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This may sound very "hindsight is always 20-20" but why was evolution not always obvious? Traits that help reproduction will increase. Traits that hinder reprod

This may sound very "hindsight is always 20-20" but why was evolution not always obvious? Traits that help reproduction will increase. Traits that hinder reproduction will decrease. Why was it controversial, and what did people believe before that?

amscanne 3y ago
None of that makes sense or works without the idea that traits are the result of continuous random mutations, which is a very non-obvious idea (and very controversial considering the orthodoxy of divine creation — humans were created by god, so what do you mean they are changing?).
- bubblyworld 3y ago
  And to add to this, it also relies on the fact that inheritance occurs in discrete units (which today we call genes). One of the early criticisms was that mutations would "average out" in a large population, and thus natural selection would never get off the ground!
itisit 3y ago
From the annals of scientific discovery, can we point to anything that was "always obvious"?
roywiggins 3y ago
For starters, as mentioned in the article, the age of the Earth was far from settled for a long time. If you think the Earth is a few thousand or tens of thousands of years old, evolution can't be right, it is too slow.
lnxg33k1 3y ago
[flagged]
bazoom42 3y ago
It was commonly believed the species had been created fully formed, like in Genesis. Slective breeding was known, but it was not obvious that entirely new species could be created that way. There is a big step from breeding a bigger dog to breeding a dog into an octupus. Different theories of evolution existed before Charles Darwin, but the mechanism driving the evolution was not understood. Lucrete (Roman writer) had ideas close to Darwins natural selection - he believed the species had been initially created by all kinds of organs and body parts combinimg at random, but only the “fit” ones surviving. But I think Lucrete thought this was a historcal event, not an ongoing process.
- genman 3y ago
  Lucretius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucretius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucretius It is amazing how ancients had great insights like also about atoms but it took close to two millennia to have these ideas refined.
  - roywiggins 3y ago
    They also had a bunch of pretty bad ideas, it took a lot to dislodge Aristotelian physics.
keiferski 3y ago
In some sense I think because language itself is very much “noun-based.” By this, I mean that we talk about humans, dogs, flowers, and so on using nouns that don’t incorporate change into the structure of the language, and thus conceiving of a process-based metaphysics (of which evolution is basically a description of) is not intuitive. Even now, the concept of a species is kind of a wonky concept. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- TylerLives 3y ago
  I wonder how common this problem is in other areas. The question of free will comes to mind. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, language has a very strong impact on your thoughts about it. And it's not just language. We could be missing many great ideas because of our seemingly arbitrary limitations.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    I haven’t read enough Wittgenstein to have a serious opinion on his work, but I do think he touches on this issue. The line “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” is popping into my mind.
    - addicted 3y ago
      This is a pretty popular hypothesis. In fact, the Oscar nominated movie Arrival is based entirely on this idea.
blarg1 3y ago
I saw a youtube video recently where the guy believes evolution exists, but doesn't think the brain can evolve since it's not exposed to the air.
pvg 3y ago
This doesn't tell you how or even whether you could end up with an elephant, a bat or a whale from a shrew-like ancestor. The thousands of years of human experience with animal husbandry and artificial selection did not produce a flying dog or man-eating battlecow.
- tptacek 3y ago
  People have trained cows to take riders, which is a step towards the battlecow.
  - dadrian 3y ago
    Massive failure by Silicon Valley to have given us Juicero, but failed to have invented the battlecow.
kryptiskt 3y ago
That there are small variations and that they can be amplified is obvious, and humans have used them in selective breeding since forever. But it's not obvious that you can take it far enough that you can create new species. Or that you can end up with very different creatures like humans and birds just by selecting for long enough.
addicted 3y ago
It’s not even obvious today. The strongest argument the creationists use when trying to push back against evolution, which actually works, is basically “do you really think your great grandfather was a monkey?”. It takes incredible leaps of imagination to accept that different species had common ancestors and evolved from very different looking species. Even if you do buy evolution it takes many leaps of imagination to propose and accept that not only do reptiles have a common ancestor with each other, and birds have a common ancestor and fish, etc. but all of them also evolved from a common ancestor. And finally even after you accept that, while it wouldn’t take as much of a leap of imagination, it would definitely require fighting millennia of cultural and religious indoctrination to accept the idea that humans were also subject to the same processes as other animals.
isleyaardvark 3y ago
To give some context on how obvious or non-obvious it was, Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, which was the same year Louis Pasteur disproved the popular idea of spontaneous generation. That was a theory put forth by Aristotle that (at least some forms of life) would just spontaneously arise from dust or mud. That theory wasn’t directly related to the origin of man, but it gives an idea of where scientific theories were at the time.
- eszed 3y ago
  I prefer to think that Aristotle wasn't wrong, just operating at an insufficiently-complex level of abstraction. Life did / does spontaneously generate, but it involves amino acids and cosmic rays (or something like that), not rotting meat and sunshine. (Wasn't that the experiment Pasteur used? Proving that flies had to lay invisible eggs before maggots could appear.)
  - actuallyalys 3y ago
    I do think this distinction is important beyond how we view Aristotle. Some creationists argue Louis Pasteur disproved abiogenesis (and in their view, evolution as well) even though his experiments addressed the spontaneous generation of life under current conditions, not whether any form of life can form from nonliving material at all. I believe he disproved both maggots and microorganisms spontaneously generating.
snowpid 3y ago
One might ask, which ideas about creation Non-western, non-european cultures had?

amscanne 3y ago

None of that makes sense or works without the idea that traits are the result of continuous random mutations, which is a very non-obvious idea (and very controversial considering the orthodoxy of divine creation — humans were created by god, so what do you mean they are changing?).

bubblyworld 3y ago
And to add to this, it also relies on the fact that inheritance occurs in discrete units (which today we call genes). One of the early criticisms was that mutations would "average out" in a large population, and thus natural selection would never get off the ground!

itisit 3y ago

From the annals of scientific discovery, can we point to anything that was "always obvious"?

roywiggins 3y ago

For starters, as mentioned in the article, the age of the Earth was far from settled for a long time. If you think the Earth is a few thousand or tens of thousands of years old, evolution can't be right, it is too slow.

lnxg33k1 3y ago

[flagged]

bazoom42 3y ago

It was commonly believed the species had been created fully formed, like in Genesis. Slective breeding was known, but it was not obvious that entirely new species could be created that way. There is a big step from breeding a bigger dog to breeding a dog into an octupus. Different theories of evolution existed before Charles Darwin, but the mechanism driving the evolution was not understood. Lucrete (Roman writer) had ideas close to Darwins natural selection - he believed the species had been initially created by all kinds of organs and body parts combinimg at random, but only the “fit” ones surviving. But I think Lucrete thought this was a historcal event, not an ongoing process.

genman 3y ago
Lucretius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucretius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucretius It is amazing how ancients had great insights like also about atoms but it took close to two millennia to have these ideas refined.
- roywiggins 3y ago
  They also had a bunch of pretty bad ideas, it took a lot to dislodge Aristotelian physics.

keiferski 3y ago

In some sense I think because language itself is very much “noun-based.” By this, I mean that we talk about humans, dogs, flowers, and so on using nouns that don’t incorporate change into the structure of the language, and thus conceiving of a process-based metaphysics (of which evolution is basically a description of) is not intuitive. Even now, the concept of a species is kind of a wonky concept. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
TylerLives 3y ago
I wonder how common this problem is in other areas. The question of free will comes to mind. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, language has a very strong impact on your thoughts about it. And it's not just language. We could be missing many great ideas because of our seemingly arbitrary limitations.
- keiferski 3y ago
  I haven’t read enough Wittgenstein to have a serious opinion on his work, but I do think he touches on this issue. The line “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” is popping into my mind.
  - addicted 3y ago
    This is a pretty popular hypothesis. In fact, the Oscar nominated movie Arrival is based entirely on this idea.

blarg1 3y ago

I saw a youtube video recently where the guy believes evolution exists, but doesn't think the brain can evolve since it's not exposed to the air.

pvg 3y ago

This doesn't tell you how or even whether you could end up with an elephant, a bat or a whale from a shrew-like ancestor. The thousands of years of human experience with animal husbandry and artificial selection did not produce a flying dog or man-eating battlecow.

tptacek 3y ago
People have trained cows to take riders, which is a step towards the battlecow.
- dadrian 3y ago
  Massive failure by Silicon Valley to have given us Juicero, but failed to have invented the battlecow.

kryptiskt 3y ago

That there are small variations and that they can be amplified is obvious, and humans have used them in selective breeding since forever. But it's not obvious that you can take it far enough that you can create new species. Or that you can end up with very different creatures like humans and birds just by selecting for long enough.

addicted 3y ago

It’s not even obvious today. The strongest argument the creationists use when trying to push back against evolution, which actually works, is basically “do you really think your great grandfather was a monkey?”. It takes incredible leaps of imagination to accept that different species had common ancestors and evolved from very different looking species. Even if you do buy evolution it takes many leaps of imagination to propose and accept that not only do reptiles have a common ancestor with each other, and birds have a common ancestor and fish, etc. but all of them also evolved from a common ancestor. And finally even after you accept that, while it wouldn’t take as much of a leap of imagination, it would definitely require fighting millennia of cultural and religious indoctrination to accept the idea that humans were also subject to the same processes as other animals.

isleyaardvark 3y ago

To give some context on how obvious or non-obvious it was, Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, which was the same year Louis Pasteur disproved the popular idea of spontaneous generation. That was a theory put forth by Aristotle that (at least some forms of life) would just spontaneously arise from dust or mud. That theory wasn’t directly related to the origin of man, but it gives an idea of where scientific theories were at the time.

eszed 3y ago
I prefer to think that Aristotle wasn't wrong, just operating at an insufficiently-complex level of abstraction. Life did / does spontaneously generate, but it involves amino acids and cosmic rays (or something like that), not rotting meat and sunshine. (Wasn't that the experiment Pasteur used? Proving that flies had to lay invisible eggs before maggots could appear.)
- actuallyalys 3y ago
  I do think this distinction is important beyond how we view Aristotle. Some creationists argue Louis Pasteur disproved abiogenesis (and in their view, evolution as well) even though his experiments addressed the spontaneous generation of life under current conditions, not whether any form of life can form from nonliving material at all. I believe he disproved both maggots and microorganisms spontaneously generating.

snowpid 3y ago

One might ask, which ideas about creation Non-western, non-european cultures had?