Keep in mind I'm paraphrasing this from memory but:
"In my main line of work, we breed fruit flies. We noticed that the some of the more aggressive males would fight over a bit of land, plant, whatever, to court females. We wondered what would happen if we only let the aggressive flies breed, and within 10 generations we had flies that were like Hercules (fruit flies breed very fast which is why they are used to study genetics and evolution). We then reintroduced them back to the more natural population of flies. What ended up happening was; while the aggressive flies were busy fighting, the non-aggressive males were hanging out with the females and making babies. The aggression was quickly bred out and after a couple of generations it went back to initial levels. We often hear the phase 'survival of the fittest' in this field of study, but just a reminder that it doesn't always mean what you think it means."
I thought that was an interesting aside that you might enjoy. 
I've always thought, "Survival of the first thing that happens to work", while not quite as neat, better describes evolution without leading to the kind of misunderstandings 'fittest' tends to cause
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There's a lot of traits that can be detrimental -- or even deadly -- to individual members, but get passed on anyway because they don't interfere with reproduction enough to undergo selective pressure.
There's an Indonesian boar with tusks that grow all their lives, eventually curving back and impaling their own heads. Squids have ring-shaped brains and their esophagus passes through the ring. They can give themselves brain-damage if they swallow something that's too large. Male fiddler crabs have that one extra large, iconic claw. It doesn't actually work as a claw and usually just slows them down. Unfortunately, female fiddler crabs choose their mates by claw size, so the selective pressure is working against them!
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Absolutely. Social darwinism is a complete refusal to understand evolution. Kropotkin had a much better understanding than the social darwinists.
As much of a lib/hack as Tim Morton is, his view of evolution and Darwin as deliberately or accidentally misunderstood to justify domination, and how an ecological reading of Darwin makes much more sense was always very interesting to me.
yep. Perhaps this is a little tangential to the conversation, but I personally think human evolution is behavioral rather than genetic.
Like, sure, there's still genes and stuff, and that undergoes it's own very slow selective pressure. But on top of that is our ability to learn new behaviors and then communicate them to others. Other animals have to wait generations for behaviors to spread through the whole species. For us, it's practically overnight.
This is true for lots of animals, mammals in particular. That’s one of the things that’s made mammals so successful, is the ability to remember learned experiences to help in future encounters, and often to pass those learned behaviors on to their offspring or other members of their species, which most types of animals can’t do to nearly the same extent.
Give a bear enough time and it’ll figure out how to open pretty much any trash can. They’ll also teach other bears how to do the same (not sure if it’s just their kids, I think it’s other bears too). Different orca and dolphin pods can have very different hunting strategies not based on anything genetic, but just that that’s how they were taught.
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Hell, everything that goes wrong with humans once you hit 35. After you have a few babies the only selection pressure is being not-miserable enough to provide supplementary care for your grown kids and their kids, which we suspect is a key reason we live so long after peak reproductive years. Your body just needs to work well enough to watch kids until they can take care of themselves to convey that advantage, but there's no selection pressure against lower back pain or your prostate staging a coup the moment you turn 70.
Spines evolved to be horizontal to the ground. Vertical spines suck shit, and knees only work properly when the load is evenly spread between four of them.
Yeah, i've heard it said that we're still in a transitional state and have achieved true bipedalism yet.
The missing ingredient to the achievement of full communism? Proper bipedalism 😔
Wisdom teeth are one of my favorite examples. It does make young-earth creationists defensive, but what doesn't
It also has a LOT to do with the enviroment a species finds themselves in too. Take a shark out of the ocean and it's a lot less scary.
Or... put a billionaire under the sea and see what happens 🎮
:oceangate:
Hmm... I think we need more data on that to make a decisive conclusion.
My evolution professor said “Evolution isn’t survival of the fittest, it’s survival of the fit enough”
10,000 years of the stupidest ways to get laid that actually worked