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How Evolution Actually Works
Today I read here on Medium an article that first appeared in the New York Times about “how beauty is forcing scientists to re-think evolution.” As I know a great deal about evolutionary theory and its real-world effects I was naturally curious.
The article was shockingly ignorant and served only to spread misinformation and simple-minded misconceptions. This was the basic argument, which I’ve paraphrased for sake of brevity:
The male bower bird has spectacular plumage. But this isn’t enough to attract a mate, so the male also constructs an elaborate bower using colorful materials scavenged from the local environment. But this too isn’t sufficient to ensure mating so when a female appears to inspect the bower, the male bower bird must execute an elaborate dance. Only then may the female deign to mate with him. So this “proves” that natural selection alone can’t be responsible for the creation of beautiful things because obviously it’s only the dance that counts, so why does the male have such resplendent plumage and go to the trouble of constructing the lovely bower?
The implicit assumption seems to be that animals can only use a single indicator of genetic fitness when assessing a potential mate.
I’d like to think even a first-grader could reason more adequately than this, but apparently my optimism is unfounded. No…
