Agreed that some years will have seen bigger steps than others.

Is that not blindingly obvious? In any case, no-one’s ever told me that about any of my bikes!

Well, obviously I don’t mean people marching up to you in the car park and declaring your bike’s past it :-)
But a quick trawl of magazines or forums suggests (to me anyway) that it’s not blindingly obvious. Granted there’s always the desire for newer shiny bits but a lot of people seem to be get through a lot of high-spec bikes in a short space of time, far too quickly to really see much difference I’d have thought.

Tricky one- it’s true that there is often appears to be very little difference between this year’s model and last and improvements tend to be incremental. OTOH, if you look at where mountain bikes were 15 years ago then there’s obviously more going on than marketing boys polishing turds. But it’s still more like a curve than a series of steps, and if you jumped on a bike at any point on that curve you’d likely be hard pushed to tell the difference from one just upstream or downstream.
Just take it all with a pinch of salt and buy a new bike when you need to, not when you’re told it’s been made obsolete. And like someone said earlier, just pick one from any of the big boys and they’ll all be (technologically speaking) the same.

In my uninformed opinion that is.

Never owned one. I rent them occasionally and have been thinking vaguely about the Whizzgo scheme, but I do have riding friends with cars I can scab off! Like others though it’s a no-brainer for me as I don’t have kids and live reasonably centrally.

I second what somebody said earlier about losing the car and just hiring being a sensible choice for more people than would consider it.

There’s plenty of examples of things getting ‘simpler’ in response to a new environment- losing eyes in permanently dark environments for example.

The Victorian view of evolution a march towards “better” (where humans are better than cockroaches) persists though.

As I see it:
Survival of the fittest just means individuals in a population best suited to their particular niche/environment will tend to reproduce at the expense of less well-suited individuals, and so the attributes that make them better suited will tend to spread through the population (e.g. Giraffe neck length, no eyes so less energy used, or whatever). What’s best in that context can be anything at all. If this goes on long enough speciation might occur (depending on a few other factors).

The population thing is important, and it’s why things like older/weaker/crippled animals not lasting as long isn’t really what Darwin was getting at. The less well-suited animals (e.g. a giraffe with a shorter neck) might be perfectly healthy, but they’re still not as ‘fit for purpose’ as the ones with longer necks.

The key thing is that ‘best’ when talking about evolution is whatever gets a result in a given environment, and that’s it- not how it stacks up in some moral code or in comparison to other things/animals in different contexts.