Hi Steve, Thank you for posting such an interesting talk by Dawkins. (To keep this posting short I won't copy the whole talk but just one paragraph.)
At 11:11 14/02/02 -0500, you wrote: >A recent Dawkins talk relevant to free will opportunities for humans to >intentionally craft their future. I personally think he is confused >philosophically, since this sounds a bit like disembodied brain/mind >escaping evolutionary constraints. However, freedom at least seems real; >and how else can we proceed to live our lives? As zombies or automatons? > >Steve Like you, I think that Dawkins is confused, mainly because he's taken an intermediate product of evolution (the gene) and personalised it as some sort of purposeful entity. Assuming that Dawkins means Darwin's Theory of Evolution overall (and not just the evolution of an individual species) then I think he is wrong where he says "Darwinism" in the following: (Dawkins) > From a Darwinian point of view, the problem with sustainability is >this: sustainability is all about long-term benefits of the world at the >expense of short-term benefits. Darwinism encourages precisely the >opposite values. Short-term genetic benefit is all that matters in a >Darwinian world. Superficially, the values that will have been built >into us will have been short-term values, not long-term ones. His premiss is wrong. Life has been on this planet almost from the very moment that the temperature was low enough for organic molecules to cohere and interact. Genetic changes have to yield short-term benefits, of course, or they won't persist, but if they also don't yield long-term benefits then that particular species will simply become extinct (which most species have done already). But other species branch out and life as a whole has certainly not died out so far. It's lasted for about 3 billion years since the Big Bang about 12 billion years ago -- that's a very respectable accomplishment! My take is that life is more important than homo sapiens, but as we're the most advanced specimen of life so far on earth, then we should look after our own long-term survival as best we can, even if it means colonising other places at some future time to escape a super-volcano which might destroy most species as well as ourselves. Keith __________________________________________________________ �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] _________________________________________________
