Do you think lots of people mistake evolution for metamorphosis?

Question

In my experience, when a classmate or a colleague argues against belief in evolution, they think of that classic image of an ape slowly progressing frame-by-frame into a human being.

Anyone who's studied even high school biology knows evolution is nothing like that.

What's been your experience?

Answer 1

I know people like that drive me crazy!

Answer 2

I find about half have this confusion and another half think of 'hopeful monsters'. You know, like a cat giving birth to a dog.

Answer 3

I think your point is well made it does seem there is a confusion between how an individual changes and how a group changes. It has often struck me that there may be a great deal of confusion between the specific and the general as concepts. There is a broad confusion between the species and the genus as well as the individual and the population as if one can be substituted for the other. When there is confusion between the specific and the group then how can the factors effecting change be separated.

If confronted with the "why are there still monkeys?" It strikes me that the assumption in the statement is that there is only one concept of monkey. There is no knowledge that this is a class containing a membership of many species in many genera. If 'it' should change or evolve then 'it' changes in its entirety as if there were no individual members that could be left outside the impact of the change.  This is an inability to realize there is a separation between species members of a genus, family, or order just as there is a separation between individuals and a population.

If it is hard to speak of groups and retain the concept of membership in the group then it is hard to conceive of a part of the population under different selection pressures. It comes down to an ability to conceptualize.

Answer 4

Yes.  You are exactly correct.

The "why are there still monkeys?" question is precisely that confusion.   That an ancestor species slowly transforms into a descendant species, which *replaces* it.

This is both an incorrect understanding of evolution, and an incorrect understanding of metamorphosis.   Evolution occurs in *populations* ... and an ancestor species may have many descendant species (i.e. species don't "morph" into their descendants, they *branch*).    And metamorphosis happens to individuals as a transformation from one part of the life cycle to another (like a larval caterpillar turning into a butterfly).

People who don't understand biology confuse the two.