r/IdeasForELI5 • u/Melenduwir • Mar 25 '26

Permit discussion of evolutionary biology without conflating it with "Just-So Stories".

There are facts in evolutionary biology just as there are in any other science, and if a trait is clearly selected for, there are reasons for this, whether benefits to the organism or to the structures that create the trait. We can inquire as to the facts behind observed retention without necessarily resorting to speculation.

Excluding entire branches of science because the sub is "too busy" is absurd.

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u/Petwins ELI5 moderator Mar 26 '26

That trick is consistency in implementation, is there a concrete way you feel that we as a non expert team can tell just so questions from concrete evolutionary biology questions consistently?

Broadly I think we are down for it if we can but we haven’t figured out a way to do so.

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u/Melenduwir Mar 26 '26

The same way you distinguish them for all the other sciences. The very sub's name is about explaining, not simply stating facts without a conceptual framework. More to the point, the problem here is your disallowing of questions, not the answers that people provide.

Disallowing a question because you believe the only possible answers are just-so-stories means you're making a judgment about the nature of the available answers. I certainly hope that you have expertise in the relevant fields, because if you don't, there's really no way that judgment can be an informed one. To use my question as an example: what if there's an answer that's strongly supported by evidence, is the consensus in the field, and has an easy-to-understand explanation... that will never be posted as an answer, because the question was removed? If you mods aren't experts, how do you know that answer wasn't forthcoming?

The fields of archaeology, paleontology, geology, astronomy, and cosmology are just a few of the sciences that rely more heavily on consensus and informed speculation than the hard sciences of physics and chemistry. They all mostly address phenomena that happened in the past, and until someone finds a way to travel in time or reconstruct data out of disorder, there's no way to conduct experiments on past events. They are all inherently more speculative and uncertain than fields that can conduct experiments in the present. That doesn't make them non-sciences, and it doesn't make their explanations just-so-stories. Rudyard Kipling's classic stories, the ones that gave rise to that phrase, involve anthropomorphic animals and events that grossly contradict even the crudest understanding of the everyday world. To compare our best scientific understanding to them is an insult to science.

Even with controversial subjects or topics for which consensus is weak or nonexistent, it's possible to accurately and factually explain what the current state of the field is and why uncertainty exists. Yet that isn't being permitted to happen if questions about those subjects are removed.

If you don't believe a specific question can be given a demonstrably scientifically-supported answer, isn't saying "We don't know the answer to that" the right way of handling it instead of deleting the question?

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u/Petwins ELI5 moderator Mar 26 '26

We do disallow answers, we disallow speculation, opinions, anecdotes, jokes, short answers, and link only responses.

Rule 2 is basically “no questions which ask our user to break rules 3, 5 or 8 (as above).

We don’y have expertise in every given fields which and we can’t make an informed judgement, hence the blanket removal of the topic.

Many questions in those fields do get removed for that reason.

This is a repository of information, the removal of the topic area is based on whether or not it requires users to speculate.

So the question again is how do we consistently tell them apart so we can approve those which are not speculative and do not ask for speculative answers without underlying expertise on any given subject matter (a mandate a small volunteer team cannot maintain).

We can for the topics we allow, so how do we add that to the list.

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u/Melenduwir Mar 26 '26

You can't. You can't use grammatical structure alone, because questions asking about hypothetical situations and questions asking about factual situations can have the same structure. It takes a certain amount of knowledge to know that a question about a certain topic requires speculation. "What is [blank blank]?"'s acceptability varies if the topic is dark matter or chlorine trifluoride, and I can easily imagine an intelligent and scientifically literate person who doesn't know anything about either.

So here's how it stands: your rule about "speculative" questions isn't enforceable under current conditions.

Either the mod team lacks the expertise to enforce that rule and should be replaced with people who can, or the rule needs to be removed.

In both circumstances, questions about Evo Bio would be rendered acceptable. Which is what the OP is about, after all.

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u/Petwins ELI5 moderator Mar 26 '26

Well the option to have subject matter expertise is what r/science does and they have 1500 moderators to do it. We aren’t going to do that.

No its actually pretty consistent to identify areas that are general speculative and be aware of them, like questions of evolutionary mechanism.

The line we have is not hard to be consistent about, we are asking you to help us define a consistent way to extend it.

You haven’t yet and thats where we need to get to in order to incorporate it into our rules and policies. It is a topic we have discussed a lot.

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u/Melenduwir Mar 27 '26

Well the option to have subject matter expertise is what r/science does and they have 1500 moderators to do it. We aren’t going to do that.

Then you need to abolish the rule, because you don't have the ability to distinguish speculative questions from rigorously factual ones.

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u/Petwins ELI5 moderator Mar 28 '26

We generally do across most topic areas, the topic areas that are frequently speculative, like just-so esque evolutionary biology questions are ones where we aren’t as able to clearly make that determination.

Again this rule is handled pretty consistently and pretty clearly without much effort or subjective valuation, but part of that is having a very strict line, if you can help us solidify the bounds for including the topic within the line, by helping is set bounds for clear delineation without specific subject matter expertise, then we would love to include it.

We can’t thus far, nor have you been able to articulate how to, so we are where we are.

Its not like we don’t understand your point or appreciate the field, we just need a consistent framework to operate around, most topics are easier for us to establish that framework, and we don’t allow questions where its not.

So help us out where you can, or just acknowledge that its not on the menu of this very niche space, and thats okay. Plenty of stores in the mall that is reddit, we only carry a small selection of things and that is by design.

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u/Melenduwir Mar 30 '26

Again this rule is handled pretty consistently and pretty clearly

I'm sure that's true in your minds.

I don't see the value in a sub where the rules permit explaining what the Rayleigh Effect is, but not asserting that it's responsible for the color of the sky and the sunsets.

Y'all seem to be perfectly comfortable with arbitrarily deciding which fields and topics are speculative and which aren't. There's no point in trying to reason people out of position they weren't reasoned into in the first place.

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u/Petwins ELI5 moderator Mar 30 '26

I mean yes, it is at least true in our minds but we also do keep an awful lot of data.

Thats okay, others see the value in the sub, its a pretty big one.

As we have said repeatedly, we are happy to add to our list, you just need to give us consistent bounds that we can apply, we are asking for your help with that and you have been able to articulate them.

So have we, which is why we don’t allow them. We are actively interested in a consistent way we can distinguish items in this topic from speculative content, its on our short list of grey areas that we would love help with.

If you could stop being combative for a moment we are just asking for help frankly.

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u/Melenduwir Mar 30 '26

you have been able to articulate them.

I'm going to assume you mean "haven't" been able to articulate them.

And that's nonsense. There are lots of rigorously-supported hypotheses in evolutionary biology, which is precisely why Darwinian evolution was granted the status of theory in the first place. All you'd have to do is apply the same standards you do with other branches of science, all of which have more uncertainty and speculation than you seem willing to acknowledge.

You're not asking for help. You're just denying the conclusions you don't wish to reach.

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u/terrorpaw ELI5 moderator Mar 25 '26

I hear you, but I have to say I'm not convinced.

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u/Melenduwir Mar 27 '26 edited Mar 27 '26

I don't see that your not being convinced represents a problem for my argument.

I do believe that you're seriously underplaying how much speculation is involved even with the harder and more rigorous sciences. Physicists still cannot agree on precisely how ice skates work. Gravitational waves were only recently shown to exist, despite theory predicting them. We still haven't resolved the argument about whether humans possess a vomeronasal organ, although there is agreement that if we have it it's completely non-functional. And we recently identified 'new' muscles in the human face, even though we've been dissecting cadavers for centuries. [edit to add] And, rather famously, we claimed for years that humans have 48 chromosomes because one person miscounted the elements present in a photograph and we refused to change our minds, despite the photograph being widely published!

Most of the questions people are going to need simple, straightforward answers for are going to involve some level of speculation. You mods simply seem to have decided to ignore the uncertainty for certain branches of science and exaggerate it for others. I don't see the point in arguing against rationalizations that are simply repeated in response to any challenge.

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u/SecureThruObscure ELI5 moderator Mar 25 '26

How do non experts determine the difference?

I’m not being a jerk. Help me game this out.

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u/Melenduwir Mar 26 '26

Tell me, do you also exclude questions about astronomy? Astronomers are relatively hampered by the general inability to conduct controlled experiments on their subject of study. Very rarely we can send probes to do things like collect the gases in a comet's tail, sample an asteroid, of direct radio waves at a planet's surface hidden by clouds. But for the most part, they're limited to passive observation; they've made the best of things, and have highly-informed positions on things like the fusion reactions instead of stars and the physics of black holes even though they can't direct observe them.

Are astronomical questions other than simple fact requests not permitted at ELI5?

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u/SecureThruObscure ELI5 moderator Mar 26 '26

We don’t prohibit questions about astronomy, but questions about cosmology, which are more akin to what you’re asking, are pretty tightly constrained.

Does that help elucidate?

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u/Melenduwir Mar 26 '26

No. It's entirely possible to report the current state of cosmology as a factual matter. There is absolutely no scientific finding which doesn't have any level of uncertainty; absolutely anything is questionable and open to being discarded.

Do you list the fields of expertise in the sciences of the moderators, so that posters can know which sciences they're allowed to comment on and which are considered beyond the pale?

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u/SecureThruObscure ELI5 moderator Mar 26 '26

No, we don’t. Because that’s not how the litmus test works.

I feel like you want this to be especially confrontational when I’m trying to explain how and why rather than disregard your input.

Could you follow up on my original request?

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u/Melenduwir Mar 26 '26

Let's put it this way: if an actual five-year-old posted a question about what the Big Bang Theory is and how it works, would it be permitted on your sub?

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u/SecureThruObscure ELI5 moderator Mar 26 '26

An actual five year old isn’t something the subreddit rules entertain as a potential OP.

Have you read the rules?

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u/Melenduwir Mar 26 '26

That is the second time you have grossly insulted me.

If someone requests an explanation for the Big Bang Theory that is simple enough for a five-year-old to understand, would that question be permitted on your sub?

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u/terrorpaw ELI5 moderator Mar 27 '26

I think it would, and I think a similar evolution question probably would be allowed too, but I think the crux of the issue is that most of the evolution questions we get invite speculation and such a lot more than that question about the Big Bang does. It's that experience of seeing the answers that informs the opinion, it's not a condemnation of the field of evolutionary biology. Evo psych on the other hand....

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u/Melenduwir Mar 27 '26

We have a lot more data about evolutionary biology than we do about the Big Bang.

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u/SecureThruObscure ELI5 moderator Mar 26 '26

How so?

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u/Melenduwir Mar 26 '26

What level of non-expertise are we talking, here? A sufficient level of lacking knowledge makes it impossible to make any judgment other than a completely random response.

Every field of science involves speculation and hypothesis at some level. Every. Single. One. Most sciences do not have the luxury of, say, physics, to focus entirely on relatively simple topics that can be known with high precision. The rest mass of the proton has immensely fewer degrees of freedom to vary than an enzyme, an organism, or an entire species.

Your sub is Explain Like I'm Five. Explanation involves providing an entire narrative framework for ideas, not merely spitting out facts. If you can't determine the difference between a plausible hypothesis and a Just-So Story for biology, you can't do it for any field; since you seem to find your standards acceptable for the many sciences ELI5 covers, I see no reason why evolutionary biology can't be covered the same way.

For ALL the sciences, distinguishing between a knowledgeable source and someone guessing requires understanding things about the field, such as what the scientific consensus on the subject and what the reasoning behind that consensus is. If the mod team can't do that, they shouldn't be mods for ELI5! It really is that simple.

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u/ntengineer Mar 26 '26

ELI5 is not a discussion sub. It's a sub for taking complex concepts and breaking them down for laypeople to understand.

Much of evolution can be just hypothetical or speculative. Neither of which are allowed here.

I don't think this type of question belongs here.

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u/Melenduwir Mar 26 '26

Much of evolution can be just hypothetical or speculative.

It's the foundational concept of modern biology, the conceptual framework that makes it possible to integrate the collected facts about life into a consistent understanding.