rob was here.

I was at a friends house playing poker tonight, and he was serving shrimp. I really like shrimp. As I was standing next to the tray gorging myself on the little creatures, I began thinking of what the probability was that those animals taste so good. For that matter, why do they taste good at all? Why don't they taste bad?

Evolution tells us that they got their rich juicy texture from many hundreds of millions of years of evolution, because this helped them survive better (for some reason) than their less juicier cousins.

Then, all of a sudden, humans came along. At this point in my trails of thought I remarked "Haha! It's the end of the line for you!" as I went for another in the tray. Humans take kazillions of these critters from the sea. Where's your evolution now, suckers?! It won't help you now! Then I was thinking.. or will it?

There are levels of tastyness of shrimp.. That is, there are some shrimp that taste better than others. Lets put all the shrimp over some tasty threshold in Category A, or Grade-A shrimp. All the lesser grade shrimp in Category B.

Instead of looking at attributes of individual animals in the evolution process, lets look at percentages of categories.

Wouldn't it make sense, that as Category B gains percentage of shrimp population, more bad tasting shrimp would be sold in world markets. Less people would purchase said shrimp. Even if this happens in tiny steps over thousands of years, shrimp would be doing themselves a favour by remaining or moving to Category B, so they can live happily in the sea and do normal shrimp things.

I guess what I'm pondering, is if human economics can effect the evolution process like this, given a long enough (but reasonable) timeline?

The wierd thing is though; in the event that economics ever does alter the course of evolution, and say, creates shrimp that are less tasty and juicy, then the shrimp will be evolving in a direction other than the natural progression. If human civilization forces shrimp into Category B, maybe some other animal on earth are big fans of Category B shrimp, and is the reason they became Category A in the first place!

Oh, I lost at poker.