Talk:Evolution

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"See also"

I recently deleted the section at the end of the article called "See also." It contained a list of five things that readers might see also.

I deleted it on the grounds that it is not helpful and has the potential of expanding to enormous length whenever somebody wants to insert their favorite topic. I can think of dozens of topics that are just as relevant as the ones currently listed.

My deletion was reverted. What do the rest of you think? Is this a rabbit hole we want to go down? Genome42 (talk) 19:13, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

"See also" is a fairly standard section. See MOS:SEEALSO. - UtherSRG (talk) 20:08, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

MOS:NOTSEEALSO says not to repeat links already in the body text. A simple Ctrl-F search shows that orthogenesis (x 1), sympatric speciation (x 3) and parapatric speciation (x 2) are already there. I'd like to see a justification for what we do choose to include beyond the two that would be left after removing these. Mike Turnbull (talk) 12:03, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

That leaves "Devolution" and "Chronospecies," which don't count as major topics that readers need to go see (IMHO). Should we add mutationism, maladaptation, drift-barrier hypothesis, junk DNA, and many others? Genome42 (talk) 19:04, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

I have removed the items already linked in the article. I encourage addition of any reasonable links that would be of interest to readers of this article, though if the word or phrase can be linked in the body of the article directly, that would be better. - UtherSRG (talk) 19:07, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

Here's the opening sentence of the article on Devolution (biology, "Devolution, de-evolution, or backward evolution (not to be confused with dysgenics) is the notion that species can revert to supposedly more primitive forms over time."

I have removed this link because I don't think we should be recommending this to readers of an article on evolution. It is not possible for humans or chimpanzees to "revert" to the common ancestor of humans and chimps that lived about six million years ago. Genome42 (talk) 17:29, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

I removed Chronospecies because it's just a fancy word used to describe Phyletic gradualism. Phyletic gradualism isn't covered very well in the main article so I added it to the "See also" section. Genome42 (talk) 17:45, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

I added a bunch of other links in order to show everybody where this could go if we allow it. Many of these other Wikipedia articles conflict with this one.

This is meant to illustrate a serious problem that's the fault of Wikipedia editors over the past 20 years. They have allowed a proliferation of specialized niche articles that have not been updated when the main article (e.g. Evolution) has changed.

The result is a bunch of conflicting and confusing articles that cover the same topic. We can't fix that right away but we don't have to compound the problem by linking to them as I've done here for illustrative purposes. Genome42 (talk) 18:21, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

I agree with your sentiments but as the related topics are well outside my areas of interest, I'm not going to make further suggestions on the details. Perhaps you should start a formal WP:RfC to get a wider view from interested parties? Mike Turnbull (talk) 12:20, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Editors are not supposed to edit articles "to show everybody where this will go". Edits are supposed to be for improving articles, not messing them up to prove a point. Sumanuil. _{(talk to me)} 23:19, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Please explain your rationale for leaving "Devolution" and "Chronospecies" and removing all the others that I added, some of which are much more relevant than an article that talks about humans "reverting" to a more "primitive" species. Are you seriously interested in improving this article? Are you knowledgeable about evolution? Genome42 (talk) 20:46, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

I removed the ones you added because they were not added in an attempt to improve the article, but, as you said, "to show everybody where this will go". Sumanuil. _{(talk to me)} 21:48, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

POV concerns and general link spam is the reason why parent articles of this nature that cover a wide variety of articles have created outlines and portals.... To avoid pointless arguments not really related to content of the page. Outline of evolution and the Portal:Evolution provide two different layouts to navigate all the sub articles related to this topic. Ideally top level articles should link to a well-organized "Outline of ..." , alongside the main portal(s) to facilitate navigation of the overall topic. Moxy🍁 21:01, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

What's the point of "See also" if it only contains links to a nonsensical article like Devolution and a largely irrelevant article like Chronospecies?

If you leave in those two, then what's the criteria for deleting all the others that I proposed?

Outline of evolution is ridiculous. It's the perfect illustration of the mess that Wikipedia has become. Nobody is ever going to find that article useful.

Portal:Evolutionary biology is even worse. It starts with a figure that has been refuted and fails to even mention the standard definition of evolution. Genome42 (talk) 19:29, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

only molecular?

@Mausfield: your recent changes to the basically remove all references to traits, characteristics, and phenotypes, scrqpping them from the definition of evolution, and instead defining it as any DNA change. So this is a major redefinition of a very important term in a broad range of biological sciences. I am not sure we have a consensus for that. I see that as a justification you link to Neutral theory of molecular evolution, but is that really a proposal that we can say has led to a new definition of the term "evolution" in biology? Our article's use of the qualifier "molecular" does not make it seem so, and I see nothing in the article that addresses the issue of whether drift requires a new definition of the term evolution itself. Also, the way I read it, molecular change which is neutral with regards to survival/selection is not the same concept as molecular change which has no effect on physical traits at all, which is how you have changed the definition I think? For example, I don't feel confident that the ups and downs of repeat numbers in a microsatellite are really now included under "evolution"? Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:10, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

The definition of evolution was change in the heritable characteristics and is now change in the heritable allele frequencies. That is not satisfactory because evolution has a meaning outside the underlying process. Even if there were no such things as allele frequencies, evolution (if it occurred) would have meaning. Johnuniq (talk) 10:21, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

I agree, although to refine this point a little our article is clearly not about ALL meanings of evolution. I do however think it covers changes in heritable characteristics, in biology (or biology-like) contexts. OTOH I don't have a problem with it being allowed to cover drift and selection-neutral change, but I think it is important that the new edits seem to EXCLUDE a major definition which this article is intended to cover. (I also don't think this is a case where we can say that this is an old concept that should be in a history of thought article or section.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:42, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

Perhaps review the first line in this article:

This article is about evolution in biology. For related articles, see Outline of evolution. For other uses, see Evolution (disambiguation).

Mausfield (talk) 13:44, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

For example, I don't feel confident that the ups and downs of repeat numbers in a microsatellite are really now included under "evolution"?

They absolutely are, and have been so for probably about 50 years as a mainstream consensus and earlier as a growing position. What are you basing this lack of confidence on?

I don't mean this to be rude at all, but what determines the content of a scientific article is the consensus and literature published by scientists in that field, and in our situation means it must come from editors who are either in those fields or (more commonly) well-read in their literature. Phenotypic change is not the definition of evolution among any working biologist I have ever met or heard of. Even the people who didn't like Kimura agreed that neutral evolution can and does occur, they just disagrees that it is the vast majority of overall genetic change in livings organisms, but by the sheer math we now know that is true. Fisher in 1930 described how evolution more broadly would also occur in areas whose contribution to fitness went asymptotically to zero, and published on how even "minute variations in chance or environment" would overpower their spread through a population, and that is the mathematical basis for understanding drift. This is not inclusive of pleiotropic effects where a net reproductive success is unchanged because of other balancing contributors, that is antagonism and from the perspective of each gene is not neutral.

Also, the way I read it, molecular change which is neutral with regards to survival/selection is not the same concept as molecular change which has no effect on physical traits at all

"Physical traits" is not a term we use, because many genetic changes can result in even very tiny changes (like the loss of a particular epitope important to the immune system) which are not "physically" visible often even with microscopy. The "phenotype" is all material results of the genome, including those changes which are neutral contributors to fitness. The "genotype" is the string of letters. Evolution is the change in the latter, which sometimes produces a change in the former. Change in the former accumulates over time and is differentially pruned by the many contexts of selection, and the result is reproductive isolation over evolutionary time, which gives us our many wonderful species.

I'm totally happy to write or discuss alternative wordings. The proper definition of evolution is exactly what you stated: heritable changes in genetic sequence. Generally, in biology we denote a heritable (i.e., germline) sequences with variation in a population as alleles, but if you take issue with this phrasing I'm certainly happy to disucss alternatives. "Alleles" do not cover all mutation because somatic mutations (like, some benign mutation in your forearm somewhere) are not heritable in the context of eukaryotes. Personally I don't feel this is too technical for the average reader.

tldr: defining evolution with "physical characteristics" has been incorrect in a very basic technical sense for several decades. Mausfield (talk) 14:05, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

I am ok on using the term phenotypes, obviously, and I understand also that scientific disciplines can change their basic understandings. However I have not seen any evidence for what you are saying in any part of biology and even if it is happening I am not confident that it applies to the general way words are used in all parts of biology (if any). We often see that there is a philosophical part of a field that has however not yet won consensus from the whole field, and these situations create problems. Apart from the issue of whether biologists really refer to genetic blips with no effect at all on individual organisms let alone populations as evolution; I think another logical problem we should discuss is that your description implies that everything which is heritable is DNA and I'm not sure we are certain of that? --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:27, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

If we are going to use your personal familiarity with a term as a basis for a discussion on whether to include it in a scientific wiki article, I think its fair to ask what your background is in this space. Mausfield (talk) 16:47, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

For context, its because the "citations" I would give you in this discussion are like... very basic intros directed at high schoolers and the lay public. Which I would imagine might be annoying, but that's the level of "basic info" we're talking about here, and why I'm concerned that you are considering what you, personally, have and have not seen as a valid basis for debate here.

All emphases below are mine:

From the University of California's Museum of Paleontology, "Understanding Evolution" educational program, specifically the "Evolution 101" course section titles:

[Mechanisms of evolution: Grades 9-12] Speciation is the splitting of one ancestral lineage into two or more descendant lineages.
[Mechanisms of evolution: Grades 9-12] Evolution does not consist of progress in any particular direction.
[Mechanisms of evolution: Grades 13-16] Evolution is often defined as a change in allele frequencies within a population.
[Mechanisms of evolution: Grades 13-16] Evolution occurs through multiple mechanisms.
[Mechanisms of evolution: Grades 13-16] Natural selection and genetic drift act on the variation that exists in a population.
[Mechanisms of evolution: Grades 13-16] New heritable traits can result from mutations.

From the National Center for Science Education:

Misconception Monday! Natural Selection and Evolution, Part 1

Natural selection and evolution are the same thing.

No, they aren’t; they really aren’t. Evolution is descent with modification, heritable change in populations of living things. A common definition of evolution is change in a population’s allele frequencies. (Quick refresher: alleles are versions of genes. The gene that codes for a certain protein on the surface of human red blood cells, for example, has three variations, or alleles, A, B, and O, which in turn contribute to overall blood type.) Natural selection is a mechanism of evolution, a process that leads to shifts in allele frequencies within a population. But natural selection is just one way—albeit a really powerful way—that such change can occur. The others are genetic drift, gene flow (migration), and mutation. Let’s look at each one—genetic drift here, and then gene flow and mutation in part 2 later today...

So, drift (which is the floating of neutral variant frequencies due to chance) is part of evolution. Drift can influence phenotype, and it can be copy number variation from slip mutations in a microsatellite, or it can be hair color in a species and context where hair color doesn't influence fitness. That means the meaningful, encompassing definition contains only these elements:

1. Heritability: mutation can occur outside the germline genome, and will not be inherited thus will not affect frequencies of variants in the next generations
2. variation: in order for a "frequency" to exist (other than 1), there must be more than one version of a sequence that exists in the population, and that variant arises from mutation, which we call an....
3. allele: the term used to describe heritable variants in a homologous region of a chromosome in a population.

As allele frequencies change (due to selection, drift, flow, etc), we say that evolution is occuring. Your mention of inheritance not being restricted to nucleic acids is not outlandish, but it is still fringe and not part of the extremely widespread acceptance of evolution as the change in allele frequencies over generations. The subset of evolution that arises from selection is called adaptive evolution. In the mid-20th century we used to have people who are now called pan-adaptationists, and that position is now uncontroversially debunked because it requires evolution to be an active, forward-thinking agent, when of course we know that evolution is no agent at all: it is a rearview, statistical description of populations in motion over generations. Mausfield (talk) 17:57, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

@Johnuniq, please give this comment a look if you are still unsatisfied with my change to the lead. I am almost verbatim quoting major educational institutions dedicated to evolutionary biology. If you want the lead to go back to defining evolution as a change in phenotypes, please provide a comparable ref to similar major institutions justifying that. Mausfield (talk) 17:59, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

@Mausfield: of course I am not saying we should take my ideas as a source, so please don't accuse me of that. However, you should find a source? If you can only find University coursework that is not really making a straightforward case, but again I fully accept that there is probably a complication building up here in some parts of the biological field. To me it still looks like something which is happening in a part of biology though, until you can find evidence to prove otherwise. Put it this way, if people use this article to understand what evolution means in 90% of biology related articles, I don't think it is going to fit perfectly with the new changes? I think that creates a dilemma. I hope other Wikipedians will chip in.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:12, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

So I'm going to again ask you what your background in biology is, to justify you presenting your personal judgements of terms in biology as something I need to debate and provide citation against.

However, you should find a source?

I need a list of citations for adhereing to the consensus defintion of evolution, but you don't need citations for the defintion of evolution as changes in phenotype? As it happens, I've already given you some, including wiki articles that simply could not logically exist if the defintion required a change in phenotype.

If you can only find University coursework that is not really making a straightforward case

Is this a joke? The fact that its so settled it's in high-school (not just university) coursework shows you that you are simply not educated enough in this topic to be debating it like this. It is not a current debate in biology that evolution includes variation with no effect on phenotypes and no effect on fitness. It such a basic fact that contemporary, peer-reviewed publication delve into it, just like contemporary neurology research won't contain the phrase "the brain is in the skull".

To me it still looks like something which is happening in a part of biology though, until you can find evidence to prove otherwise.

I just showed you two educational resources meant for teenagers which state, unequivocally, that the common defintion for evolution is the heritable change in allele frequencies, so you are sea-lioning here. I also provided you with background about neutral evolution as an example which breaks the previous defintion, as some portion of evolution occurs without effects on phenotypes or fitness, thus categorically contradicting the previous version of the lead, which used "characteristics".

The situation is not a claim that needs citation, the situation is a person with no education in biology demanding that I supply citation for basic, uncontroversial facts about biology. That is sea-lioning. Citations are for specific, often numerically quantitative claims that are not part of broad consensus and accepted facts about biology.

Put it this way, if people use this article to understand what evolution means in 90% of biology related articles, I don't think it is going to fit perfectly with the new changes? I think that creates a dilemma

Since I'm kinda tired of the hyper-philosophized statements where you declare things are they way they are with literally no basis, please describe one article which works better with a defintion of evolution of changing phenotypes versus changing allele frequencies. For contrast, almost every single one of the "Key concept" articles in the population genetics template fundamentally breaks if evolution = phenotypic change, including:

• Hardy–Weinberg principle
• Genetic linkage
• Linkage disequilibrium
• Fisher's fundamental theorem
• Neutral theory
• Shifting balance theory
• Selection coefficient
• Fitness
• Heritability (which requires alleles be fundamental to heritable traits)
• Population structure
• Constructive neutral evolution

That's all except a couple, including Price's equation where you can use quantitative trait distributions intead of alleles, because it is a model parameterizing fitness and natural selection, not evolution. Mausfield (talk) 18:47, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

I asked you for a source to justify a major change. Can you please just bring sources to this discussion? This is how we work on Wikipedia. See WP:ONUS. The situation actually is a claim that needs a citation, and that has nothing to do with me personally, so don't make it personal please. I don't recall you providing any example which did not involve "phenotypes", but you did mention that the loss of epitotes would also be evolution and that seems to mean that evolution can be non-genetic? Please explain how this is consistent with the changes you've been made, without any personal attacks please. You also mentioned that "for probably about 50 years" there has been a "mainstream consensus" that a change in microsatellite repeat numbers is "absolutely" evolution, so there must be good ways to source that side claim?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:51, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

There are multiple issues here. The first one is how to define evolution in a Wikipedia article for the general public. What we want is a scientific definition that represents the concensus view of experts in the field. Mausfield is correct that the minimal definition of evolution is a change in allele frequencies of a population and he is correct that this covers changes such as changes in allele frequencies in junk DNA or other neutral sites.

Our goal should be to teach the general public that this is the proper minimal definition of evolution and that population genetics is the core of evolutionary theory.

Lots of scientists have struggled with the best approach to teaching this important concept and many of them have started with a somewhat more general definition of evolution that focuses of the three most important ideas; namely, that the changes must be heritable; that it is populations that evolve; and the process takes a lot of time. That's why they often have a definition like my preferred definition: "Evolution is a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations." I wrote several blog posts about this over the past 30 years ([What Is Evolution?]).

This was a good start but in previous long and tedious discussions about how to define evolution it turned out that it was still a bit too radical for most editors so we modified it a bit and came up with, "Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations." The addition of "characteristics" is acceptable because we say later on that it refers to any allele.

Mausfield thinks that this restricts evolution to just changes in phenotype but that's actually a misreading of "characteristics." It was never intended to be taken in that sense. Think of it as just a way to ease the average reader into a more accurate scientific definition later on in the article.

Here's the problem. The correct scientific definition (allele frequency change) is described later on under "Evolutionary forces" but much of the article still gives the impression that phenotypic changes are the only ones that are important and that natural selection is the most important process. The whole article needs to be rewritten in order to reflect the current consensus among knowledgeable evolutionary biologists (i.e. those who understand population genetics as it was developed more than 100 years ago).

There's a lot of unnecessary garbage in the article and a lot of misleading statements that reflect the view of amatuer editors who have inserted them over the past 25 years.

I think the time has come to explain the scientific definition in more detail in the introduction. Mausfield has the right idea but I think it needs some tweeking. I still think we need to ease into the description of "allele" and not throw it out in the first sentence. Genome42 (talk) 22:00, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

Well, it is a Featured article and a Top in WP Biology and WP Genetics, so I think a rewrite might be a bit drastic (and we'd need a solid consensus). Per WP:OKFORK I can create a temp subpage and we can edit that, and then I'd say add Template:Expert needed and tag WP Bio and/or WP Genetics, and submit to peer review and see what they think. I agree there are factual and organization errors that amplify each other, and that the basic structure needs work, like there is basic layout that kind of relies on misconception to flow, such as organizing mutation as one source of variation rather than its definition to be subcategorized into duplication and other larger structural variation, etc. And pretty wild (and unreferenced) stuff like:

"About half of the mutations in the coding regions of protein-coding genes are deleterious—the other half are neutral."

Lastly:

and that population genetics is the core of evolutionary theory.

Not sure I fully agree with this, modern synthesis and all. It's certainly half the picture, but to be holistic evolutionary theory, population genetics still needs needs the jazzy part, which is everything that comes out of the pop genetics as it gives rise to non-identical organisms who interact with each other and the world around them. An inherent part of that is the physical biology of traits and environment which has nothing to do with the stats.

It's definitely a central pillar though: evolution is a statistical, retrospective description of gene pools. Gene pools exist and change because replication is imperfect (mutation), creating variants (alleles). Those variants exist in frequency distributions (allele frequencies), which change because reproduction is not identical among alleles (drift, flow, and selection). That's basically where the most basic, inclusive, and holisitic definition in the lead has to stop. Mausfield (talk) 00:30, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

If you are worried about the FA status then it is important that instead of changing the lead on its own, the lead should match what is in the body, and the body should contain solid sourcing. There also has to be sufficient consideration to allow for awkward cases whether that be epitotes or epigenetics, and there needs to be a lot of consideration of the fact that the article should explain how the word is used in all parts of biology. In most of biology, the observation of phenotypes is still part of how evolution is described, even if genetic change is presumed in the background, so non-specialist readers need to be able to see that connection. I feel that the recent changes are not user-friendly. Switching from every day words to more technical "insider" vocabulary is occasionally useful or even necessary but I am not convinced that was the case with the recent edits. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 05:24, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

Did you review Genome42's comment? Mausfield (talk) 10:31, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

Yes. It contains new proposals about reviewing the whole article which may or may not be a good thing, but this was originally a thread about changes to the lead. That discussion is still open and is not really addressed in Genome42's post. A full review of the article might take a long time, might never happen, and might involve a lot of extra problems, but for now I would like to propose that we change the wording in the lead back to how it was (or something more similar). I see you've made a self-revert for now though, so thanks. To be clear, various points have been raised but one key practical concern I had is that the new lead was more hieratic and opaque. It is difficult for many types of reasonably educated readers by defining things in terms of alleles and removing the clear link to the way evolution is often observed by biologists in real-world animals and plants. I think this is a very important article for many different types of people.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 17:21, 29 August 2026 (UTC)