Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

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From my experience, it seems that the biggest misconception about Evolution is that species evolve through some sort of conscious decision-making process, and not really by natural selection and random mutation.

For example, I often hear that a big step in the primate-to-human evolution was when one of our common ancestors "left the trees and started walking bipedally", implying to me at least, that it was some sort of "hey, maybe we should try this today" decision made by an individual to attempt it.

It wasn't. What really happened was that a mutation in the population allowed one individual the ability to walk a bit more upright, and this conferred a special ability for this individual to gather more food or have more offspring, thus propagating the mutated gene(s).

I watch the pop-sci channels regularly, and even they fall victim to this anthropomorphic trap about species "evolving-by-choice".

[edit] I just read this in the OP just below where I stopped...

MISCONCEPTION: Natural selection involves organisms trying to adapt.

It's more subtle than that. For example, if walking enabled you to gather more food, then anything that helps you walk better confers an advantage. If food was in trees, walking would be useless.

The best hypothesis for what triggered this change was a shift in climate where trees became less productive and thinned out more, meaning you often had to move quickly from one tree to another on the ground. Anything that enabled you to hustle faster like that gave you a big advantage.

With natural selection you do not have any choices. You survive or you die.

> for what triggered this change

You are doing it too. A change is not triggered by anything - you are talking as if there is some latent change waiting to be activated.

A change in selective pressure would trigger a change in the output of selection. The parent's point that reduction in trees would trigger a change to more walking behavior makes sense to me - the environment changed, which caused a change in selective pressures, thus making walking more favorable for survival and "triggering" the change.

A lot of that is tied up on how our language works. "The reason for this is" is ambiguous, because we use 'reason' to describe both purposeful decisions and coincidental explanations.

Have you ever tried to distinguish between "explaining" your behavior and "making excuses"? There is no clear difference -- or rather, people don't know what the difference is if there is one. It's not encoded in the language, but in our intent.

There is a lot of confusion about evolution because we simply don't have the words to make things less confusing. Trained scientists are better at it because they are better trained to see structure independent of language -- (I.e., to think logically instead of culturally.)

I think he is using the word more like a way of saying "the group of factors that ultimately led to this change" and not as if there was actually a change waiting for a trigger so that then "it can happen".

At least that's how I read it.

It was. The change was a shift in the tree population due to a latent factor; this latent factor is what resulted in walker-better-groups to outcompete tree-clinging-groups.

There is no anthropomorphizing here; it's simply semantics.

> I watch the pop-sci channels regularly, and even they fall victim to this anthropomorphic trap about species "evolving-by-choice".

I think this is, in part, due to their attempts to explain things to viewers by analogy, which often must anthropomorphise things.

One of the difficulties in this is that experts also anthropomorphise this, even though they know that it is not technically correct. Similar to how a programmer might say that the compiler would get angry.

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