However, it is instructive to note that fisheries-induced evolution would have been predicted to have occurred even if the targeted fishing mortalities set by management had been attained.
It makes sense that evolution would have driven us to develop long-term memory skills, and the ability to form and retain reputations of other people, since an ability to remember our friends and enemies could be crucial for survival.
This style of niche evolution would have provided a competitive advantage to the native species and allowed them to survive the ecosystem reorganization following the Richmondian Invasion.
If you accepted evolution, Darwin concluded, then species would have to be treated as "artificial combinations made for convenience".
To truly make the case for genetic evolution, he says, the team would have to show that devils taken from zoos, for example, would not adopt early breeding in response to more food and more mates.
A student opting out of evolution in such a course would have to bob in and out of the classroom several times a month, disappearing, for example, when the structure of the cell is taught (and with it the endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria), and again when taxonomy is taught (and with it phylogenetic systematics), and yet again when genetics is taught (and with it molecular homology), and so on.
Without the evolution of host resistance, these strategies would have to be maintained indefinitely.
Sober argues that, even if we accept an evolutionary approach to human behaviour, there is no particular reason to think that evolution would have made humans into egoists rather than psychological altruists (see also Schulz 2011).
If an ancestral aquatic tetrapod didn't already possess limbs, it would never have been able to crawl onto the land, and evolution would have followed a different pathway than the one familiar to us today.
If anything, evolution would have made damn sure that mechanisms exist to eliminate these party-crashers.
