[extropy-chat] Extinctions past and future

[Jef Allbright]

Robert Bradbury wrote: 
> The NY Times has an interesting commentary [1] on 
> a recent Science paper [2]. The net of it is that 
> the Permian-Triassic Extinction event [3] 251 million 
> years ago eliminated a significant majority of 
> species and forced most of those that remained into 
> a "mobile" framework to find food.  This ultimately 
> lead to much of the animal diversity you see on the 
> planet today.  I.e. were it not for this event animals
> (and you and I) might not exist.  

Robert, I've long appreciated your factual as well as speculative
contributions to our list. I find your factual statements to be
well-founded, and your speculative statements to be of a practical
orientation.  But there's an aspect of your statements that is mentally
jarring (to me) and might offer some meta insights upon inspection.
There's a certain "inside-outness" of point of view that I notice, which
reflects the popular point of view but seems to impair descriptive
coherence.  I'll try to comment below in a way that may highlight this.
I note also that my phrase "meta insights", in its self-contradictory
direction of attention, may be an indicator of how deeply rooted is this
bias in our language and our thinking.

> The species that
> remained as "plants" (immobile) adapted to this by
> evolving increasingly complex genomes.  

The statement above, while expressing the popular view of evolutionary
development, imputes intention and purpose where there is none. It
implies a kind of "survival strategy", where there is none.  I'm sure
this was not intended, but it is conveyed.

It may be worthwhile here to emphasize that evolution proceeds through
destruction.  That novel growth follows pruning, rather than the
reverse. Of course, that was a key point of the NYT article, but it is
easily lost in the subsequent commentary. The popular and common point
of view is the intentional stance, where one prunes to shape and reduce
the preceding growth, but such is not the way of evolution.

> Most people
> don't realize it but complex plant genomes are
> *larger* than animal genomes.  The lack of mobility
> drove a diversification at the genome level -- you
> have to evolve genes to deal with whatever nature
> (weather, fungi, insects, birds, etc.) throws at you
> where you stand.  

Again, attributing intentionality to an evolutionary process.  I
understand that the point of this commentary is a question of survival
strategy, but clarity and coherence, and thus effective extrapolation,
are sacrificed in this manner. 

> One can argue that mobility enables
> genomic simplicity. 


More fundamentally, we might say that mobility and genomic complexity
express fitness functions exploiting alternate dimensions of the same
environment and that it's economic to express one rather than both.  My
intention here is not to be pedantic or to pick nits, but to point out
that mobility is not nearly as fundamental as is exploiting a novel
dimension of freedom leading to growth.

 
>	
> Now, species at the time were incapable of forward
> thought.  

Yes, this is crucial--from our point of view.


> Astrophysical processes handed them a
> wakeup call and they adapted as best they could.

Again imputing intentionality and anthropomorphizing, but this has
already been beaten to death (to use a metaphor in a similar sense.)


> *We* on the other hand see the future coming.  *We*
> have very good ideas as to how it will evolve
> towards the limits allowed by physics. 

Yes, we can intentionally affect our environment and the course of our
development--to a much greater extent than plants or animals lacking our
knowledge and our self-awareness--but we are still bound by the
extremely limited context of our awareness (relative to indications of
how much more there is to understand) and we are still subject to
fundamental pressures to either grow or perish within a coevolutionary
environment.


> But "we" are
> 1000 people out of 6 billion [4].  One must ask whether
> another "great dying" (to quote the NYT) is coming [5]
> and whether mobility is the path to survival or whether
> like the plants we can evolve ourselves to a point
> where "U can't touch this." [6]? 

All that I have said above is meant to highlight the point that
"survival" in a static sense is unrealistic.  But we can act to promote
our values (knowing that they too will evolve over time) into the
future.  To suggest that we can "evolve ourselves" in order to preserve
ourselves is to assume some immutable core of self that, despite the
illusions of our sensory experience, reinforced by our language and
culture, simply doesn't exist.

- Jef