[Platt] No doubt Pirsig would agree that evolution is not due to "supernatural intervention."
[Krimel] It is not at all clear to me that some of Pirsig's interpreters here agree with this. You for instance. If, for example, one speaks of Quality as a driving "force" then it is hard to see what other kind of force one could be talking about. [Platt] But, his questions still haunt conventional evolutionists. "But why do the fittest survive?" [Krimel] This question haunts only the terminally dense. Organisms survive to reproduce. [Platt] Followed up by, "Why, for example, why should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?" (Lila, 11) [Krimel] Again the simple answer is that there is no "why". There is no "struggle". We live in an environment filled with diverse forms of matter energized by a rich source of energy. All of it is driving toward entropy or stasis. To get there it follows the path of least resistance. The fertile combination of energy and matter present in this time and place make the path of least resistance twisted and tortuous. Most of the sun's energy finds this path easy. It is a straight line out into space. But the sunlight that finds its way here bounces around, gets trapped in chemicals energizing them causing them to interact in complex ways. But the "motive," if you insist upon there being such a thing, is to find the path of least resistance. [Platt] Until Pirsig's questions are answered other than by his theory of a moral imperative, the conventional explanation of evolution remains incomplete. [Krimel] Until you actually understand the theory it will always seem incomplete. Once you do understand it, it will also seem incomplete but in ways that don't make you sound like an idiot. . 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/md/archives.html
