The Master stays behind;
that is why she is ahead.
She is detached from all things;
that is why she is one with them.
Because she has let go of herself,
she is perfectly fulfilled.

I got my books for the Books4Obama  thing.  The results were one copy of Summerland, which I have not read, and nine books by people I have never heard of.  I'll read that, at least, though the "young adult novel" thing is always a turn off.  Of the other ten, one is a kids book that the FoML pronounced good, and there are two others that look potentially interesting.  So not worth the money, though that was hardly the point, obviously.

There's some that we'll likely give to a library or something.  They are mostly thrillers, which neither my wife or I have any interest in.

The recent diary by TheosophileEscargot has gotten me again thinking about a subject that always annoys me, that is, the misunderstandings and fallacies people have about Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection.  These are not particularly related to anything anyone posted in that diary.  It just got me thinking.  These are the errors I often see people make, even (and especially) people who are not "creationists":

Evolution is not directed

Evolution is not an example of progress from simpler forms to more complex forms.  This can happen, sure, but we can also see more simpler forms replace more complex ones. 

You very often see notions of some ultimate goal to evolution in SF, for example, notions of evolving into some higher form of being.  (Bad Star Trek novels and even good SF like Childhoods End.)  This is entirely inconsistent with the actual theory of evolution by natural selection.

Darwin did not discover "Evolution"

The idea that animals evolved from earlier forms was not knew to Darwin, but rather, was nearly the conventional wisdom among biologists before he came along, based on the very obvious similarities between the physical structures of different species.  Darwin didn't discover it.  What he did was produce a coherent theory that explained how it worked.  His contribution is not the "Evolution" part but the "Natural Selection" part.

Natural Selection does not produce creatures perfectly adapted to their environment

One of the very real problems you deal with when you write genetic algorithms on a computer is "local minima".  That is, the algorithm slowly makes improvements until it cannot make minor improvements that help matters.  If there is a large gap between an "ok" result and a "great" result, the algorithm can easily find itself stuck in the "ok" result because all the minor improvements are worse.

The situation in actual biology is the same.  If it would take a long chain of mutations to reach a better result, and the links in that chain are all worse results, then the species will not evolve in that direction.

As an example: there are many, many bird and reptile species with green skin.  Clearly it is advantageous to have green skin in certain environments.  No mammals have green skin?  Why is this?  It is because mammalian pigments are all based on melanin and there are no simple mutations that can be made to that that will produce green.  So just because it is advantageous does not mean that it will inevitably appear.

Not every feature of an organism must have a reason

There is a tendency to say "well, the creature has X, so because of natural selection, X must confer some advantage.  This is an error.  It is perfectly possible for a feature to have no benefit at all.  As long as it confers no disadvantage, natural selection will not remove it.

For instance: why do men have nipples?  The most likely answer is that because of pure random chance the mutation that led to them was not sex linked and since they confer no disadvantage, there is no evolutionary pressure to remove them.

(This is what Stephen Jay Gould called a "spandral".  This is a feature that has no benefit to the organism but exists merely as an offshoot of another, selected for feature.  These can form the basis for future traits that may have a benefit, but do not themselves have any benefit.)

Evolution is slow

To an evolutionary biologist, a significant trait appearing in a thousand generations is monstrously fast.  (Fast enough to be considered controversial in theories like "Punctuated evolution".)  Humans, for instance, are almost certainly only partially adapted to the rigors of agricultural civilization.  The idea that we could observe evolutionary changes in humans over the last century, or even the last millennium, is ludicrous.

Environments change constantly

There is a tendency to look at a creature in its environment and say "well, natural selection says it must be well adapted to the environment we find it in".  But environments are constantly changing, sometimes dramatically nearly overnight.  Some species we find may be poorly adapted and on the way out.  (For instance, there's some evidence that the cheetah would be headed for extinction regardless of human presence.)

Evolution is not a story of superior forms taking over from inferior ones

By most objective standards insects are more successful than mammals.  Our own family, the great apes, was barely holding on before people figured out how to bash things with rocks.  There is strong evidence that the human race itself almost went extinct, having been reduced to only a thousand or so members.

That isn't very well organized, but I'm done.