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Comment by shermantanktop | Hacker News Reader

As usual, popular science coverage always casts evolution as an active process, and sometimes even an intentional process. But anyone who took high school science would recognize the form of evolution in the article as just a result of some people dying early while everyone else went about their business.

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I'm not clear on what you mean. The definitive example of evolution that I was taught in school was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution, which is easily described as you just stated it.

Not GP. This is not evolution, every human is like a lottery ticket, it doesn't change once you draw it. The system "evolves", not humans. Every human is merely a data point (a vector if you will) in this simulation.

What? I am almost with you in that you are not going to individually evolve, necessarily. Colloquial use of the word notwithstanding, of course.

But you can absolutely see evolution across generations of any animal. Humans included.

Right. And if I were a pop-sci writer, my article about it would probably get a headline like "Moths hid in soot by getting darker." Moths didn't do anything, there was no intention.

We are addicted to stories with protagonists, heroes and villains, and so that's how these stories are framed. But that's the exact opposite of what is happening, and everyone knows it, but apparently we just accept it as inevitable.

But that is ignoring what happened. Moths didn't "get darker." Darker moths died at a lower rate than lighter moths did. That is it. That is the mechanism. Similarly, when being darker became less beneficial, they started dying at higher rates again.

You could reword it to say that "moths that were more hidden in soot were more likely to survive." But that doesn't change anything? The individual moths involved had no intention. They did not choose to favor genetics that give them a darker look.

Pretty sure that everyone in this thread agrees on what evolution is and how it works.

I have a pet peeve, which I’m clearly not articulating well, which is that journalistic coverage of this topic relies on two false metaphors: 1) the products of chance can be described as intentional or directed to a positive destination, and 2) a species over time can be anthropomorphized into an individual who has that intent. “How The Rhine Got His Hide,” that sort of thing. Journalists need a story with protagonists and that’s what happens.

That’s my pet peeve, I don’t expect it to bother everyone the same amount, but that’s what my original post was about.

I think this is largely a reading thing, though? We have some defaults on how we frame subjects. In large, we want subjects to be singular things. For stories that span large amounts of time, though, the thing with the same name is largely not the same thing. Ship of Theseus being the famous example of that.

This gets more complicated with actually living things. That is, if you had "How the Ship of Theseus got its mast," I doubt you would necessarily think of any active choices from the ship. See the same for "how chickens came to lay an egg a day" and you would perhaps think there was a bit more active choice on the chickens of old. Realistically, they were both the result of external choices to the subject.

> some people dying early while everyone else went about their business

So, evolution - just framed correctly.

I knew enough when the article was explaining what a hemoglobin is.

That's also evolution.

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