We Are All Confident Idiots

Re:We Are All Confident Idiots by adwf on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @08:36AM (#8520600)

Yeah, my issue wasn't with the mechanism of evolution, more with the phrasing. The word "survive" implies some sort of agency, the inverted phrasing does not. I could alter it to "decline of the weakest attributes as they are less successful and thus less likely to breed and pass their genetics on", but that's quite a mouthful for a tagline to teach schoolkids! ;)

PS: And yes I know there are plenty of situations where even "weak" attributes won't necessarily get weeded out, but then you'd be extending the tagline quite a bit!

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Re:We Are All Confident Idiots by JulianMorrison on Tuesday October 28, 2014 @09:52AM (#8520911)

Except, a stable population (not currently coping with a change from their evolved circumstances) doesn't really contain "weak" individuals beyond the normal lossage to infection, harmful mutation, violence and old age.

It may well contain groups that biologists project human cultural ideas on and call weak. But the continued presence of those groups shows them to be a useful part of the species diversity.

(I strongly recommend "The Genial Gene" and "Evolution's Rainbow", both by Joan Roughgarden, for further reading.)

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