>we don’t understand that enough to be able to explain why shit smells exactly the way that shit does, and not like roses
Well, maybe we do. At least, shit probably smells offensive because evolution favored our being repelled by it, and avoiding it, and thereby avoiding spreading some diseases. And roses may smell appealing because they are trying to (though I’m going out on a limb here). Flowers exist to attract animals to help in pollenating or transporting seeds, right? Though I don’t know why wildflowers would smell pretty to people, unless they smell pretty to most creatures and there’s little incentive for the flowers or the creatures to turn the attraction off in cases that don’t matter.
Roses, of course, smell pretty so that gardeners will plant them. When humans domesticate and breed other species, the other species think they’re evolving. And they’re right.
Er, this is backwards. Gardeners plant roses that smell pretty. It’s not as though the roses are conscious of their genes and think, “Looks like a human coming up near me! Evolution, ACTIVATE!” The environment chooses the organisms, not the other way around.
Actually, since we’re talking about artificial selection, it IS the other way around. Gardeners plant roses that smell pretty, and crossbreed them with roses that also smell pretty, to get a better-smelling rose. Or breeders develop the flower’s size or shape and the fragrance gets left behind because it’s not what they’re working on (this is the reason that so many of the old-fashioned roses smell so good, and so many of the modern hybrid teas have little or no smell at all).
Yes, I agree with what you’ve said, but explaining why shit smells offensive and why shit smells like shit, literally and not figuratively, aren’t the same thing. While it’s easy enough to figure out that we evolved to be repulsed by the smell of shit - so we don’t eat it/play with it/etc - we don’t know how to determine why when we smell it we smell that distinct smell.
Yeah. That’s what I meant. The gardeners function as the environment; my objection was to Napier’s description of the roses as somehow consciously striving towards pleasing the gardeners. The roses don’t “smell pretty so that gardeners will plant them,” gardeners choose roses that smell pretty. Species never “think they’re evolving.”
Well, we do know the molecular weight and configuration of the various components of shit. As far as why we experience that particular sensation, you could say the same of any of the other senses. At the end of the day we know red objectively refers to a certain wavelength of light, but we don’t know how the brain codes for it or assigns the quality of “redness” to it as opposed to other things.
One thing peculiar to smell is that it seems to be highly dependent on the concentration of the compound. Speaking of shit and flowers, indole (a component of feces) smells very shitty in high concentrations, but at lower concentrations it smells like orange blossoms. The sense of smell is definitely a peculiar thing.
>my objection was to Napier’s description of the roses as somehow consciously striving towards pleasing the gardeners
Well, I conceed this. I certainly don’t think evolution is typically a deliberate process on the part of the evolving species. I was speaking in the colloquialism that credits evolution with a purpose. It is shorter to say “we evolved eyes to see with” than to spell out the incremental path that lead to eyes and remark on the likely advantage at many points along that path.
>When humans domesticate and breed other species, the other species think they’re evolving. And they’re right.
And, here, I am being cute. In truth I suppose roses don’t think. I was trying to emphasize that what breeders do is to create an environment such that the evolution of roses produces sweeter smelling ones, and especially emphasize that what the roses are doing really is evolution. I propose that one of the simplest demonstrations that evolution is real is to look at what breeders of various plants and animals accomplish.
Fair enough. In my experience, though, that colloquialism is taken as fact by the broad majority of the population, when it should not be. A teleological view of evolution seems to be too common, and it risks cooption by political movements. In this day and age, I think precision is necessary when talking about evolution. But since we agree on my footnote that “that’s not how evolution actually works,” no harm no foul.