There would be a lot less violence in the world if ...

... if all animals were herbivores.

Zebras are herbivores.

Less than two weeks after posting this, the BBC Nature section reports research into why zebras evolved their stripes. The article is here.

From a linguistic point of view and one that represents the real world, it seemed odd to me that [animate creature] evolves [feature]. There are many transitive uses of this verb. The most frequent objects of the verb, according to the BNC, are shown in this screen shot from the Sketch Engine. These items clearly belong to a lexical set we might entitle approaches, thus
[person/organisation] evolves [approach].

Most other transitive uses of evolve have representatives of the animal kingdom as their subject, the implication being that the speakers/writers accept that the
creatures manipulate their environment over a long period to acquire the feature they now have. Another example:

Several groups of them specialise in this diet and each has evolved a long sticky tongue entirely independently...

However, the verb is far more frequently used intransitively and in perfect aspect, e.g.,

The character of the British countryside has evolved due to changing agricultural, industrial and recreational pressures ...

 I would say that this is a good example of the verb used as an ergative verb. See Wikipedia and MAELT on this topic.

Patterns of typical usage in "get over with"

This is a separable phrasal verb. Of its hundreds of appearances in the New Model Corpus (NMC), it occurs seven times without something in the middle, an object. Six of these are spoken language, such as:

• How do I get over with you now ? Get over with me ? 

Not even seven swallows make a summer, so let’s move on to the patterns of typical usage. Using this CQL in the NMC

• [lemma = "get"] []{1,7} [word = "over"] [word = "with"]

there are 216 occurrences. The {1,7} tells the concordancer to allow between 1 and 7 words to appear in between the other components. Get it over with has 112 of these, and get this over with 44. And 48 of all occurrences are preceded by let’s. These are patterns of typical usage which learners deserve to have highlighted.

This Wordle was created from the list of node forms that the Sketch Engine generates, minus the lemma GET. It is clear from not only the negative lexical words, e.g. agony, worst, fever, but also the attitudinal words e.g. antsy, fuck, shit that the phrasal verb is a vehicle for expressing negativity. This is despite the lack of inherent negativity in get and over and with.

Among the collocates on either side of it, quick, quickly, soon and hurry are significant. So are wish want sorry and please. 

Through our multiple exposures to this phrasal verb, with its negative objects, the need for speed and a tinge of imploring, we wouldn’t think to use this verb in a jolly way. So, even if the object were a happy event, such as a picnic, wedding, award ceremony, it is smeared by its environment and these events would not be perceived positively here. Due to the lack of attested examples, let us imagine a scenario in which someone might plausibly say, let's get this picnic over with. 

This is semantic prosody – through exposure we are primed to understand the whole meaning, and through using the phrasal verb in its pattern of typical usage, we reinforce its priming in ourselves and our interlocutors.

For our students to have active use of word, they need to know its patterns of typical usage.