Russ, Good questions. I'm hoping Nick will speak up, but I'll hand wave a little, and get more specific if he does not.
This is one of the points by which a whole host of conceptual confusions enter the discussion of evolutionary theory. Often people do not quite know what they are asserting, or at least they do not know the implications of what they are asserting. The three most common options are that "the species evolves", "the trait evolves", or "the genes evolve". A less common, but increasingly popular option is that "the organism-environment system evolves". Over the course of the 20th century, people increasingly thought it was "the genes", with Williams solidifying the notion in the 50s and 60s, and Dawkins taking it to its logical extreme in The Selfish Gene. Dawkins (now the face of overly-abrasive-atheism) gives you great quotes like "An chicken is just an egg's way of making more eggs." Alas, this introduces all sorts of devious problems. I would argue that it makes more sense to say that species evolve. If you don't like that, you are best going with the multi-level selection people and saying that the systems evolve. The latter is certainly accurate, but thinking in that way makes it hard to say somethings you'd think a theory of evolution would let you say. Eric On Mon, May 9, 2011 06:25 PM, Russ Abbott <russ.abb...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I'm hoping you will help me think through this apparently simple question.> > >When we use the term evolution, we have something in mind that we all seem to understand. But I'd like to ask this question: what is it that evolves? > > >We generally mean more by evolution than just that change occurs--although that is one of the looser meaning of the term. We normally think in terms of a thing, perhaps abstract, e.g,. a species, that evolves. Of course that's not quite right since evolution also involves the creation of new species. Besides, the very notion of species is <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/>. (But that's a different discussion.) > > >Is it appropriate to say that there is generally a thing, an entity, that evolves? The question is not just limited to biological evolution. I'm willing to consider broader answers. But in any context, is it reasonable to expect that the sentence "X evolves" will generally have a reasonably clear referent for its subject? > > >An alternative is to say that what we mean by "X evolves" is really "evolution occurs." Does that help? It's not clear to me that it does since the question then becomes what do we means by "evolution occurs" other than that change happens. Evolution is (intuitively) a specific kind of change. But can we characterize it more clearly? > > > I'm copying Nick and Eric explicitly because I'm especially interested in what biologists have to say about this. >> > >-- Russ > Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State University Altoona, PA 16601
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