Bill Kahn wrote the following in response to an Ed Felien post:
"Now the evolution of species through adaptation in the process of Natural
Selection is of overwhelming interest to me and a much better angle to view
government of human beings, corrupt or not. The species we are interested in
here are various forms of Minneapolis city government. The DNA of these
particular animals was fairly well outlined in the Strib's Sunday Opex pieces
as well
as the selection pressures on our various forms or species of Minneapolis over
their natural history. Our present Minneapolis lives in a rather harsh
environment at the moment, and in such times Natural Selection can be counted
on to
act on those species that fail to adapt to that harsh environment, a soupy mix
of dwindling money and competing ideologies. Some ideologies favor animals
with a more reptilian life way and others favor a more diverse mix; but none of
them seem to go the fascist route, openly at least."
And yet again Bill posts this:
"....the kind of industry that Homo sapiens sapiens evolved to do and
what our culture has derailed in favor ..."
Bill Kahn, Anthro major, responds:
This use of the theory of natural selection as a rhetorical device has
to stop, or at least be identified as such. There is no such thing as the
biological evolution of a city, except in a very broad sense spanning the
current
geologic epoch. A city is an artifact of culture and DNA is the main genetic
material of life; more broadly, one definition of culture taught to me not so
long ago is information passed vertically and horizontally between generations
of animals independent of genes, i.e., other than genetic information/DNA.
Ultimately, our capacity for complex culture evolved through biology, but
cultural evolution can be very far removed from biological evolution.
Now I forget how I got on to this thread exactly; someone asked what a
city was, I think. I started out answering with some lexicography, but
abandoned it in favor of the really sloppy notions of biology above. Now we can
go
back and look at what we know about old cities we have known like those of
ancient Mesopotamia where our armed forces are presently mired, SW pueblos, or
anything you would like; or we can just call them places where many people live
and try to get along and make a living. They operate here under our federal
system and Minneapolis, while still "a creature of the state," is what is known
as
a charter city, or as close as you can get to the great city states of the
Renaissance in our US of A. We change them by amending or rewriting charters
and
ordinances and electing folks to office who really want to change the city,
for good or ill. Cultural evolution has the potential to be very fast when you
can overcome the inertia of any given cultural tradition. I think we're mired
here in Minneapolis too. Our species has the capacity to create and adopt a
culture that can adapt and correct itself, but there are some zero sum style
folks out there who like things the way they were and should always be instead
of
like they could be if all folks got a fair shot in life. Instead, we are
securely tied to nearly original charters or constitutions of what a city in
the
USA was thought to be for hundreds of years, even when the vehicle for changing
those ideas is built in to the documents. What's wrong with trying something
new?
It is time to amend the Minneapolis City Charter to try something that
might actually work well with a modicum of a rare and valuable comodity â
exceptional public servants.
Bill Kahn
culturally stagnant in Prospect Park
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