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Comment by unlikelymordant | Hacker News Reader

what do you mean by present evolution?

For any small window of time evolution is the hum-drum existence of daily live - being born, being eaten, etc. Only over significant periods are the patterns of change discernable. There are good examples of evolution at work over periods that humans can easily understand, bacterial resistance or peppered moths, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution, for example. But these are not nearly numerous enough for widespread understanding of the process. On a side note: hence the reason why Creationism is not extinct.

It's also important to remember evolution is not a process of general improvement, it's a process of adaptation for survival.

There is absolutely no reason for natural evolution to select for being smarter or stronger if it's not a good survival tactic - i.e. if it doesn't select for traits which allow proficient reproduction.

On a large scale "more evolved" is a meaningless term.

I would assume he's referring to the fact that evolution works by allowing the weak to die, or at the least not reproduce and without those mechanisms evolution is a different beast.

I don't think he was making a statement about society. Rather pointing out that when we think of the benefits of evolution, we tend to think of the combined effect over billions of years. But holding a microscope to it on scales like that of human history reveals a cumbersome and nearly imperceptible process. As it is, it offers nothing on any timescale that is meaningful to us.

I tend to agree. But a point about timescales: While it offers little on timescales that is directly relevant to our individual lives today - we're not going to see the generation of our children grow to turn out to include super human mutants like in X-Men -, it does offer something on timescales most of us can reasonably comprehend.

E.g. I believe HIV resistance is higher amongst people that have a certain gene that appears to have spread to something like 10% of people in Northern Europe after the black plague, for example. And blond hair in Northern Europe spread out of the Baltics from as recently as the 1700's, and went from nothing to 90%+ of the population in some areas.

Short-Term and Long-Term probably would have made more sense than Present and Past.

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