Re: Apple II: Second Best Tech Product of All Time!

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

On Apr 11, 5:35 am, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:

> > You know what I find funny? The currently popular meme that evolution
> > is some benevolent ever present force that guides all life in the
> > universe toward some unspecified apex of development.
>
> I agree that this is a neo-religious teleological interpretation
> of natural selection, which is essentially random mutation with
> fitness pruning.
>
> Of course, as you note below, humans are now in charge of their
> evolution, and exert a controlling influence over much other
> evolution.  As a result, future "evolution" can be bent to the
> purposes of humanity--which can be either short-sighted (as is
> natural selection) or guided by a long-term goal.  It's up to us.

I'd substitute "in charge of" with "capable of". I'll also say that
when viewed holistically, human civilisation gives the impression of
being chaotic, perpetuating the idea of evolution as a constant. But
where some see a continuation of that chaotic process, I see an
emergence of order from that chaos. At least *potentially* ...

> >>Are we slowing evolution down?  No
> >>way!  Instead, we're rather speeding it up with our technological
> >>advances, which now are influencing the Earth also on a global scale.
> >>Our artificial breeding of both plants and animals also speeds up
> >>evolution a lot.
>
> > You're kidding, right? Causing extinctions by the bucketload and
> > reducing biodiversity? This helps the great wheels of evolution spin
> > faster?
>
> Actually, yes.  The biggest factor in the proliferation of species
> is the massive extinction of many existing species--thus opening up
> huge spaces for new life to dominate.

Well of course, but the human race isn't a 10km wide asteroid hurtling
through the atmosphere :-) Instead, we're subsuming "our" environment
from within, adapting it to our own purposes, and rather than
encouraging the existing evolutionary process to thrive, we replace
vast tracts of its stomping ground with more humans and human
controlled environments. Far from creating new spaces for new life
forms, we create less space for them and more space for us. We're not
speeding up the existing process, we're obsoleting it.

We are however faced with a conundrum: the biosphere we're coercing is
of finite size, and we have limited understanding of just how much of
it can be transformed into humans before the properties of it on which
we depend begin to radically shift. As I see it, we can fiddle with
variables and hope they're the right ones to control a chaotic system,
or we can get on with what we're good at: synthesis.

> > Come on, you're anthropomorphizing something that is nothing more than
> > an emergent property of a complex system. A common and excusable trait
> > to be sure, but equatable with creation mythologies and other forms of
> > romanticism.
>
> I don't see that in what he said.

It's right there! Look again.

> I read only a simple statement of fact--that human action is speeding
> the course of biological transformation--for better or worse, and
> without any real plan at present.

Speeding where exactly? :-)

To imply that human action is speeding the course of evolution is to
imply it actually has a course and speed, and I contend that this is a
purely human conceit, based on no other evidence than the fact that we
are here.

To do so puts our faith in the system from which we emerged. A system
which by our very own understanding of it is without meaning or
purpose; a system that produced the human being by a process
explicable by nothing other than chance.

It's my belief ( :-) ) that in doing so we shift responsibility for
human behavior away from ourselves and onto something else, in this
case a phenomena rather than a deity. Effectively trading free will
for fatalism with a self fulfilling prophecy.

> We can now do genetic engineering that grossly accelerates the pace
> of change on this planet.  How we use this growing power in the years
> ahead is one of the central questions of this century.

Indeed! And how we justify fiddling about with a system that takes
*eons* to show predictable affirmation of a change. I suspect that
once again the justification will be "Because we can", but I remain
hopeful that it will not.

> >>In a way I like that very long-term perspective though, and it would
> >>indeed be nice if such a long-term perspective gained wide acceptance
> >>within mankind.  We would certainly deal with e.g. the global warming
> >>issue in a quite different way if we really considered billions of
> >>years of future, rather than at most a few decades of future....
>
> > Too bad if you're right; we won't be around to reap the rewards of our
> > forward thinking ;-)
>
> But it is *exactly* the right question:  the appropriate balance of
> short-term (generational) goals against long-term (species++) goals.

I could not agree more - my comment above was a facetious retort.

> To the degree that we decide issues solely on the basis of the present,
> we operate just like natural selection.  To the degree that we operate
> on the basis of understanding and concern for the future, we bypass
> natural selection for a more intelligently directed course (which
> could still be incorrect ;-).

:-) I suspect we differ in viewpoint far less than it first appears.

> I think it's our conflict over planning vs. not planning that leads
> some to wonder whether there is actually intelligent life on Earth.

LOL! That's *exactly* how I feel

Matt