I’m not disagreeing with you here, but wouldn’t it be fair to say there is a gradient, but it is dynamic and defined by the current environment and what it takes to survive it?
Maybe the goal posta keep moving but we are talking about a very large time scale, so long that, for at least a couple of million years, what could be defined as more or less evolved might seem or be descibed as pretty solid.
Although i suppose its not fair to say more or less evolved and might be more accurate to say more or less well adapted.
The question is more or less adapted to what? An elephant is more adapted than a mouse to the daily activities of an elephant, and vice-versa. An elephant might be more well adapted for our current environment for elephant tasks than, say, a wooly mammoth, but it could just be that the wooly mammoth was actually the more well adapted animal except for being the only megafauna in an area with humans, eventually leading to extinction by hunting. There’s a million and one ways to be adapted to an environment.
But in your example, humans are part of the environment. Or at least they are a factor in your ability to survive. Part of being adapted and being able to survive is surviving your predators. Dont you agree?
I dont know if i agree that being adapted to “elephant tasks” is a good marker to measure how adapted elephants are. If an elephant can eat, reproduce, and defend or hide itself from predators or deadly flora or weather, etc, then i would look at the elephant and argue it is well adapted.
Unless you think that predators change things or you dont consider humans as predators because we dont always kill for survival.
I dunno, im kind of just fleshing this out in my head as we speak.
