Questions That Don’t Get Asked Enough?
Recently re-read “Oath Of Fealty” an old SciFi novel by Niven and Pournelle. This post concerns just one quote from that book so please don’t get entangled in the balance. I mention the book as a source only, NOT as context.
Think of it as evolution in action.
A working definition: Evolution as a process that leads to survival of the fittest, or natural selection. Whether this process is controlled by The Divine or driven solely by nature is NOT germane here. It either is an on-going process – or it isn’t? And that ain’t the question anyway.
I’ll posit that we do not always do humanity a favor by fighting against nature. All men may be created equal but soon divergence becomes apparent.
One anecdotal example: Don’t pee on the third rail. Others can be found online by looking up “Epic Fail” or similar.
Then we have: Prof Stephen Hawking has been caught red-handed having visited a sex club in The States. NB, this is not exactly relevant here, it just tickles me. Arguably one of the finest minds on the planet is quite human.
How is any of this fodder for the TAH crowd you might reasonably ask? Most of us consider firearms and other weapons simply as tools. They also can trim the gene pool on occasion. War – on the scale we are capable of even more so.
And, of course, the phony socialist effort to equalize everyone is in play.
Here’s the question (it don’t get asked in polite circles)… Have we screwed up evolution, as defined above, so much with technology that the concept is meaningless? Further, is this a good thing for humanity?
Category: Geezer Alert!
I think we’re overdue for some kind of cleansing type event, a culling of the herd so to speak.
Could it be that our own invention and use of technology is a form of evolution?
I once said to the squadron safety officer that paying too much attention to safety allowed idiots to live long enough to breed.
He didn’t agree with my sentiment.
I dont think its technology that is screwing up evolution. I feel its the actual policies that govern it and the fact that stupidity is protected under law.
BUt How do we get every Walmart in america to Burst into Thermite fire at Midnight on Wednesday?
I’m # 5… Theoretically…..
Not just evolution, but the death of “caveat emptor” across all of our commerce has been catastrophic.
No, you are no longer responsible. The government has to step in!
It’s not just technology and social engineering. It’s also medicine. And a few others items as well.
Bottom line is that we are protecting and encouraging to replicate the weakest among our species. The inevitable results cannot be pleasant and is horridly expensive when the most fit are required to care for the least fit.
(Kinda makes you wonder what it might look like if all those libs had not been practicing abortion all these years – just as intellectual curiosity.)
I just wanna hear what Hawking would have said with that speech synthisizer while he’s getting a lap dance.
My $0.02 on the subject: society’s policies vice technology are to blame for temporarily changing the rate of evoltion killing off of teh stoopid wuns. But IMO, it’s also only a temporary reprieve.
It seems to me historically prosperous societies have at some point began devoting large amounts of public resources to caring for the “less fortunate”, generally due to moral or civic stability (keep the plebians fed and they won’t riot) concerns. Ignoring moral concerns for the sake of argument, one can argue that this is counter to evolution in that it allows to breed many who would otherwise die off due to lack of competitive ability, thus preventing evolutionary pressures from “improving the breed”.
However, at some point, society can no longer afford to do this – and either quits doing so or collapses. Those who are then unable to care for themselves then die off en masse. One can argue that this is nothing but a restoral of the normal process of evolution in delayed form.
What is more disconcerting to me is that technology has given us the tools to potentially off our entire species by introducing a massive change to which we cannot quickly enough adapt – e.g., a hugely effective contagious bio-weapon or generalized massive nuclear exchange of sufficient scope to trigger nuclear winter. In that respect, it may now be possible for a few true fools in key places to cause an effect that outpaces our species’ ability to adapt – thus negating human evolution. But maybe avoiding doing so is our next evolutionary test.
Hmmmmmmm. . . . never thought of it in that big of a picture before (evolution). Only thought of it in terms of society. But yes, we have “evolved” into a group where the irresponsible and those who cannot survive on their own are taking (have taken) over.
Too bad we are not as God, to be able to foresee the future, to say who should live, and who should not.
I think #1 OS is right, there will be a collapse and a cleansing.
The simple answer is YES. As a species we have reached a zero point of sorts where nature is overcome by nurture and mother nature’s designs can be and are disregarded. Evolution will now take very different directions then would have occurred due to natural selection. Heartless as it sounds, our inclination for nurture over nature causes society, not nature, to decide what traits are maintained and which will not. Children who would die if nature had her way are given heroic measures to survive and thrive. These actions all add to the direction that humanity will take as a species.
My son-in-law, a deputy sheriff, calls himself a “Agent of Unnatural Selection”, because his job largely consists of dealing with people nature has clearly fingered for destruction from killing themselves.
Have we screwed up evolution, as defined above, so much with technology that the concept is meaningless? Further, is this a good thing for humanity?
I don’t think the question is meaningful – evolution among the human race is happening, and always has – you can read about it in this book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-000-Year-Explosion-Civilization/dp/0465002218
…but evolution is simply an adaptation to circumstances, whatever they may be. It’s not necessarily from “lower to higher” or “dumber to smarter” or anything else like that. (So, parasites can lose digestive organs they no longer need, because they get their nutrients ready-digested; our primate ancestors lived in places with high-fruit diets, so they lost the ability to make vitamin C, etc.) Since it’s something that “just happens,” the concept of “screwing it up” makes little sense to me.
(I personally think we’ll be modifying humans through genetic engineering before the century is out, though in which countries and by what means I can’t say. And I think that will be a good thing for humanity in the long run. But I don’t call that screwing up evolution either – it’s simply using one of our adaptive abilities, intelligence, to adapt further to the world around us.)
I don’t know – now we have motor vehicles, electrical things, and the Internet (see combination of the above) to weed out the truly terminally clueless.
And how do you define evolution? In purely physical terms, or do you include mental and technological factors as well?
Big questions. Some evolutionists like Jared Diamond maintain that people from 15,000 years ago, pre-civilization, were more intelligent on average than modern humans. Mistakes were ruthlessly punished, you didn’t get a second chance. Males in hunter-gatherer societies had a high chance of dying by murder, often in their sleep. Fierce selective pressures.
Another interesting hypothesis – the human brain is about as complex and intelligent as it is liable to get due to constraints on how small neurons can be, packaging the expanding number of connections necessary as the number of brain cells grows, etc. So this is about as good as it gets….