What is it that pushed mankind up to the point where it is capable and in some extreme cases willing to destroy the planet on which it lives and the rest of its species?
I have a little theory of my own and it can be described as a rabid desire for control. Control in this case is as much if not more defined as a feeling of, rather than demonstrable, power over our environment and , more crucially our fates.
Mankind is a quite mind bogglingly self important creature. We saw ourselves for millenia as the single most important species in all of the universe, only to find that as a result of getting better amd better at seeing things as they really are instead of some way we want them to look, we have totally redefined our importance from the very zenith of the pyramid, to rooting around in the dust with all the other animals!
Many people were humbled by the realisation that we are just a tiny part of a reality far more wondrous and varied than we'd ever imagined.
Some others respond by ignoring this and concentrate instead on reducing the universe in both scale and age to something more easily acceptable (read creationists or other intelligent design supporters). There is a very good reason why they did this. Its very scary to admit how random and unfocussed the universe is as well as the realisation that nothing we do really affects much on such a stupendous scale.
There is the third response, even more scary than those in denial who, in response to the vastness of existence decide they will be validated in their own self importance by the exercising of control over both people, and nature itself.
We all display some of this tendency - its there every time you make an assumption or form a first impression. In many people the desire for control leads to obsession and in some cases serious danger. What sort of person would ever fire off a nuclear first strike or commits genocide? Not someone who has accepted their insignificance, for sure. These are the people who cannot accept that they are the same as everyone else except for one genetic differention among millions. They are the people who believe that any one man can be considered 'better' than any other.
However, this clearly is a double edged sword, because this need for control is the same need that drives the desire for understanding and learning. A universe following an understood set of laws is less scary than one where all is random and unfocussed.
This relates to my earlier point in 'a mental exercise' regarding human forebrain development Why did we create languages and science with this new biological tool? Why aren't we still in Africa eating carrion or scavenging fruit? Because we found we could control our environment - through tools and communications and this satisfied a need in the species that drives us even now.
Survival is itself an act of control over our environment. We control our climate, our food availability, our learning to the point where randomness is the least likely outcome and the sign of things going wrong.
But we should always remember the desire for control is a double edged sword and be watchful for signs of arrogance. The universe won't miss us if we mess up.
A
p.s. I realise i used the word randomness a lot without making it clear what i mean. In a purely scientific universe there is little that is random on a non atomic scale at least, but much of what happens is caused by so many and so detailed factors it is little use to think of them as other than random. See? I just exercised control over language. Hurrah!
See the full post by clicking here...
Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Friday, July 4, 2008
Truthiness
Yup.. its Stephen Colberts word off the TV, truthiness.
For those of you who are uninitiated in this word - its the instances where things are treated as real because they "feel true" in your gut as opposed to just knowing they're true due to cold facts.
His use of it is as a satirical joke obviously but it is a very pertinent one to American society in particular where opinions are very affected by such gut feelings.
Take for example the studies by Stephen Levitt, the american economist and thinker, into the causes of the drop in crime of the 90s. Conventional wisdom (truthiness!) seemed to suggest that it was because of increased police expenditure or improved education.
Levitt posited a very different theory, but one based on the numbers nevertheless, and described how the drop in crime could be traced back to a certain court case; Roe vs. Wade.
How could one court case do all this for crime?
Bear with me, because this may appear a strange tangent - Roe vs. Wade was the seminal case in the fight to legalise abortion across the US, and led to legal and safe abortions being available and more importantly for the crime argument - affordable to more people.
This meant that the poorer communities could now legally and cheaply get an abortion and avoid an unwanted pregnancy. It is a statistical truism that unwanted children of poor families are far more likely to turn to crime than the desired children of more affluent ones. This meant that 12-17 years later, when all of these unwanted children would have been starting on the all too frequent road to crime, they simply weren't there.
Roe vs. Wade had reduced crime by reducing criminals.
Now.. I won;t go into the economic theory because i doubt I could put it better than Levitt and Dubner do in FREAKONOMICS, so just get the book and read the chapter.
As you might imagine, this was a very controversial conclusion to reach in an increasingly polarised social and religious climate and many people came out and found fault with methodologies and mainly with their thought processes. Levitt's response?
He improved the mathematical formulae and proved the conclusion again, and better.
The upshot of this is that economists are faced with something that is mathematically true but lacks that gut feeling of "truthiness". One economist in particular (and I may slightly misquote but this is the gist) stated that he could not fault the numbers or the methodology but found himself unable to agree with the conclusion.
How was that econmist looking at the conclusion? As an economist, or as a human being who is concerned at the overtones of Social Darwinism this evokes?
This in turn raises the point that Levitt himself makes.
I would say the same of Darwinist thinking. If you believe in evolution it does not immediately follow that you believe that survivial of the fittest is the way societies should be run. Here is the Algo quote of the day;
Peace.
A
See the full post by clicking here...
For those of you who are uninitiated in this word - its the instances where things are treated as real because they "feel true" in your gut as opposed to just knowing they're true due to cold facts.
His use of it is as a satirical joke obviously but it is a very pertinent one to American society in particular where opinions are very affected by such gut feelings.
Take for example the studies by Stephen Levitt, the american economist and thinker, into the causes of the drop in crime of the 90s. Conventional wisdom (truthiness!) seemed to suggest that it was because of increased police expenditure or improved education.
Levitt posited a very different theory, but one based on the numbers nevertheless, and described how the drop in crime could be traced back to a certain court case; Roe vs. Wade.
How could one court case do all this for crime?
Bear with me, because this may appear a strange tangent - Roe vs. Wade was the seminal case in the fight to legalise abortion across the US, and led to legal and safe abortions being available and more importantly for the crime argument - affordable to more people.
This meant that the poorer communities could now legally and cheaply get an abortion and avoid an unwanted pregnancy. It is a statistical truism that unwanted children of poor families are far more likely to turn to crime than the desired children of more affluent ones. This meant that 12-17 years later, when all of these unwanted children would have been starting on the all too frequent road to crime, they simply weren't there.
Roe vs. Wade had reduced crime by reducing criminals.
Now.. I won;t go into the economic theory because i doubt I could put it better than Levitt and Dubner do in FREAKONOMICS, so just get the book and read the chapter.
As you might imagine, this was a very controversial conclusion to reach in an increasingly polarised social and religious climate and many people came out and found fault with methodologies and mainly with their thought processes. Levitt's response?
He improved the mathematical formulae and proved the conclusion again, and better.
The upshot of this is that economists are faced with something that is mathematically true but lacks that gut feeling of "truthiness". One economist in particular (and I may slightly misquote but this is the gist) stated that he could not fault the numbers or the methodology but found himself unable to agree with the conclusion.
How was that econmist looking at the conclusion? As an economist, or as a human being who is concerned at the overtones of Social Darwinism this evokes?
This in turn raises the point that Levitt himself makes.
Economics shows things as they are, not how they should be.
I would say the same of Darwinist thinking. If you believe in evolution it does not immediately follow that you believe that survivial of the fittest is the way societies should be run. Here is the Algo quote of the day;
Sciences of all kinds only show us what the world is. Only you can decide what you want it to be.
Peace.
A
See the full post by clicking here...
Sunday, June 15, 2008
The Chicken and the Egg
This is one of my pet peeves this perennial and retarded question "what came first, the chicken or the egg?". This question is supposed to be one you cannot answer and people look at you smugly as if to say - "what do you think of that then? can you get your head round that?"
Frankly, yes I bleeding well can thanks very much.
There's a quick way around this and a long way around this.
Even quicker is to say "who cares" but so sick am I of the whole thing I really want to to lay the issue to rest for myself and hopefully by osmosis resolve the question for the whole world.
First; the quick way:
DINOSAURS LAID EGGS.
If you mean chicken eggs, read on.
The initial appearance of any species is described differently to people who believe in;
Dealing with the first of these is simple and quick too. God created Animals on the fifth day and not their unborn forms, so if my reading of Genesis is correct, you can unequivocally say that the Chicken came first. You may believe that in fact God created the chicken inside the egg in order to start life as he meant to go on. Fair enough, but you in this case would answer "egg".
In neither of the God hypotheses is there any sense that the question is unanswerable. Quite the opposite.
In the evolutionary sense things are a lot more complicated. The way I'd put it is that the first chicken in the modern sense, say chicken(x) was the child of a different animal, not a different species (or it would have been an abberation as opposed to a permanent mutation) so what we have is a parent called chicken(x-1)* which is an intermediate between the two species of chickens as they are now, and their nearest common ancestor with another animal, ducks, say.
The order of births can be shown in the following way. I am showing five generations as ashort hand but I have no idea how many intermediates there were.
Common Ancestor - egg - Chicken (x-5) - egg - Chicken (x-4) - egg - Chicken (x-3) - egg - chicken (x-2) - egg - Chicken (x-1) - egg - Chicken (x)
The issue to think about here is that of the nature of that crucial final egg before chicken(x) hatches. Is it a Egg (x-1) or and Egg (x).
In short is it a chicken egg or an intermediate egg with a chicken in it?
My view is that this is an egg(x-1) with a chicken inside it and therefore the answer to the "unanswerable" question is that the Chicken came before its first egg.
The contrary position is that the egg could be a modern chicken egg. That is to say it is an Egg(x) ratherthan an egg(x-1) and therefore you would be saying that the egg came before the chicken.
However you feel about your conclusion - it is clear to me that without a doubt a conclusion to this question can be reached and we can put the whole sorry subject to bed.
A
*that is to say, minus one intermediate specieslet - the parents of the first chicken if you like. minus two would be the next intermediate backwards, and so on. To describe future intermediate evolutions I would use Chicken(x+1) etc.
See the full post by clicking here...
Frankly, yes I bleeding well can thanks very much.
There's a quick way around this and a long way around this.
Even quicker is to say "who cares" but so sick am I of the whole thing I really want to to lay the issue to rest for myself and hopefully by osmosis resolve the question for the whole world.
First; the quick way:
DINOSAURS LAID EGGS.
If you mean chicken eggs, read on.
The initial appearance of any species is described differently to people who believe in;
- Divine creation
- Evolution
Dealing with the first of these is simple and quick too. God created Animals on the fifth day and not their unborn forms, so if my reading of Genesis is correct, you can unequivocally say that the Chicken came first. You may believe that in fact God created the chicken inside the egg in order to start life as he meant to go on. Fair enough, but you in this case would answer "egg".
In neither of the God hypotheses is there any sense that the question is unanswerable. Quite the opposite.
In the evolutionary sense things are a lot more complicated. The way I'd put it is that the first chicken in the modern sense, say chicken(x) was the child of a different animal, not a different species (or it would have been an abberation as opposed to a permanent mutation) so what we have is a parent called chicken(x-1)* which is an intermediate between the two species of chickens as they are now, and their nearest common ancestor with another animal, ducks, say.
The order of births can be shown in the following way. I am showing five generations as ashort hand but I have no idea how many intermediates there were.
Common Ancestor - egg - Chicken (x-5) - egg - Chicken (x-4) - egg - Chicken (x-3) - egg - chicken (x-2) - egg - Chicken (x-1) - egg - Chicken (x)
The issue to think about here is that of the nature of that crucial final egg before chicken(x) hatches. Is it a Egg (x-1) or and Egg (x).
In short is it a chicken egg or an intermediate egg with a chicken in it?
My view is that this is an egg(x-1) with a chicken inside it and therefore the answer to the "unanswerable" question is that the Chicken came before its first egg.
The contrary position is that the egg could be a modern chicken egg. That is to say it is an Egg(x) ratherthan an egg(x-1) and therefore you would be saying that the egg came before the chicken.
However you feel about your conclusion - it is clear to me that without a doubt a conclusion to this question can be reached and we can put the whole sorry subject to bed.
A
*that is to say, minus one intermediate specieslet - the parents of the first chicken if you like. minus two would be the next intermediate backwards, and so on. To describe future intermediate evolutions I would use Chicken(x+1) etc.
See the full post by clicking here...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
