The Top 5 Most Irritating Terms In Evolution Reporting

An extreme example: if a mutation occurs that makes it impossible for all sperm to swim, that mutation will be eliminated from the population because the affected individual will not produce offspring.

Yes, if the mutation occurs in females, it can get propagated, and perhaps even reach high frequency before it is selected against in males, or the species goes extinct. This is a great example of why, "survival of the fittest" is so confusing. Even the fittest female might make terribly unfit sons.

How about a "bit more fit than the rest"

It would be great to come up with a list of alternative phases for journalists to use. They need to be correct, concise, and catchy.

M. Wilson Sayres said: It would be great to come up with a list of alternative phases for journalists to use. They need to be correct, concise, and catchy.

They need to be correct, concise, and catchy.

This is because it isn't really the survival of the fittest organism that drives evolution. It's the death of the least fit organism.

I've always liked "live long enough to get laid".

fnxtr said: I've always liked "live long enough to get laid".

fnxtr said: I've always liked "live long enough to get laid".

harold said:

fnxtr said: I've always liked "live long enough to get laid".

And it's only that complicated for sexual diploids and polyploids like us. "Live long enough to divide" is good enough for the vast majority of the biosphere.

Journalists are basically scientifically illiterates.

harold said: Humans just can't seem to get their brains around the fact that, although selection acts on individuals, it is populations that evolve.

How about "Individuals reproduce, populations evolve".

Henry J said: How about "Individuals reproduce, populations evolve".

A phrase I've often seen floating around here sometimes is reproduction of the good enough. I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet.

Anyway, before I click on the link to the article in question, let me see if I can predict some of the other irritating terms.

missing link

living fossil

more evolved/less evolved

de-evolution

micro-/macro-evolution

Another problem, not limited to a single term, is teleological language in general. i.e. gazelles evolve speed because they want to evade the cheetahs. As if their desire had anything to do with it.

Well, I got three of the four. :)

Paradigm Shift.

As long as I live, I never want to hear the phrase "Paradigm Shift" ever again.

Fuck you, Thomas Kuhn.

Scott F said: I think that phrase (or some variation) ought to be "it": "Populations evolve, not individuals." The phrase is clear, concise, catchy, and most importantly, it's true. It avoids, contradicts, and explains the misconceptions of both, "If people evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys",

AltairIV said: Another problem, not limited to a single term, is teleological language in general. i.e. gazelles evolve speed because they want to evade the cheetahs. As if their desire had anything to do with it.

If an individual has a mutation conferring a ten percent reproductive advantage there is a twenty percent chance that mutation will eventually spread through the entire future population.

I feel this statement answers most of the concerns raised. But I admit it is neither catchy nor concise. So what follows are some attempts at catchy and concise that admittedly leave behind some accuracy:
Mutations are hard. Evolution is easy.
Populations can evolve rapidly once they get that special allele.
A population will take an advantageous mutation and run with it.
Population army is only looking for a few good men. (Evolution will make the rest of them good).
One North European got a mutation conferring lactose tolerance. Evolution gave that advantage to nearly the entire European population.

Am I even getting close?

This is how I meant for that to look:

Mutations are hard. Evolution is easy.

Populations can evolve rapidly once they get that special allele.

A population will take an advantageous mutation and run with it.

Population army is only looking for a few good men. (Evolution will make the rest of them good).

One North European got a mutation conferring lactose tolerance. Evolution gave that advantage to nearly the entire European population.

Sorry.

Mutations and recombination increase genetic variety.

Selection reduces it. (Genetic drift also reduces it.)

Positive feedback between the two can increase or decrease the intensity of a given trait, which can resemble optimization of something.

Yeah, I know that's not concise or catchy, but concise and catchy will always leave out details that are needed to actually understand it.

Evolutionary change may be understood as a dual process of the introduction and reproductive sorting of variants, where "reproductive sorting" covers selection and drift, and the introduction process implicates mutation and altered development.

This process takes place in some environment (which may be complex and variable), and often is compounded by the presence of multiple hierarchical levels of variation and reproduction.

How about this with regards to selection and adaptation:

"Those that didn't aren't."

Not very detailed, but succinct.

Ugh. We must emphasize that evolutionary theory is our only way of understanding biological complexity. We must address two features of biological structures:

1. Their complexity.

2. Their adaptation.

These two are not the same thing, because complexity may be non-adaptive. If an insectivore had one arm for climbing and another that evolved into a wing (which is in fact what creationists say evolution "requires" transitional fossils to look like), then that would be very complex indeed, but not adaptive.

Complexity (specifically Kolmogorov complexity) is a measure of non-duplication, non-redundancy. If an exactly duplicated part is modified so it is no longer identical to the other part it was duplicated from, then that is an increase in Kolmogorov complexity-- but not necessarily adaptive. It may or may not be adaptive.

For example, if we start with a repetitive sequence, ABCABCABC, a random mutation might change that to: ABCABXABC. That is less duplicative and thus more complex, but not necessarily adaptive.

To generalize: if a sequence starts out duplicative (e.g. due to observed processes of gene duplication), then random mutations, ON AVERAGE, will INCREASE COMPLEXITY (but not necessarily adaptation) by the Kolmogorov criteria.

What, then, increases adaptation? Natural selection, because adaptation is closely related to a particular measure of "information". Information can be quantified as the distance (specifically Kullback-Liebler divergence) between the distribution of fitnesses in a population, and the distribution of fitnesses in hypothetical random genomes (which would be mostly dead.)

That is, think about the distribution of fitnesses in all the alleles of a gene in a population. Most are viable, some will have decreased fitness or be lethal, a small number may have increased fitness.

Now think about the distribution of fitnesses in a set of random scrambled sequences of the same length as the gene. Most have reduced or zero fitness; whether they are mostly lethal will depend on the gene, but if the gene is essential, most random scrambles of it will be lethal. A very small fraction will be viable.

How far apart are those two distributions? The information in the population is determined by how far apart the distribution of fitnesses in the population is from the distribution of fitnesses in the hypothetical random scrambled set. This is a measure of the adaptation of the population. Let's call this adaptive information.

Now, to describe what random mutation does, as compared with what natural selection does, we must distinguish between the properties of individuals versus the properties of populations.

As I described it above, adaptive information can only be a property of populations, never of individuals.

Complexity can, in principle, be a property of populations or individuals-- but if we imagine a single "random" mutation, that affects the complexity of AN INDIVIDUAL not a population.

Thus we summarize that evolution increases BOTH:

1. Random mutations on average increase the COMPLEXITY of individuals. On average they DECREASE the adaptive information of the population.

2. Natural selection INCREASES the adaptive information of the population, because NS pushes the distribution of fitness values in all the alleles in a population farther away from the distribution of fitness values you would expect in a hypothetical set of randomly scrambled genes. Increased distance (to be precise, Kullback-Liebler divergence) between distributions of fitness values are by definition an increase in information.

Evolution of super-complexity and super-adaptation is possible when the gain in adaptive information in natural selection is greater than the loss in adaptive information due to random mutation. This will be true only for certain values of mutation rates and for certain selection coefficients. For example, for hypothetical extremely high mutation rates and low selection coefficients, "devolution" or degeneration would probably occur, as creationists claim. However, in the real world of biology, mutation rates are very low and selection coefficients sometimes high. So there's no reason why Australopithecus afaransis can't evolve into Homo habilis.

However, in the real world of biology, mutation rates are very low

I like to think of evolution as an application of Theseus' Boat. You can never catch the boat in the act of ”becoming” another vessel, but the builder (or knowledgeable observer) of the ”original” boat would be able to spot the change instantly on Theseus' return to Crete.