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Strategies & Market Trends : ahhaha's ahs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ahhaha who wrote (7774)	3/16/2006 7:34:02 PM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24758

Sorry I couldn't get back sooner, I suspect the discussion has moved on, but I had to think about this for a while. F: Are not error and culture a field addititive to "the arbitrary application of natural conditions"? A: Natural selection has stopped in intelligent species. It is replaced by a thoroughly random process or error and culture where, in contrast, natural selection has a "vector" governed by an almost fixed environment. Intelligence is not confined to humans. Darwin's work and all other work since confirms life seeks niches. Niche seeking is intelligent behaviour. Grace's cat is a good example of a species branching out into a new niche - the symbiont business. It gives her the right signals and she provides it with food and shelter and removes its crap. Mighty smooth move for a ferocious predator. It seems some cats and dogs have modified the "vector" of their evolution and "re-fixed" their environment. So does intelligence move a creature beyond the power of evolution once it's developed a theory of evolution? I've been wondering about the following: We can certainly think better than our fellow creatures and can more radically change our local environment and deliberately create niches far more effectively than they. But I don't think we should assume from this that we're yet very good at thinking, or even know what we're doing much of the time. For example, 2500 years ago Europeans were formally presented with two sets of problems. One had to do with the problem of tyranny and the other had to do with geometry and motion. How long it took! These are difficult problems. Europeans fought over the tyranny problem for over two thousand years and many of those wars were to the bone - right down to the women and children. (We probably killed a significant proportion of everybody who'd ever been alive. We killed more in the 20th century and probably will kill lots more in this one). But finally, about four hundred years ago those favouring the novel idea of self rule started winning. And coincidentally, the geometry and motion problems started being solved. I think this is because there were a lot more people at work on the problems and, more significantly, a lot more people approved of what they were doing and others at the very least got the hell out of the way and let them do it. But I don't think most classical Athenian citizens would have problems understanding the British and American solutions to tyranny. And would Pythagoras, or at least, his young colleagues, take very long to get up to speed with Newton or Gauss? So, I'm not exactly arguing that Canada, US and Europe have been culling themselves (and some Asians) for a bunch of geometry or "democracy genes". Cause I don't know that. But I'm damn sure something is going on. Democracy and science both have certain requirements for success. An obvious one for both is toleration of those who disagree. A corollary is that intolerence of dissent needs be suppressed. This is a recipe for failure in a tyrannical society where intolerance of dissent is a requirement. Corollary: toleration of dissent needs be suppressed. The two kinds of societies are incompatible but at an individual level there is the opportunity for a perverse fit: the tolerant will tolerate the intolerant. Not so good for a democratic society if it's visited by even a comparitively small number of people from an intolerant society. See first corollary above. We have cuckoos in the nest but we aren't going to let them push our fledglings out. Toleration is putting up with stuff of which we don't approve. It's not a law or a moral imperitive: we can put up with a little bit, or a lot, of...whatever, whoever. It's an intellectual style which we wear for the sake of freedom, science and non-violent society. It's what we killed all those people for. We didn't know it until we got there but that's what it was for. (Google the Toleration Act 1689 - not that we didn't kill a whole lot of folk for it after that). It took over 2000 years and I don't think the process was "thoroughly random" at all. Possibly the most tolerant society on earth, (some might say decadent), the Dutch, are actively confronting new arrivals who are intolerant, with new laws concerning immigration and assimilation. Will they back off? Not likely. The British are also going in this direction. Even in Canada (!) public debate is commencing and with the new government eventually there will be action, I expect. Can evolutionary pressure lead to greater preference for an intellectual style? It doesn't seem impossible. It may even have happened. I doubt if physical effects could be measured grossly. Cortical and limbic changes would be subtle but necessarily would be there. Accumulate enough of these changes and you have a new human who may well look just like the old one. Are resulting somatic and intellectual changes heritable? Intellectual changes, growing size of grey matter, are not elements of evolution under natural selection. Under conditions of natural selection we survived predation, climate change and disease, and grew our grey matter and changed intellectually. What we're doing now is additive. The difference between us and caddis flies, hermit crabs and bears is we now have more degrees of freedom locally, we can probably even save ourselves from the kind of disaster that wiped out the dinosaurs, but it's a big universe and we're very small beer there. And under those conditions we're going to have to evolve far more radically than we did here under natural selection if we are to survive. A true story: About 1300 when the Europeans were really getting down to serious war over intellectual style, China, the greatest power the world had ever seen, was finishing its survey of the world: Circumnavigating Asia and Africa and visiting both coasts of N and S America, mapping and trading. They pretty well passed by Europe - it was small and full of savages - or maybe the Gulf Stream carried them past. It was just as well for the Europeans because it would have been demoralizing had the Chinese visited. Their fleets and ships were huge and fearsomely armed - yes with cannon - and European naval power was utterly insignificant. For whatever reason, China decided not continue with this activity, destroyed the fleets when they returned and most of the accounts and records and became the most fearsome police state the world has ever seen - borders sealed, all dissent extirpated. Yes, they really did have thouight police. It was a capital crime to sail offshore. This created economic havoc throughout S Asia, India, E Africa and Arabia. The Superpower had gone off the map. China stagnated and was helpless when the Europeans arrived some while later. Today they are playing catchup. And this is the point of the story: the great debate at every level of Chinese society today is what will they put up with? What will they tolerate? ........... A similar thing happened to muslim civilization and they are still trying to decide whether they'll play catchup at all. The loudest voices there right now say they won't tolerate anything. We'll see.