Sheep Not Shrinking

These shrinking sheep then - what does this story tell us? Certainly not that the sheep are shrinking - it's only the notional 'average sheep' that's 'shrinking', i.e. weighing slightly less. What's really happening is that slightly lighter sheep are surviving - but that's not a narrative that we can easily accommodate, therefore we give the sheep agency and talk of 'shrinking sheep'. It's much the same with the famous Speckled Moth, which over the years is said to be either 'becoming darker' or 'becoming lighter' (in response to soot levels). It's doing no such thing -it's just that in some circumstances more of the dark form surive, in other circumstances more of the light. But again that's not a narrative we can easily handle, so we reduce it to a more assimilable, but less true version. It has often seemed to me that the acount given in virtually all wildlife documentaries and TV sagas of evolution at work fall into the same trap, presenting a narrative in which creatures are actively changing, adapting, evolving, when they are doing no such thing, according to Darwinism - the blind forces acting on the gene pool are resulting in this or that outcome, that's all. The narrative we are given is surely less Darwinian than Lamarckian - and no wonder: Lamarckianiam makes more human sense and is easier to assimilate. All this just goes to show how hard - even impossible - it is for us to actually construct and experience the world in terms of the physical facts we know to be 'true'. We haven't even internalised Copernicus yet - the sun still 'rises' and 'sets'. It always will, whatever we know.