whenever someone says they evolved
They forget what evolution is. Evolution is a struggled to survive, where one has to adapt or die.
So when candidates say they evolved on an issue, it means that they had to have pressure put them them to change or be devoured.
I apply pressure, because it reinforces the traits we desire, and culls those to stupid to evolve. the vast majority of our elites need to be guided to their proper place in the food chain, which is to say, the chewed up and digested poop that at least keeps the ground fertile.
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An individual, in biology, cannot evolve. It can only reproduce successfully or fail to reproduce.
We view evolution as telic--there's a goal towards "better" not just to "better adapted to one's environment". If humans have evolved, we assume we evolved from inferior to superior. Not just "better adapted to our environment."
In other words, first we misunderstand and misconstrue. Then we misapply. That's fine for language--how it changes is not grounded in fundamental properties of nature, but in human interactions--but it pays to be clear that we're not using the biological meaning any more. We've appleid a quasi-moral or religious sense to it. (We also view religions as evolving from worse to better.)
When someone says they've evolved they usually mean "I've gotten better in terms of my morality or my politics". It can mean because of pressure, in which case they're using the word to manipulate ("I don't really care about good or bad like you use the terms, I care about keeping or losing position and power"
. Often the politicians stil view themselves as less cynical than we view them, and often view themselves as superior sorts of beings guiding us lesser folk. They're the wise shepherd, the philospher king.
Mostly when people say "they've evolved" it just means they've changed their minds and want to present it as an improvement. That's often because of experiences apart from the "managed evolution" that you think you perform a public service in doing (one manages one's inferiors, after all), sometimes those experiences are just increased sympathy or empathy or more knowledge. Often it's from social pressure to conform, and it just took us time to find justification. Often it's from self-interest, and it took time to find a justification we could stomach. Because few of us like to think we devolve, pretty much any change that we undergo that doesn't gobsmack us with its awfulness is "evolution" (and changes that are awful we find ways to blame on others).
there's at least 2 generations that have grown up thinking evolution is when your pikachu transforms ("evolves" into a raichu.
^ NOT EVOLUTION^
