It's the old war between the Dionysians and the Apollonians, between the grasshoppers and the ants. Your ants and your Apollonians plant tiny oaktrees in their lawn, build brick houses, develop communities, because they are confident in their ability to make a future. Your Dionysians grab for all the gusto they can get, having contempt for the possibility of making a future. I can't really argue for one position or the other. Either makes sense to me. What does offend me is when Dionysians represent their revelry in Apollonian terms -- as making a better future. Let the technicians invent their toys, play with them, adorn them with skins and aps, but don't let them ever claim that they are making progress. It's just what it is, and it will go where it goes, and on balance, we may be happier or more miserable because of it. Real progress, if there is such a thing, requires a lot more than innovation.
Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Saturday, February 14, 2015 11:54 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] GMO and "the evil you know" On 2/14/15 8:56 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote: > Steve writes: > > ``I don't really trust engineering-thinking (GMO) to replace > evolution... humans and domesticated flora and fauna "co-evolved"... > just jumping in and replacing things with "new and improved" isn't as > simple/obvious as one might imagine, I contend.'' > > Perhaps the only way to learn the constraints in the problem space, though. > Risk vs. reward, like anything. Absolutely. The only question is whether we are aware of the scale of the risks we take when we take them or are willing to consider the risks we surely know are there but maybe cannot elaborate in detail (yet)? Had we known the devastating effects on the biomes and human populations of many parts of the world during the "age of exploration", I'm sure some would still have exercised their right/need to abruptly introduce a wide variety of unexpected creatures (from virus particles and bacteria to pigs, cats and rabbits) to the "rest of the world", especially islands throughout the Pacific, as part of their "manifest destiny". I'm as much of a technophile as anyone here, yet, I believe we live in the constant fog of "the evil you know", working like crazy to fix the problems that are in our face today, often caused precisely by the problems caused by our last round of "fixes", whilst being willfully ignorant of an evil we "could know" but choose not to apprehend. We replace cane sugar (sucrose) with cyclamates in our diet only to find the terrible side-effects a few years later, then we move on to new and improved saccharines, and then with another turn of the wheel we pull in aspartame and gawd knows what else all the while building a huge industry on turning cornfields and soybean fields into food-product streams that are now being implicated in some of our most tragic public-health problems (widespread obesity, hormone imbalances, etc.) And this isn't even I'm not sure why we need GMO in our foodsources. We can cite world famine and "improved productivity" as motivations, but those are never ending cycles methinks... we already have some huge human health and possibly social dysfunction problems as a consequence of how we have "engineered" our food-source. GMO doesn't promise to address any of those problems in any fundamental way, merely to help obscure the problems in another layer of indirection. I suspect you (and Glen and others) will insist that the pace and quality of the march of tech progress is inevitable and maybe even necessary in some fundamental way, so "get over it" and I have to defer on that point. I doubt my voice, or the millions of other yet-more-shrill ones will have any significant effect in slowing this latest fad in agricultural tech. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to watch the 1.5 billion car-pileup in morbid fascination whilst muttering to myself "I knew it all along!" In Glen's immortal words "Get off my lawn!" <shakes gnarly old fist ineffectually> > > Marcus > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe > at St. John's College to unsubscribe > http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
