I like "descent with modification" when explaining what evolution is to layman. They find it easier to understand as the term isn't so loaded.
What, then, would devolution be?
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22higher+animals%22
The Encyclopedia Britannica mentions plants that are more highly evolved than others: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22highly+evolved+plants%22
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/463192/plant
for example, the most highly evolved plants reproduce by means of seeds, and, in the most advanced of all plants (angiosperms), a reproductive organ called a flower is formed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devolution_(biological_fallacy)
Unless you mean something entirely different than what most people mean when they say "devolution", what you are referring to is just evolution. The same way that "reverse racism" is just racism.
I suggest you read the wikipedia link
I read it before you gave the link. The discussion page conflicts with the current state of the main page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Devolution_(biological_fal...
evolution can be both 'progressive' and 'regressive'. [...] if a population deteriorates genetically it certainly is something like 'devolution', and this article completely ignores this issue. [...] deterioration, misconceptions aside, is a real thing, and we need to stop giving people the impression that it is only a 'fallacy'.
I said "Devolution is a nonsense concept" because, as I stated before, what is referred to by "devolution" is just evolution. The term, as used commonly, implies some sort of objective heirarchy to evolution, and although organisms may get labeled with terms describing their complexity, that does not mean that one has somehow "devolved" if it evolves into an organism with less complexity. It has just evolved.
Edit:
There's not much disagreeance on the page. There are people talking about using the term to describe something that actually happens, but they aren't talking about what most people mean when they say "devolution".
Dictionaries do not define devolution as just evolution. They define it as retrogade evolution. http://www.google.com/search?q=devolution+%22retrograde+evol...
Yes. Such an objective hierarchy of species is frequently referred-to in Charles Darwin's, The Descent of Man. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/dscmn10.txt
Von Baer has defined advancement or progress in the organic scale better than any one else, as resting on the amount of differentiation and specialisation of the several parts of a being [...] In accordance with this view it seems, if we turn to geological evidence, that organisation on the whole has advanced throughout the world by slow and interrupted steps. In the great kingdom of the Vertebrata it has culminated in man.[...]
Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality. The world, it has often been remarked, appears as if it had long been preparing for the advent of man [...] The most humble organism is something much higher than the inorganic dust under our feet; and no one with an unbiassed mind can study any living creature, however humble, without being struck with enthusiasm at its marvellous structure and properties. [...]
no animal voluntarily imitates an action performed by man, until in the ascending scale we come to monkeys [...]
this is the first case known to me in the ascending scale of the animal kingdom [...]
It is generally admitted, that the higher animals possess memory, attention, association, and even some imagination and reason. If these powers, which differ much in different animals, are capable of improvement, there seems no great improbability in more complex faculties, such as the higher forms of abstraction, and self-consciousness, etc., having been evolved through the development and combination of the simpler ones. It has been urged against the views here maintained that it is impossible to say at what point in the ascending scale animals become capable of abstraction, etc.; [...]
He who believes in the advancement of man from some low organised form, will naturally ask how does this bear on the belief in the immortality of the soul. [...]
I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to shew why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form [...]
In the lower divisions of the animal kingdom, sexual selection seems to have done nothing: such animals are often affixed for life to the same spot, or have the sexes combined in the same individual, or what is still more important, their perceptive and intellectual faculties are not sufficiently advanced to allow of the feelings of love and jealousy, or of the exertion of choice. When, however, we come to the Arthropoda and Vertebrata, even to the lowest classes in these two great Sub-Kingdoms, sexual selection has effected much. [...]
Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition [...] and if he is to advance still higher [...] Otherwise he would sink into indolence [...]
The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely, that man is descended from some lowly organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many. [...]
Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future. [...] with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system--with all these exalted powers--Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
If you seriously think that we haven't changed our theories of evolution since Darwin, there's not much I can do about that.
I'm not a biologist, but it seems to me that evolution refers to combined mutations over time and not much more, regardless of the perceived "direction" of those mutations. I imagine I would be more frustrated than I am already if I were a biologist.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482311 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=480986
His m.o. is usually to take some weird position and to argue incessantly with all kinds of links to support his position thrown in for good measure.
The interesting thing here is it seems to work, he gets modded up quite frequently and scores tons of karma like this.