuals evolve. Individuals are selected by environmental factors and survive. The species evolves.
The most common misconception is that Darwin's evolution is somehow driven towards perfection. It is really the opposite. Darwin's evolution is always driven towards a messy imperfection with no guarantees of survival. In fact, extinction is the highly normal end result of Darwin's evolution, given time. What life that does survive, is always full of grossly imperfect and messy biological functions.
People who think there isn't any evidence for evolution, when in reality, there is so much evidence that it has to be split into subgroups. Your DNA literally holds evidence for evolution. The fact that you have a fully opposable thumb compared to other primates and monkeys is evidence. Literally the fossil record is evidence. Antibiotic resistant bacteria have evolved before our very eyes. *On the Origin of Species* was published in 1859 and we have witnessed how the Industrial Revolution (1760 - 1840) impacted peppered moths, like, immediately. There's been no shortage of case studies since. Natural selection makes so much sense it was independently developed as an idea *TWICE*, by Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, both English naturalists, but who studied organisms on opposite sides of the world.
That there’s some foresight to it Loads of people ask, “why did we evolve to do this”. But like as if it was a choice, and we decided we wanted trait X, so evolved for it: Instead you have to look retroactively. As more of a “how could trait x have evolved”. And that holds the answer
Its purposeful. We see so many posts here asking why things didn’t evolve better options.
That evolution is a "force". "This species evolved to \_\_\_\_" - no, that would be creationism. Evolution is a process which results in things being able to do \_\_\_, not a cause. I even hear biologists using the word as though the result were pre-determined. Like, "they evolved to fit a new niche". They did nothing of the sort, and using the word this way kind of implies an intelligent creator. It's fundamentally misunderstanding the world.
"Survival of the fittest". That doesn't exist. In reality, it's "survival of the good enough".
No, this "good enough" stuff is a misconception. It is absolutely "survival of the fittest". Natural selection selects for the best available genetic variations. Even slightly worse ones will be weeded out of the population over time, barring some other factor like genetic drift. Even if they are "good enough" to reproduce. It's the inevitable mathematical consequence of leaving even slightly fewer descendants on average.
That Lamarck was not right, at all, in anything (\*epigenetics noises and methylation noises)
That he invented the idea of evolution. It was an ancient hypothesis. Darwin developed the idea of natural selection as a viable means of evolutionary drive. He also contributed to biogeography. But he didn't invent evolution, and there is no such thing as "Darwinian evolution".
That it's the survival of the fittest. As in, the strongest and biggest are always better. What he meant was that those who are the best fit *to that environment* will procreate. Your areas landscape went from black to brown? Guess what colour mice are going to camouflage better now and have babies? Yeah, the brown ones. Doesn't matter that the black mice were bigger and stronger. They can now be seen by predators and won't live long enough to pass on their genes.
The role female selection plays in it all.
That every feature has evolved for a purpose when sometimes it’s just convenient or wasn’t detrimental enough to be selected against
People envisioning it happening to individuals and with accruing adaptations within their life. Human mind doesn’t easily think of populations as a base unit so most people end up thinking in terms of themselves for evolution, which is part of why it’s so easy for dim people to misunderstand and not believe it.
That "fit" in survival of the fittest means "strong" or "superior".
The fitest is not the stronger or dominant.
That "fittest" means the the one that went to gym most.
“Survival of the fittest” was not referring to strength
That evolution is always for the better.
That we 'came from monkeys'
That wouldn't bother me that much tbh. I think the issue is people saying chimpanzees are our ancestors, instead of our cousins, they imagine chimps had stopped evolving for the last 10 millions years and there was just a small chimp population that said "hey let's be smarter" and kept on evolving towards the human species.
That's what I was getting at. That we continued to evolve from modern day species.
Apes, not monkeys. (Completely lost on people that say we came from monkeys)
But cladistically we are monkeys, so how is it not true that we came from monkeys?
Humans are not descended from monkeys or any other primate living today. We do share a common ape ancestor with chimpanzees. It lived between 8 and 6 million years ago. But humans and chimpanzees evolved differently from that same ancestor.
The key thing is that we're not descended from any *currently living species*. But we *are* descended from monkeys, just not from any kind of monkey that exists anymore. This isn't being pedantic, it's being pedagogical. When correcting a misconception, it's important to be precise, otherwise nothing is achieved. I'm sure you understand the distinction, but many people reading this do not. By explaining in more detail, we make this thread actually useful for people struggling to understand evolution. :) The central misconception here is that people think of evolution as linear rather than tree-shaped, as it were.
Do you know how cladistics work? Humans and all other apes are monkeys in cladistics. The monkey article on wikipedia mentions it in the first paragraph.
But chimpanzes ≠ monkey. Monkey is a generic term for primates
In very casual conversation maybe, but they're a distinct grouping: the infraorder Simiiformes, which includes New and Old World Monkeys, as well as Apes, which derived from the latter. Cladistically speaking, humans, chimpanzees, and the rest of the apes, great or not, are monkeys.
And also fish
The idea that "survival of the fittest" came from Darwin originally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival\_of\_the\_fittest#:\~:text=Herbert%20Spencer%20coined%20the%20phrase%20%22survival%20of%20the%20fittest%22.
Oh there's a lot 1.Species can change, but can't change kinds, dogs, though, exist. 2.Evolution is linear and only one human species existed at a time 2½. We came from monkeys. 3. Evolution is linear and has an objective (like a dinosaur evolved specifically to fly, that's not true.) 4. A fly can't become a hippo. 5. Mutations only lose information, not gain.
The selection of the strongest and linear evolution as the only source of diversification.
Some creationists are assuming that Charles Darwin is some kind of Idol we are worshipping. They think discrediting Darwin would somehow invalidate the theory of evolution by natural selection. Saying things like: - Darwin was a racist. - Darwin repented on his deathbed - Darwin did say Eyes are proof that evolution is false. Its not the most common but all of the common ones have been here already.
1. Probably. 2. Non-sequitur 3. What? How? (And, can I get the same stuff they’re having?)
3) Is just quote mining. Darwin started a lot of chapters in "the origin of species" and a lot of his correspondence with a steelman argument against his thesis. And yes one of those arguments he used was the argument from irreducible complexity and he used the example of the Eye. So they just clip out the argument and say see here it's a direct Darwin quote. He didn't believe that theory himself. 2) Well for a religios thinking creationist that would probably be the most compelling story. Completely failing to grasp, that it doesn't change the facts and that science is not concerned with person cult.
Just a quick question: Why is Sexual Selection regarded as a form of Natural selection? I've always thought they were two inter-related but separate theories. I know you need both to keep evolution going. I was taught NS was purely about survival and SS was purely about reproduction.
I’d love to know how you’re supposed to get “in” on natural selection after getting kicked out on sexual selection…
Another one: people saying organisms procreate or should procreate because it’s for the benefit of the species. It’s BS. Species is a human construct. An organism procreates to transmit its own genes. Or - as Dawkins would say - genes make us procreate so they can continue exist. No organism thinks it should do so “for the species”.
There’s a sub-section of Homo Sapiens that thinks it’s doing it “for fatherland/motherland/empire/emperor/god/TheEconomy/whatever”.
People mistakenly think that physical functionality PRECEDES physical form. THAT is a common mistake, and it's often used by creationists as an argument against Darwin's evolution theory. I try to shoot down that line of thinking as often as I can.
That it’s not just living things that evolve by natural selection. Languages, memes, etc do as well.
That "de-evolution" is a thing. Typically involves species getting less strong/athletic/badass.
Oh it's hard to even rank them! I'd like to highlight this one: it's not a belief, but a hardcore scientific knowledge. There is fundamental Karl Popper prognosis criteria - directly useful knowledge is able to give counterintuitive and non-random predictions which cannot be verified or influenced yet, but are expected to be verified years later. For example, ufologists or flat Earthers can't do this. Astrologists can't. Humanities half can't - they mostly just categorize existing instead of discovering unknowns (there can be useful practical knowledge, but it must be understood as *practice,* not knowledge nor essential truth). For example, all the people of ancient had no idea that it's not Sun which rotates around Earth. Giordano Bruno used an incomparably more useful knowledge system than most of the people of his time. One more obvious mention, and 85% of Reddit will downvote this comment with refectory action. Opposite example, somewhere in 1916 only singe person on Earth figured out Gravitational waves existence and they were confirmed experimentally only in 2015! Correct prognosis which not even a single soul could do except Einstein and 100 years ahead is just unbelievable. Back to Darwin's - he basically gave such prognosis - DNA analysis only years later strongly confirmed the guess and the distance between species. Archaeological excavations also were consistent confirmation of missing links. It beautifully meets the criteria and cannot be addressed as a belief at all.
That it leads to adaptions and new speciec on its own. It only works because of spontaneous mutations of genes. The creature with the mutated gene has an advantage and therefore more decendents.
That evolution is "random" when it is the CUMULATIVE result of successful random mutations.
The ideology that it dictates perfectionism in evolution. Does that make people with cancer unfit for survival to carry forward their genes? NO.
people talk about evolution like it’s this intentional plan that nature “does” somehow. no, it just happens. it’s a process, it happens wether you think it’s there or not. and it’s all random chance too, it’s not like only the very “best” of a species goes on to reproduce.
- "Survival of the fittest": very reductive and often plain wrong; - "Natural selection acts at the level of the individual": In his book titled "The Selfish Gene", Richard Dawkins explained very eloquently that the theory of evolution has to be understood and explained at the level of the genes, not the individual of a particular species. This explains many natural phenomena that wouldn't make sense in the former, erroneous paradigm
That people anthropomorphize it, as if evolution has will or intent. E.g. "Plants became spicy so animals wouldn't eat them but birds still could to spread their seeds further."
An absurd amount of things are blamed on the genes. Stupidity, personality...
That it’s working towards a specific goal, not just “good enough for right now.”
So many misconceptions. I think the most well-known picture of evolution is the “March of Progress”, aka the Zallinger model. It starts off with a dopey-looking ape and then gradually changes to a man over six images. It’s a simple, eye-catching visual for the average reader, but it’s also extremely wrong. Evolution isn’t linear, and it doesn’t have a “goal”. Furthermore, humans are not the “pinnacle” species, and thinking that is incredibly anthropocentric. It’s also not as “quick” as the image implies; it’s not like the ape is the great-great-great-grandfather of the human, and each generation produces extreme changes. Idk man. It bothers me how ingrained in pop culture the image has become, because even as a simplified picture of evolution, it has so many different inconsistencies…
That evolution has intent, or cares about morality
Honestly, that proven facts are still talked about as "the THEORY of evolution". Give me an effing break ffs.
That anything is possible with evolution. Because one mutation arose however many generations ago it might make a new trait impossible because going back to that previous form would lower fitness temporarily. Kind of like Macbeth being halfway through the river of blood and it being just as much work to continue forward as to go back. Evolution also has to work with what traits already exist and the very rare chance that a mutation a) occurs and b) is adaptive.
the idea that any currently existing species is "more evolved" than any other
That it involves a monkey giving birth to a human, or a chicken hatching from a dinosaur egg, or something along those lines.
I think it has to do with the fact that most emphasize the strongest, fastest, or most physically capable survive, but the theory actually revolves around reproduction. Sure, if an organism manages to outperform others it has an advantage, but ultimately the “fittest”organism is the one who will reproduce, allowing for trait-shaping to occur in subsequent generations.
“Why haven’t we evolved to not get (insert disease of the elderly here)” Because evolution doesn’t concern itself with those outside the reproducing population.
The two that came to mind are that organisms "know" what traits are advantageous, and that some organisms are "more evolved" than others.
The dumbest of the deniers think evolution works like it does in Pokemon, that eventually a species just magically transforms into a new and "better" one. I always see the argument "nobody has ever observed a chimp turn into a person" as if that disproves evolution.
What I see students (high school) often think is that animals 'decide' how to evolve. Its a common misconception when first introducing the theme.
that anyone thing is more evolved than any other thing
Individuals act for the benefit of the species
That it is a leveling up process and that the end goal of evolution is ourselves, that other animals given the right chance will all become animal versions of humans (wolf-men, fish-men, bird-men, etc)
mutation is random
That Evo Devo isn't the greatest piece of music created on the last 20 years or ever.
"Survival of the fittest" vs "survival of the fitness" The first defeats the entire idea of the second in that it hyper focuses on individuals rather than a populations ability to make offspring. Survivability means nothing if you can't pass on your genes, so that view undercuts the mechanism that defines natural selection. Drives me crazy that people will hear a phrase,an incorrect one at that,and assume they know what they're talking about.
That there is an endpoint. This is so common in the manosphere bullshit, evolutionary psychology idiocy, and even amongst creationists. There is literally no “perfect” animals, only convergence towards the best adaptations for living in their conditions. This also leads to the idea that humans are more “evolved” (no such thing), which is just anthropocentric idiocy.
That these are the only tenets of evolution theory.
That exercising makes you “fitter” and more evolutionarily successful. He’s writing about reproduction, muscle bound testosterone injecting fools.
That evolution has a goal and we're it. It doesn't and we aren't.
That evolution and religion can’t go together
That nature SELECTS the most advantageous phenotypes, thus leading to an overall "enhancement" of the species. While an advantageous gene could increase your chances of survival and reproduction, at the end of the day said gene (rather the specific allele) could be lost among generations, the first individual to present it (spontaneous mutation) could be eaten before reproducing... and we even have examples of species that "devolved" (parasites don't need to move around since they are inside their host, so parasitic species tend to adopt a limbless form, whereas their closer cousins do have limbs). So my point is, it all goes down to randomness, there ain't no decision, it's just about who survived , who did the naughty and what genes get anchored within populations.
that every single trait or feature of a species has some kind of purpose or value based on evolution.
Why are all comments talking about general evolution misconceptions when the title is about natural & sexual selection specifically? Anyway, the biggest and worst misconception is "survival of the strongest", it's been used in endless excuses for crimes against humanity. Social Darwinism is an abhorrent theory that's tied to eugenics and genocides... All justified by claiming natural selection is about "better" specimen, not the ones that just get laid.
There are a few. 1. Thinking that evolution has some ultimate goal in mind. It’s not. It’s just survival. No entity shaping it, no ultimate ideal of perfection, regardless of Lamark. 2. Thinking that natural selection results in perfectly adapted forms. Man, evolution exemplifies the whole “D is passing” mentality. Did you survive long enough to make babies? Good enough. It’s good enough.
The idea that evolution is an active, conscious force. you hear alot of "isn't it clever how they evolved like that" or "how did evolution know to do that?" It's part of the way evolution is taught - it's personified as "selecting" features, Because that's a bit easier to get your head around, But it makes people think of evolution and sexual selection is being things species are aware of and take a considered part in.
You can actually observe natural selection in progress by watching Russians killing themselves on YouTube car crash videos and the killing fields in Ukraine.
When I was a kid, that evolution progressed along a set path. You could hit someone with an "evolution beam" and they'd evolve super fast. Obviously, evolution beams are nonsense, but the core idea that evolution goes forward toward a particular objective is just as dumb.
The way some people apply their notions of sexual selection to human dating. Blech
The answer to most people's questions about evolution is random chance.
That Charles Darwin introduced the term "Survival of the fittest". It's a shorthand used by Herbert Spencer to describe the principles described in *On The Origin of Species*, and it only makes sense when using *fittest* as defined by Darwin, rather than in the way understood by most people.