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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PiMac who wrote (33386)	3/26/1999 11:45:00 AM
From: Chuzzlewit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

PiMac, you have this part 90% right but I think you came to the wrong conclusion: Second, the methods of genetics point to using a large selection, not a few. More genius will result from a 100,000 births of average parents than from the coupling of 10,000 genius pairs. [ok, substitute more accurate figures] The way to raise desireable traits and diminsh the lesser is to make all repoductions healthy, and all children max their potential. 1/4, 3/4? of our race is evnironmentally gelded for this purpose. When the bright are happy they will not suffer an excess. The measure of evolutionary success is invariably the ability to leave more traits of one type than another in successive generations. This is what is meant by selection, and it can occur in one of two ways. It can occur as a result of increased fecundity, where you simply outbreed the competition. This is so-called "R selection". Or it can result from having greater survival rates than your competition. Examples abound in nature for both strategies. But the end-point, the measure of success is the percent of progeny with the trait in succeeding generations. This, in fact, is how coefficients of selection are measured. Many people erroneously believe that traits with low coefficients of selection are less viable. That is not the case. They simply may not be as fecund. We may value intelligence above all else, but evolution is indifferent to our opinion. In other words, we run the risk of invoking a series of teleological arguments when we adopt an anthropocentric focus. The point behind my original post was underscore the difference between what we as human beings think we may value in ourselves, and what we, as evolutionary organisms actually value. It is a bit of a paradox only if you hold to the anthropocentric view. TTFN, CTC