Willblake2 says: OK, so my original point of not getting too serious or closed minded about this subjective reality that we project onto our experience through the five senses (which are extremely limited), has been lost in a discussion over whether evolution is a useful way of picturing our place, (and the place of everything, I guess), in this life. I'll accept. I brought up some of the negative sociologic results from applying this concept of evolution to our daily lives, what are the positive ones? Of course, the human race (at least one of them) is the winner if evolution is one of domination, which is good for my ego. And if I struggle enough to get to the top, I'll be at the top, woohoo! And because we have been here longer our philosophy is more evolved, or is it?
According to evolution that which we see must have been better or more appropriate, otherwise it would not be here (I love those arguments). [Krimel] Evolution can be used to describe everything from the life cycle of a star to the waxing and waning of fads. Why something survives depends of a host of factors some of them deterministic and some of the pure chance. Nature reveals a myriad of possible strategies for pursuing reproductive success. Aggressive competition for resources and clawing your way to the top of a business are just one such tactic. What we see around us is what HAS survived. It is not necessarily "better" than what preceded it. Small mammals out-survived large reptiles after the last big meter strike. But is wasn't because they were "better" than an large reptiles is was because the collection of traits that they possessed were better adapted to the newly shaped environment. In MoQ terms they had static qualities that were more stabile in the new environment created by the dynamic quality introduced by the meteor. [Willblake2] Let's look at it from the other side. That which is here is guided by nature through a process of selection. That selection process determines our present world, and all living beings are allowed to exist in there present state because they conform to the shape allowed, in the same way water conforms to a shape when poured in a cup. Any ideas on what that cup is made out of? Current theories are very one-sided as though we are evolving into some random process (this world, nature), by some random process (natural selection), making us completely random (natural?). Which means that our thoughts are random and meaningless (I know that is a jump). And of course any concept of a separate God (and I am agnostic) falls by the wayside, which doesn't bother me. But, if indeed life is viewed through this prism of chance, all philosophy is chance, as well, and we fall into an existential dilemma of truth and meaning. I've been there and it is a pretty useless existence. So, either your life has meaning or it doesn't, or maybe on good days it does. You choose your reality, others can choose theirs; this is a random process after-all, roll the dice... [Krimel] All the evidence we can find in a wide variety of disciplines suggests that random process are all around us. Randomness can exist in the relationships between purely deterministic elements. Order can be shown to arise spontaneously in a variety of random situations. Just because something is rooted in chance doesn't mean it is purely random it just means that all things are probabilistic. Evolution is nothing less than the study of those interacting probabilities. If you are looking for "meaning" then it seems to me the existentialists have nailed that pretty well. The meaning of your life is the meaning you give it or the meaning you find in it. As a trained biologist you should know that the meaning of life is nurturing our young and giving them more opportunities than we had. Even untrained alligators and birds know this. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
