[extropy-chat] Transhumanism: Teilhard de Chardin - Truth or Dare

[Samantha Atkins]

On Saturday 01 November 2003 10:10, Damien Broderick wrote:
> `Guardian of established religion' my foot. Gould, and more impressively
> still Sir Peter Medawar, showed why Teilhard's teleological and
God-dragged
> model of evolution is just plain incompatible with random mutation and
> natural selection. It's a form of divine Lamarckism. It *could* have been
> true, in some other universe; it might even be true to some extent in a
> Tiplerian Omega Point universe. But it doesn't jibe with what science has
> learned to date about how evolution works.
>

This debunking by Gould and company rings a bit hollow when we increasingly 
become able to direct our own evolution.   Arguments from "random mutation 
and natural selection" about the possible future of humanity are increasingly 
irrelevant.  Lamarckism is the doctrine that learned skills and information 
are inherited by future generations.  Funny, that is precisely what today's 
world looks like and will look like right down to the level of genetics very 
quickly now.     So why do we fall back on outmoded assumptions and 
dismissive arguments?

What is missing from our science and that it is not science's job to provide 
is a vision of where we want to go.  Teilhard and others had vision but not 
enough science and technology.   But he and others saw the possibilities even 
if they couched them in mystical/poetic terms.