I haven't written anything in a long while, and to be honest, I'm not sure I should be writing now. But it's one of those Sunday afternoons without anything special to do, and I recently had a thought that is probably worth working on a bit, so what the heck.
The thought started - as it often does - with another thought that I have had before, namely how inefficient evolution is. Evolution is like one enormous experiment in an enormous laboratory, the difference being the amount of control we have. In our laboratories, we try to vary only one factor at a time, and keep all the other factors constant; in the natural world, hundreds if not thousands of factors vary simultaneously, making the situation so complex that there is no way for us to know in advance which species will survive and which will not. It is not even possible to single out any specific tactic that is conducive to survival: in one situation, a generalist or opportunist might survive, while other environments are more suited for specialists. As a result, geological history is littered with evolutionary dead ends: species (and sometimes whole groups of species) that didn't make it, and will presumably never be seen alive ever again, organs that are no longer necessary, and behavior that is no longer appropriate (the fear response in urbanised humans).
Some people might put this down to a case where "God works in mysterious ways". I prefer to couch this in different terms, namely that the natural world works in mysterious ways - which is just another way of admitting our own limitations: the mystery only exists because we are unable to fully understand what is going on, because there are too many factors involved. If we work very diligently, we might be able to form some kind of mental image of what could happen in situations where there are a few variables, but never hundreds.
Now you might think that this is leading up the conclusion that we might as well stop trying to understand anything, given how limited we are, but that is not the point I am trying to make. In fact, I quite like the fact that evolution is so sloppy, because I see analogies all around me, in the human world, and it puts things into perspective. Also, it made me realize that it takes all kinds - if the size of the population is anything to go on, the society we have today is a success, and it took a lot of dead ends to get here. By the same reasoning, this latest fad (western civilisation) might also prove to be a dead end, but it will have at very least served the purpose of continuing the big experiment that is life.
The thought started - as it often does - with another thought that I have had before, namely how inefficient evolution is. Evolution is like one enormous experiment in an enormous laboratory, the difference being the amount of control we have. In our laboratories, we try to vary only one factor at a time, and keep all the other factors constant; in the natural world, hundreds if not thousands of factors vary simultaneously, making the situation so complex that there is no way for us to know in advance which species will survive and which will not. It is not even possible to single out any specific tactic that is conducive to survival: in one situation, a generalist or opportunist might survive, while other environments are more suited for specialists. As a result, geological history is littered with evolutionary dead ends: species (and sometimes whole groups of species) that didn't make it, and will presumably never be seen alive ever again, organs that are no longer necessary, and behavior that is no longer appropriate (the fear response in urbanised humans).
Some people might put this down to a case where "God works in mysterious ways". I prefer to couch this in different terms, namely that the natural world works in mysterious ways - which is just another way of admitting our own limitations: the mystery only exists because we are unable to fully understand what is going on, because there are too many factors involved. If we work very diligently, we might be able to form some kind of mental image of what could happen in situations where there are a few variables, but never hundreds.
Now you might think that this is leading up the conclusion that we might as well stop trying to understand anything, given how limited we are, but that is not the point I am trying to make. In fact, I quite like the fact that evolution is so sloppy, because I see analogies all around me, in the human world, and it puts things into perspective. Also, it made me realize that it takes all kinds - if the size of the population is anything to go on, the society we have today is a success, and it took a lot of dead ends to get here. By the same reasoning, this latest fad (western civilisation) might also prove to be a dead end, but it will have at very least served the purpose of continuing the big experiment that is life.
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