Hi Harry, Overnight, your posting on survivability has combined with Brian McAndrews' posting yesterday concerned with, inter alia, genetic imperatives and given me first-pot-of-tea thoughts about why our survival instincts are so strong.
The strength of our survival instincts have always puzzled me and still does. Somehow this is bound up with Richard Dawkins' ideas on the "selfish gene" (which, as so stated, strikes me as being implausible). Nevertheless, some sort of "destiny feature" that lies beyond our individual lifespans seems to be built into us. The traditional religions have always cashed in on this by holding out the prospect of personal survival after death in a state of the greatest felicity. This is understable because the religions always lined up with the secular powers (or were themselves sole powers) in order to console the mass of the people for their existing wretchedness of life. When the religious message waned as a consequence of the enlightenment and the growth of scientific thought in the west, the economists started proclaiming a similar message -- but only for this life. From John Stuart Mill onwards right through to Samuelson, the prospect of the perfectibility of governments in distributing fairly the good things of life among all their subjects has been a dominant theme. But I still think that there's more to survivability than the personal angle. There's a bigger game involved. This is why I believe that man must endeavour to get into space. Otherwise we'll lose that vital spark that makes us the species that we are. This is not to say that we possess this exclusively. But now that we have the beginnings of the capability to escape the earth and colonise space then I think we have a need do so or else we'll inevitably collapse into a state of narcisism which will end only when the next super-volcano blows us all to smithereens. Keith At 01:46 18/08/01 -0700, you wrote: > Keith, > >"" thoughts! > > As I mentioned earlier, we don't know what a person's desires are - just >that they extend before him. However, I suggested his first desire must be >to survive or else, as we say, he will no longer be part of our study. > > So, we can surmise. (It's not an hypothesis, nor is it a theory - we are >just surmising.) > > If survival is our first desire, we can argue that the longer we survive >the more successful we are. Also that ultimate survival - immortality - is >best of all. > > Well, we can't manage immortality, but we can revere those who make a good >attempt - such as the very old. > > subject to special treatment by us. > > I don't think an apparently lifeless redwood forest is a patch on a >deciduous forest with its umpteen varieties of flora and fauna, with >sunshine and shade providing a constantly changing backdrop. > >"". > > So, there is the surmise. > > Harry > ___________________________________________ > __________________________________________________________ �Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
