a. The human mind trumps all other known mechanisms as a means of
survival. This is why human beings are the dominant life form
on this
planet.
Koerner[0]:
Rich social darwinists take wealth as the best indication of fitness
to survive, academic social darwinists take intellectual achievements
as the best indication and so on. They are often haunted by the fear
that the unfit do not understand this and may outbreed the fit.
A simple exercise: what is the population of microbes for whom you,
like the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, provide a
living?
(for those who like an answer at the back of the book, see:
"men, microbes, & the moon" [1]
http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/2002-February/009171.html
We serve well both as boarding-house and as lunar tour bus)
-Dave
:: :: ::
[0] in a discussion of known-plaintext attacks on Enigma, TW Koerner
mentions that:
A further aid was provided by the fact that German military men, like
military men everywhere, tend to be very punctilious in giving full
military titles. (footnote: as opposed to academics who like it to be
known that they like to be known as Tom but who, in fact, like to be
known as Dr. Koerner)
[1] in which Mark Twain clearly has priority for being in the van to
welcome our existing slime overlords.
[2] just because natural selective pressures have been mitigated does
not mean that artificial selective pressures are equally low. In
looking at domesticated animal species, we find that the members become
generally larger, fatter, and easier to order around. How would modern
HSS rank on these scales relative to an early wild type?
