[ExI] Anti-transhumanist crap on Kuro5hin and related.

giovanni santost santostasigio at yahoo.com
Mon Nov 12 04:57:46 UTC 2007


Right, 
  what Spike mentioned is in the line of what I meant (expressed in more eloquent words)
  and please if anybody can show me how to calculate the probability of survival of a black bear in the artic versus a white one, let me know....I will like to learn to do similar calculations...
  Also why orange cats are orange? Is that a good coat to hunt in candy-land?
  It is silly to try to explain everything (in particular complex human behavior, motivations and desires) with a simplicistic and reductionistic chain of reasoning as: this random event happened that selected this particular trait because of a higher probability of survival for individuals with this trait and so on... the elementary school description of the evolutionary process I understand well, lol, but sorry it seems very silly to use it to explain why I watch this tv show instead of that other one...
  And yes while the instances of adaptation are examples of the evolutionary process the overall process that we call evolution is the entire history of life on the planet and of this there is just one example (even if we can speculate and imagine how evolution could unfold on other planets, such exercise is more fantasy than real science until we can get data to compare with our speculations).

spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
  > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of scerir
> Subject: Re: [ExI] Anti-transhumanist crap on Kuro5hin and related.
> 
> Giovanni ha scritto:
> I think it is kind of silly to try to "explain"
> evolution in terms of "chance". Chance is a code-word
> for our ignorance. Saying that evolution is driven
> by probabilistic events is not really an explanation
> of anything. It just shows we don't understand what
> really goes on and we recur to statistical arguments
> as the best possible way to model what we don't
> fully understand.
> 
> #


This discussion needs to bring in Steven Jay Gould's notion of contingency
as a factor in evolution. Gould's concepts are sometimes described as the
role of chance, however his use of contingency can better be described as
being the opposite of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's notion of
parallel evolution. Roddenberry suggested that given two similar planets,
with about a 1G field, about 1 atm pressure and similar chemical composition
in both the air and land, mostly water on the surface, etc, both planets
would eventually evolve humanoid lifeforms.

Gould's notion was the opposite: given the same initial conditions, the two
planets would evolve *completely different* lifeforms. The evolutionary
paths would be unpredictable, with unpredictable outcomes. In my thinking,
Roddenberry's notion is only good for explaining why it is that on his show,
all the aliens look like humans except with the pointy ears or the wrinkly
forehead. Gould was right. Evolution can be better understood with the
ideas developed by chaos theory. It is unpredictable. 

spike





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