[dTal]

"Evolve" here is a neat word for "countless trillions of creatures die preventable deaths or otherwise fail to reproduce over geological time". If your terminal goal is to "finally stop caring about micro plastics" rather than "protect Earth's existing ecosystem", why wait? Just nuke the planet to glass. Microplastic worry over.

(A similarly nihilist viewpoint comes from the people who pontificate that "the planet will be fine, it's humans who will suffer". Sure, if by "the planet" you mean "a lump of mass orbiting the sun". Low bar for your ethical framework.)

[flir]

> Low bar for your ethical framework

Or highest. Puts overall species diversity ahead of the future of a single species (us).

[dTal]

That would be a defensible (if unpopular) position - see VHEMT - but usually the people saying this are arguing against the ethical consequentiality of anthropogenic ecosystem damage ("the planet will be fine") which is very harmful to biodiversity. Nobody's really offered a sane ethical framework in which it's a good thing for humans to wreck the planet, killing themselves and most everything else in the process.

[oasisbob]

There's a broad read on the definition of "social Darwinism" I like to remember.

Natural selection is a scientific concept and process. When people hijack these concepts for social or political aims, it's no longer scientific, and it's something else entirely.