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

mdj wrote:

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* ...


So do I.

Since "in charge of" includes the case of screwing it up, I fail to
see the distinction intended by "capable of".  There is no doubt that
evolutionary forces operating on our species are now dominated by human
actions.


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.


Hmmm.  We seem to be in agreement--we are increasingly taking the
place of natural evolution in whatever domains we influence.  The
net effect is that some species are eliminated and some are changed
even faster than natural evolution would produce.


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.


I largely agree.


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.


Yes--if I look at it right, I can see the sense of "progress" in there,
but the statement can be taken without that implication.


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.


No, a chaotic system can be speeded, too--consider Brownian motion
and increased temperature.  Speed does not imply net direction.


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.


I know what you're concern is, but we agree that you can have lots
of "whats" and "hows" without any "whys".  I don't think anyone has
really raised the spectre of "intelligent design" (unless you consider
the possibility that our universe is just someone's lab experiment ;-).


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.


We will not wait to find out the results if we took our hands off the
wheel, because we will keep driving.  Until further notice (say, by an
asteroid that we can't divert), *we* are responsible for the stability
of the planet, including its biome.


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.


As I recall discovering before...   ;-)


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


-michael

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Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
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