>Does any change count as "evolution" or is someone quantifying which ones actually improve fitness? I think it's helpful to get distance from the idea of "fit

>Does any change count as "evolution" or is someone quantifying which ones actually improve fitness? I think it's helpful to get distance from the idea of "fitness" in discussion with laypeople, as it is often loaded with presumptions. Evolution selects for what it selects for. It's true that surviving to maturity and producing offspring is vital for evolution (for the forms of life that work this way), but that's far from the whole story and our intuition about 'fitness' is often wrong.