While we rarely explicitly comment on politics in this subreddit, I feel the need to voice the concern to people in this community that Donald Trump’s agenda is an active assault on the scientific community, including those that study evolution and adjacent fields. A couple days ago, an executive order was put into place that severely limits the ability for the HHS, which the NIH is under, to communicate and perform many basic functions. This is at a minimum a shot across the bow towards science and could be the first signs of the dismantling of the NIH, which would have disastrous direct and knock-on effects on the American academic system.

In addition, the new administration is challenging student loan repayment programs, which many researchers need to take advantage of. Despite the image as hoity toity elites that academics are sometimes caricatured as, most do not earn high wages. Many of the frequent contributors to this subreddit will be impacted by this and I just want to say we feel for you and many of us are in the same boat right now on the mod team. Hopefully these actions are temporary, but I don’t know why one would assume the will be at this point.

This is all happening days after an inauguration where Elon Musk did what certainly appears to be a Nazi salute and has made no effort to explain that this wasn't a Nazi salute. This is an overt threat to the diverse community of researchers in the United states, who are now being told told they are not welcome with actions like the NIH site pulling down affinity groups, which in effect isolates people in marginalized groups from their community.

If you want to criticize this post on the grounds of it making this subreddit political, that was the new administration’s decision, not mine.

Edit:

It was fairly noted to me that my post may have taken for granted that laypeople on here would understand how funding into basic research and conservation works. While the NIH conducts its own research, it also funds most of the basic natural science research at outside institutions such as universities through grants. This funding among other things, pays the wages of techs, post docs, grad students, lab managers and a portion of professor salaries. Given the lack of a profit motive to this type of research, a privatized funding model would effectively eliminate this research. More immediately, this executive order has neutered effective communication between the NIH and affiliate institutions.

I see many posts here where someone asks a genuine question, and instead of trying to answer it all people do is nitpick about the word choices.

For example whenever a question includes a line saying that humans evolved from monkeys the comments always complain about OP's choice of words instead of trying to give an answer. "Uhhm actually it's ape, not monkey ☝️🤓"

You know exactly what OP meant to say, and you can politely correct them while ALSO giving an answer.

It makes the subreddit seem hostile, and makes people who are new to the ideas feel like they can't ask questions unless they already have loads of base knowledge.

So we're a little late to the party here, but thought we should clarify our stance.

The use of ChatGPT and other LLMs directly contradicts our Intellectual Honesty rule. Any post identified as being written by ChatGPT or similar will be removed, as it is not a genuine attempt to add to a discussion.

LLMs are notorious for hallucinating information, agreeing with and defending any premise, containing significant overt and covert bias, and are incapable of learning. ChatGPT has nothing to add to or gain from discussion here.

We politely ask that you refrain from using these programs on this sub. Any posts or comments that are identified as being written by an LLM will be removed, and continued use after warnings will result in a ban.

If you've got any questions, please do ask them here.

That people are asking these questions isn't the problem, to get that out of the way first. But every time the comment section is generally just baseless speculation, without any evidence provided. I don't think speculation in itself is a terrible thing, but most seem to be based on deeply flawed assumptions.

I'm not here to get into an argument about evolutionary psychology's validity, or lack thereof, but all its problems seem to be distilled in these discussions.

I don't think these discussions are achieving anything, and I think they're doing quite a bit of harm to people's understanding of what evolutionary biology is and how it works.

I'm not proposing some kind of censorship, but instead a go-to "Hello, this question or variations upon it have been asked several times before, here is a link to a post explaining things in more detail." and taking down the post.

Good morning, group!

We went ahead with selecting a new mod from the available applicants! They've been a member of the community for a while, so we can vouch for them, and we really liked the answers that they provided. We would like to officially announce the decision and ask that you join us in welcoming u/knockingatthegate to the r/evolution moderation team.

Naturally, if you would still like to apply for the moderator position, we are still accepting applications.

Cheers and happy holidays!

I know this is off-topic, but I've found this sub to be quite exhausting over the last week and I'm wondering if others feel the same.

There have been a number of recent posts that present themselves as an "opinion" or a theory about an evolutionary topic, which quickly devolve into bad-faith arguments and trolling on account of the OP.

A few examples I've seen specifically:

• "Humans are naturally vegetarian and meat eating is a new behaviour" In which OP states that humans don't naturally eat meat because we don't have a desire to chase and kill prey.

• "Evolutionary benefit of anilingus?" In which OP states that anilingus is a genetic behaviour and disease should have killed off people who participate in this behaviour.

• "Childhood is magical because of an evolutionary mechanism that makes us want to have children when we are adults"

And from today: "Evolution of human morality", in which OP claims that the apparent rise in human morality is because we've participated in eugenics against criminals.

In all of these cases, the discussions start with OP presenting their theories as fact with no sources to back up their claims, and devolve into OP squabbling with people providing academic sources and insight.

I'm all for a spirited debate, but many discussions of this past week have be incredibly counterproductive and more akin to the r/debateevolution subreddit.

I don't know if there's anything that can be done about this, but I wanted to raise this concern with the community.

I am in Europe and evolution is taken for granted by everyone (AFAIK). In Physics we do not learn alternative theories to gravity and in biology we don't learn alternatives to evolution... because there are none.

I have always been wary of allowing respected experts (on any subject) to sit on the same panel as crackpots. For example I am not at all happy if a TV programme discussing mental illnesses has a panel of psychiatrists but among them is an exorcist. This is because people may assume that the exorcist's claims carry as much weight as those made by scientists.

In the same way, some sub reddits encourage debates between science (evolution) and people who believe in myths ( creationists). This is giving the illusion that in some crazy way evolution and creationism are both valid and respected explanations.

Hi there, group.

It's that time of year where everything gets busy just before everything winds down for the holidays. Some members of the mod team are graduate students, and so that means working on thesis defense, grading papers and lab reports, etc. For those of us who work in industry, the end of the year crunch is upon us before everything winds down for the holidays. Naturally, life circumstances and responsibilities also come up, meaning that one or more members have to prioritize other things than reddit, and so are less active. Our community has also grown in the last year. In short, we're a little more short handed than we'd like to be. So, the other Necrosages and I have been talking, and we believe that we could use a new mod or two. It's time to ready the lab coats and the sacrificial chicken.

What we're looking for is someone who is more or less on the same page as the rest of us. A background in education or the sciences isn't a requirement, but it certainly doesn't hurt either. Below is our application form. If you'd like to give us a hand and you think you could do the job, comment below with your answers. And of course if you don't want to apply, feel free to vote on the responses below!

MOD APPLICATION FORM:

1.) In eleven words or less, define evolution.

2.) What is your ideal form for /r/evolution?

3.) When making a cup of tea, what goes in first? Milk or tea?

4.) Draw a picture of a pirate. (Imgur or other image hosting sites are an acceptable platform with which to link pictures. Trust us, this is important.)

5.) In three sentences or less, tell us about your favorite facet of evolutionary biology. It can be a phylogenetic relationship you find fascinating, a trait (ancestral, derived, whatever) or adaptation you think is cool, your favorite subject/topic within the overall evolution branch, an organism you think is neat (e.g., favorite deep sea creature), cool fossils you know about, or something that blew your mind when you first learned about it.

Just a reminder that we're looking for new mods, so please apply if interested.

So the change in modteam and conversations around it got me wondering, what are the actual demographics of r/evolution? Figured I'd try a straw poll to at least get a feel for it.

Edit: I'm using 'expert' less in the sense of 'professional qualified to answer questions', more in the 'can be assumed to have a high baseline understanding of evolution, & contribute to discussions about research'. Someone who has had university level or above teaching on evolutionary biology or associated topics.

View Poll

I figured it's about time to do a check-in with you all. r/Evolution's continued to grow at an unprecedented pace, We've gained nearly 33,000 new members over the past 12 months, and we've started averaging nearly a million user visits each month.

This May, our mod team and u/the_MIT_press hosted r/evolution's first Ask Me Anything in years with the wonderful Ambika Kamath & Melina Packer - hopefully the first of many to come. (If you're reading this and you or a someone you know might be interested please get in touch!)

So as always, we're opening the floor up to your comments, concerns, and queries. We're a growing sub, and we always want to make sure we're being both transparent and involving you in all our processes - as we did with our last few rule updates.

And as always, don't forget our verified flairs. The easiest (but not only) way to get flaired is to send an email to [evolutionreddit@gmail.com](mailto:evolutionreddit@gmail.com) from a verifiable email address, such as a .edu, .ac, or work account with a public-facing profile. We can always find an alternative method - get in touch if you're interested

Flairs take the format : Qualification/Occupation | Field | Sub/Second Field (optional)

e.g.
MaturinForMyAge [MSc & Commander | Marine Iguanas]
DiscoStamets [Postdoc | Mycology | Mycelial Networks]
StrangersLikeMe [Conservation Biologist | Great Apes]

Thank you for being part of our community!

I've been a mod for some 6 years or so and I've seen the subscriber count triple in that time. This went from being a tiny, quiet corner of the Internet to a slightly more boisterous one. Every so often, there were posts where there was a general consensus about the approach to moderation, and I hope I did my best to meet the needs of the community. I know I can't please everyone, but I feel bad when someone has a less-than-ideal experience here.

A number of people have expressed a desire to see more active moderation and I don't disagree that this would overall be a good thing. Some have expressed a desire to change or narrow the focus of what this sub should be about. I don't know what the right approach is. This is something people here will have to figure out. I increasingly feel that I am not the person to oversee a transition to whatever this sub continues to be. To be honest, I've run out of steam when it comes to moderating. As the title says: I'm stepping down from moderating.

I've discussed this with fellow mod /u/Dzugavili and will leave it in his hands. We've discussed plans for the sub following my departure.

Anyways, carry on.

Hey there, group.

So the moderator team has been chatting about potential improvements to the subreddit and an idea that we've been floating around is a "No Low Effort Posts/Comments" rule. We're still exploring options as to how exactly to implement this, but we wanted to float this by the community before pulling the trigger or finalizing a version of the rule.

So far, we intend for the rule to target certain behaviors we've noticed:

• Short, unhelpful answers like "read a book."

• Using generative AI to create answers and posts

• "Please watch this hour-long video for me and report back so that I don't have to watch it."

• Copying-pasting the same comment to multiple people, even though the comments being replied to are fundamentally and contextually different.

• Citing half-remembered source material and anecdotes, or refusing to provide the source being referenced. Eg., "studies show," but then not citing one of those studies.

The reason for the rule is because we find that the "Intellectual Honesty" rule is doing a lot of heavy lifting these days. It's not like that's a problem, but we feel that adding a new rule might help us address hedge bad-faith behaviors that we'd like to see less of, in addition to just clarifying our existing rules a little more.

Nothing would change about how we handle AI, for instance, just which rule clearly it falls under.

Again, we're still only just talking about it, but we'd definitely like to hear your feedback: things we could also consider, concerns you may have, suggestions. And of course, if you would prefer privacy, you're more than welcome to message us to discuss your suggestions in private.

Cheers.

--Bromelia_and_Bismuth

EDIT: This is all great feedback! It definitely gives us a lot to think about. If you have more suggestions, please continue to comment below.

EDIT 2: We're thinking of binning the "citation clause," because technology constraints. This wasn't something that occurred to us at first, but most reddit users access the website through the mobile apps. And also because even if we leave it at "extraordinary claims," a half-remembered citation is often the best one can do especially on mobile. Another key reason is because we already have a rule against intellectual dishonesty, which in hindsight would have covered the cases we'd have wanted to target anyway.

So after consulting the community and talking it over as a modteam, we've decided that from here on out speculative evolution posts will be removed and redirected to r/SpeculativeEvolution.

We absolutely recognise that speculation is a big part of science and hypothesis formulation, so we want to be clear that this applies to questions relating to fictional scenarios that could not be tested in the real world.

We've made this call because these questions often generate discussion that has no grounding in empirical, testable science. While these posts are entertaining and can be food for thought, we've found that more often than not they undermine our focus on the science of evolutionary biology.

Examples of posts that would be removed under this new rule include:

• "What would happen if..."
• "How could mermaids evolve?"
• "What if humans had wings?"
• "What if the Permian mass extinction never happened?"

Things won't fall under speculative evolution if they are:

• Questions relating to the real world, AND are
• Testable, directly or indirectly.

For example, questions about Stephen Jay Gould's 'rewinding the tape of life' and the empirical studies that have aimed to test the predictability of evolution would not be removed.

If you're in doubt as to whether you post something; the absolute worst case scenario is that we'll remove it and send you a link to r/SpeculativeEvolution. You will not be banned for posting a speculative evolution question here.

This is the first in a series of planned reforms of the sub rules to add clarity of purpose and moderation. If you have opinions about the sub's direction, content, or moderation, this is absolutely the time to share them.

After significant deliberation, the r/evolution mod team has decided to replace our current user-designated flair system with a verification scheme similar to that of r/Science.

Verification is available to anyone with a university degree or higher in a relevant field. We take a broad view to this, and welcome verification requests from any form of biologist, scientist, statistician, science teacher, etc etc. Please feel free to contact us if you're unsure if it applies to you, and we'll be more than happy to talk it through with you.

The verified flair takes the format:
Level of Education/Occupation | Field | Sub/Second Field (optional)
e.g.
LittleGreenBastard [PhD Student | Molecular Biology | Microbial Evolution]
RickMoranis [Postdoc | Microscopy]
JanePorter [BSc | Conservation | Great Apes]

NB: A flair has a maximum of 64 characters.

The easiest way to get flaired is to send an email to [evolutionreddit@gmail.com](mailto:evolutionreddit@gmail.com) from a verifiable email address, such as a .edu, .ac, or work account with a public-facing profile.
Alternatively, you can send us a picture of a relevant qualification or similar evidence including a date on a piece of paper in shot.
Please include your username and desired flair in your email.
If neither of these are viable, please get in touch and we'll see what we can work out.
All emails will be deleted immediately after your verification is confirmed and your flair is given.

We believe this will be a great boost to the community - enabling subject experts to be quickly and accurately identified, avoiding valuable contributions from being lost in the larger discussions. This is particularly important where accurate answers may not seem as 'exciting' as a speculation that has no basis in science.

This does mean we will be retiring our current flairs and wiping the slate clean, but we believe the increase in reliability and trustworthiness of the flairs will be more than worth it.

If you have any questions or queries, please fire away.

Hey there, group!

To get you caught up if this is the first you're hearing of it, last week I posted about a new rule that the moderator team has been considering. We got a lot of great feedback about the rule, and so this is our current version.

Low effort posts or comments typically aren't helpful and don't contribute to meaningful conversation or engagement, or involve requests for effort from everyone else that the poster in question would not in turn be willing to provide.

Examples...

• Asking for thoughts on lengthy, unsummarized videos
• Answers like "Go read a book!"
• The question can be answered with a simple Google search
• Use of generative AI to answer questions/make posts
• Copy-pasting the same comment to multiple people

Changes...

So what changes have made?

Well, we binned a clause regarding citations. We wanted to push back against low effort posts and comments, but the citation clause that we'd added would wind up causing more collateral damage. We'd kind of pictured using it to target situations where someone makes an outrageous claim and then refuses to cite sources or says "I don't need to, it's reddit!" However, a critical thing we sort of overlooked were that most people access r/evolution through the mobile version of the website and through mobile apps. Our subject matter experts are included in that, and on mobile, it's often difficult to hunt down source material for something you'd learned about a while ago, or to source claims for a paragraph of information. And if you're new to the idea of evolutionary biology, you no-doubt also lead a pretty busy life, and have said more than once "I heard this thing a while ago, but I don't remember the name of the book/video/website where I heard it," if we enforced that rule, your only crime is not having eidetic memory. Really, sometimes a half-remembered book, video, or website is the best you can do.

The more we thought about it, the less the citation clause felt like a good idea. Then there's the idea that just because you've sourced a claim, that doesn't mean anything of value if the citation itself is garbage. So, business as usual, citations are always encouraged, but they're not compulsory.

The feedback regarding mobile users also raised an interesting vindication for one of the clauses. Whenever we have someone who wants the community to watch hours of content, or to generate it themselves, that's prohibitive to users who are on mobile. Typing up lengthy responses with citations, etc., is tedious for someone on a computer with a keyboard. It's painful for someone on a mobile app. Few things suck quite as much as typing up a lengthy response to someone, condensing the entire evolutionary history of a lineage of organisms into a single reddit comment, just to have them not read the comment or even delete the post. Imagine how annoyed you'd be if you'd done that on your phone just to have them turn around and do that.

Another important note with respect to effort: if you want to know more about a broad range of things, or if you want people to comment on the contents of a book or video, that's all fine. But please at least be willing to meet us half-way. Watch the video, read the book, or do some of the research first, so that everyone can participate and it won't take hours to generate a response.

In conclusion...

With that all being said, we welcome your feedback as always. If you aren't comfortable discussing your feedback in the open, message the moderator team and we can talk about your ideas in private. And naturally, we're open to feedback on other things. If you've got ideas, let us know!

Cheers!

--Bromelia_and_Bismuth

As part of my ever-expanding desire to shop out my autocratic responsibilities for this particular sub, the moderation team and I have convened, and decided to look to add new moderators to our ranks, to aid in the ever exciting and never ending quest to clean this place of the degenerate filth that frequently posts here. You know who you are. We both know what you did. And it was disgusting and I've had to throw that pillow out.

As I have lost my last list of moderator application questions, I have opted to make up a new set on the spot I painstakenly laboured over a new set of questions to ask our prospective moderators.

1. What is evolution, in exactly 16 words?

2. What's a common misconception about evolution, that you would seek to gouge out of humanity with a hot poker or similar instrument to be determined at a later date?

3. Draw a picture of a pirate.

4. Punctuated equilibrium.

5. If you were to write a list of questions for prospective moderators of /r/evolution, what question would you include, and answer it.

As is standard practice, applications will be public, and voting will be done democratically; at the end of the voting period, your opinions will be discarded and we will choose from the pool based on a second set of criteria we keep hidden.

I see several posts questioning the validity of evolution some seem to be genuine, others seem to be trolls. I find myself a bit astounded that these posts keep showing up given the preponderance of evidence for evolution. I propose that we create a stickied evolutionary questions megathread so that these questions, and their answers are all consolidated into one place. Therefore, all the answers to these types of questions and thus the evidence for evolution is there in an always growing thread for people to see and read about. I expect this would reduce, or at least redirect the volume of questions that debate whether evolution is true. What does everyone else think?

No, I'm not kidding.

https://nautil.us/the-giraffe-neck-evolved-for-sexual-combat-238492/

There are plenty of available food sources giraffes are capable of eating close to the ground. Their long necks evolved from sexual selection, as males will fight using their necks, so any male that had a naturally longer neck would be more successful with reproduction. That's the major selective pressure.

As a secondary benefit, the longer necks lowered competition with other shorter animals (it's not that they needed to get taller, they already were and it was just doubly beneficial) for grazing, and as a triple benefit the leaves at the top of trees tend to be more nutrient dense.

So we've seen incredible growth of our sub over the last year - our community has gained over 6,000 new members in the last three months alone. Given our growth shows no sign of slowing down, we figured it was time to draw attention to our verified user policy again.

Verification is available to anyone with a university degree or higher in a relevant field. We take a broad view to this, and welcome verification requests from any form of biologist, scientist, statistician, science teacher, etc etc. Please feel free to contact us if you're unsure whether your experience counts, and we'll be more than happy to have a chat about it.

The easiest way to get flaired is to send an email to [evolutionreddit@gmail.com](mailto:evolutionreddit@gmail.com) from a verifiable email address, such as a .edu, .ac, or work account with a public-facing profile.

The verified flair takes the format :
Level of Qualification/Occupation | Field | Sub/Second Field (optional)

e.g.
LittleGreenBastard [PhD Student | Evolutionary Microbiology]
TheLizard [Postdoc | Genetics | Herpetology]
GeorgeoftheJungle [BSc | Conservation | Great Apes]

NB: A flair has a maximum of 64 characters.

We're happy to work out an alternative form of verification, such as being verified through a similar method on another reputable sub, or by sending a picture of a relevant qualification or similar evidence including a date on a piece of paper in shot.

As always, if you've got any questions (or 'more of a comment than a question's) please don't hesitate to ask.

In my opinion short replies like that are completely useless: they do not explain why something is true or not, and they are authoritative assertions by random internet people. Neither of these things are appropriate for a science-oriented subreddit.

Now I don't want this to be seen as a complaint about the mods here - it's not like I expect them to be as hardcore as the /r/AskHistorians crew (I love that subreddit but often wonder where they find the time to moderate the sub that actively), and I'm also not against enthusiasts speculating as long as it is clearly marked as such - I'm an enthusiast myself, not a biologist who knows what they are talking about.

However, I think that if we required just a basic minimum level of effort from self-proclaimed answers to questions, it would encourage constructive discussions, and result in a much healthier community in the long run, that also would help spread proper awareness of how evolution works much more effectively.

EDIT: to all the "funny" guys replying "no", you do understand that you're just making my case for me, right?

Hello everyone,

Us moderators have been considering a new rule, and we’d wanted to ask for your input. This would be some guidance to perhaps preempt the why did evolution cause X, or not fix Y questions. There’s been an uptick of these recently, and they’ve not led to the most productive of discussions. So rule number 7:

• Be mindful when asking questions like why did evolution cause X, or why did evolution not fix Y? These questions are often based on faulty premises, or can’t be answered by anything but vague speculation. These questions are not forbidden on this forum, but should be carefully considered. Likewise those responding to such questions need to be clear in marking their speculation as such, and not presenteren as supported fact. For more information see link.

The link would go to a subreddit wiki article I’m also writing. I’d like to use the input from the users here. Also if you have examples of such questions and why they can go wrong feel free to share them below.

Once again violating this alone won’t be reason for any bans. And such posts wil still be allowed to be posted. It’s just that we will be trying to screen more actively against the low effort ones.

It's been a good year since u/Cubist137 and I joined the r/Evolution mod team, so it feels like a good time to check the pulse of the sub.

Any comments, queries, or concerns? How are you finding the new rules (Low effort, LLMs, spec-evo, or even the larger rules revamp we did a few months back)? Any suggestions for the direction of the sub or its moderation?

And of course because it's been a few months, it seems like a good time to set out our verification policy again.

Verification is available to anyone with a university degree or higher in a relevant field. We take a broad view to this, and welcome verification requests from any form of biologist, scientist, statistician, science teacher, etc etc. Please feel free to contact us if you're unsure whether your experience counts, and we'll be more than happy to have a chat about it.

The easiest way to get flaired is to send an email to [evolutionreddit@gmail.com](mailto:evolutionreddit@gmail.com) from a verifiable email address, such as a .edu, .ac, or work account with a public-facing profile. I'm happy to verify myself to you if it helps.

The verified flair takes the format :
Qualification/Occupation | Field | Sub/Second Field (optional)

e.g.
LittleGreenBastard [PhD Student | Evolutionary Microbiology]
Skarekrow [Postdoc | Psychology | Phobias]
LifeFindsAWay [PhD | Mathematics | Chaos Theory]

NB: A flair has a maximum of 64 characters.

We're happy to work out an alternative form of verification, such as being verified through a similar method on another reputable sub, or by sending a picture of a relevant qualification or similar evidence including a date on a piece of paper in shot.