Stock Rants #3: Evolution

[kiya]

No, really, saying something is "highly evolved" is not demonstrating your leet grasp of scientific principles. "More highly evolved" means you need Remedial Clue so you have a chance at understanding Freshman Biology when you take it.

Evolution does not work the way you think it does. It does not pluck out the particularly gifted, the particularly special, the mystically transcendent and bless them with descendants. Natural selection means that the ones who aren't able to survive don't, and also a bunch of random others who aren't lucky don't survive either. If your sooper-special genetic improvement mutation-holder gets hit in the head with a falling piano, unless their mutation provides them with superior piano-incident-surviving skills a la Wile E. Coyote, that mutation is not getting into the gene pool. Along the same lines, by the way, the existence of seat belts and air bags is not proof that we are not "evolved enough" to handle moving at highway speeds. (For crying out loud. NO I AM NOT MAKING THAT ONE UP.)

While we're on the subject, you are not more evolved than a monkey. You are evolved to different niches. The monkey almost certainly has you beat hands down at brachiation, for example. You are not the pinnacle of evolution; your eyes are in backwards and the cephalopods laugh at you. Evolution does not have an end goal that one can place living things on to evaluate their grade level; it is a process perpetually in progress. We'll know if this generation's mutations worked out for the species a few generations down the road.

So long as you perpetrate the notion that there is this continuum of evolution, by the way, you are supporting the ravings of creationists. Who don't understand that people didn't evolve from lemurs, but rather that people and lemurs evolved from some umpty-lump great-grandgenerations removed protoprimate and have evolved over an equivalent amount of time since that point. So they rant on about how they're not lemurs, they're "more evolved" than that, only they don't say "more evolved", they want to be soooo evolved they were specially ordered by a god without having to get on with any of that messy begatting ahead of time. Just stop feeding the trolls the special-case exceptionalism they want for their species, okay?

Further, your preferred subculture is not "more evolved" because of your presence in it, not even with the secret skills that are beyond the ken of the ordinary folk that you're convinced in your special place are required to deal with you and your super extraordinaritude. They have not invented new interpersonal skills in order to handle the likes of you. They fall back on the old standbys: the polite brush-off, the patient explanation, the cut direct, the snarkpocalypse. You are not that difficult to deal with, really. (Even if you do go on and on about how much more evolved you are.) All the virtues that you extol as proof of the superiority of your subculture are a) present in the mainstream, b) useful in non-subculture spaces, and c) not as universal within your subculture as your highly-evolved-colored sunglasses would have you believe. You are not going to usher in a new period in human evolution with your subculture's shiny values; if there is a "new period in human evolution", it's called "tomorrow", and it's coming whether or not you froob your grubunctuous noibs with mayo or choose to abstain. (Though a few days ago the new period in human evolution was called what we will, for the sake of argument, now call "yesterday".)

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Oh, amen.

It's really hard to get the assumed teleology out of English enough to make these arguments, isn't it ? Darwin needs his Milton yet, basically.