Lev Muishkin wrote:
/thread
I do not believe in evolution, but for the naysayers this is how it works.
You get a rare positive mutation. A rare positive mutation is like “a chosen one”, and “anakin skywalker” or an “avatar”. This avatar guy special one has a wife and kids. Those kids have kids, and eventually they have a lot of avatar grandkids. Over several generations, his genes make a sizeable portion of the population. Then, the environment changes, either a calamity happens or a new predator enters the realm. All the non-avatar kids die. This is natural selection, and macro-evolution.
However I do not believe in evolution because the fossil evidence indicates humans were alive at the same time of dinosaurs. Evolution seems to violate the law of entropy also.
Though the method I described of evolution seems possible under rare circumstances…the law of entropy indicates that backwards evolution, evolutionary decay, is more likely.
I used the word “success” instead of “fitness” just in order to rescue the Darwinistic theory, because the concept of “fIttness” is problematic. Those humans who are “fit” have less offspring than those humans who are “unfit”. You can easily observe and prove this as a fact.
By these standards the travelling train hobo who has a kid with a woman in every town he travels through is evolutionary successful…
Fitness in evolutionary context literally translates to a set of traits conducive to production of healthy offspring in a particular environment.
What you’re getting at is the fact that humans are capable of creating artificial environments which invert nature, in which the naturally unfit will reproduce by acting as parasites on those who would be considered more fit in nature itself. This is observable in socialism and similar leftist systems but they eventually collapse, either on their own or they are conquered by a system better aligned with nature. Socialism/leftism basically creates an environment which breeds weakness and slowly eats the system inside out, so such an outcome is inevitable. Evolution is slow though, so it may take a few generations to do so, depending on how extreme the socialism is, a minor degree of it might even prove useful. Remember, a few generations is a lot of time from a human perspective, but from an evolutionary one it is nothing.
The travelling hobo is likely to only have kids with not so genetically fit women, and since he is probably not very genetically fit himself and the woman will be a single mother, his offspring is likely to end up being an idiot criminal who contributes nothing to society, also very likely to end up in jail or dead.
This is also why quality matters even moreso than quantity.
Evolution does no deal with individuals or single generations. Evolutionary success would require that the hobo passes on a trait which his offspring use to multiply and their offspring use to multiply.
There is no such thing as quality in evolution. Either a life form is well adapted to an environment or it is not. The measure of adaptation is how successfully it passes on its DNA. That’s measured by quantities.
If an idiot criminal is well suited for an environment, then idiot criminals will proliferate in the long run.
You still got this notion in your head of “contributing to society”. Neither hobos, nor the goverment actually ever contributes to society. Contributions to society are a rare occurence, usually performed by the Tesla’s and rarities of the world. Criminals who work on roads technically contribute to society. I do not consider people who have shitty jobs and work at restaurants who hand out toxins, as contributing to society, except a negative contribution.
^^^I consider societal contribution a false dictomy.
FIT means appropriate to the environment. Its not the same as physically fit, physically fit physically fit, physically physically physically fit -
though this might help.
As long as you can attract a mate, and have progeny that can have progeny - that is tautologically fitness. this IS selection.
The failure is not with the theory. We’re still evolving, just means that Stephen Hawkins can make a contribution regardless, and if he also has kids then he is also selectively successful.
DOn’t think this is much of an argument.
I’m not sure “fittness” is that useful.
Yes, it does. Of course. Duh!
Only then, if he is supported by liberalism, socialism and other modern isms. … You do not want to become a travelling train hobo, do you?
Exactly.
Yes, although I do not think that it is only a thing of socialism but of liberalism and other modern isms as well. It is typical for modern humans.
This can only be certainly said if the environment is a natural environment - and not a human cultural environment. In a human cultural environment idiot criminals can be punished or not - thus: it depends on the human cultural (especially political) environment whether criminal idiots proliferate or not. This idiot criminals can be punished by death and do not proliferate but die out, and the same idiot criminals can be revered as heroes and do not die out but proliferate.
You can easily observe this.
I don’t think that putting declared/judged criminals to death affects the future population much at all. Most have already had whatever children they were going to have.
It’s possible to organize and kill all people who have red hair. A subsequent examination would lead to the conclusion that red-haired people were not well adapted to the environment.
The fact that it was an organized act brought on by ‘culture’ is not important in terms of evolution. Stuff happens and whoever survives was the fittest to survive.
If that was true, you were not communicating with the people from all over the world without moving an inch from your place. It becomes possible for you because of the contributions of the many generations in the past.
Contribution does not mean merely empathy or helping others. Whatever one does in any field, small or big, is contribution. Yes, it may be either positive or negative.
And, this capacity of contribution is precisely what differs humans from other animals. Animals are unable to contribute to their society. That is why they are there where they were thousands of years ago, but humans evolved continuously.
With love,
Sanjay
To be judged by so called contribution to society is to admit being owned by it.
This thread proves once again the hilarity and absurdity of evolution. Naturally evolution has no direction or final destination despite what the Social Darwinians would like to pretend everybody else should believe in.
I think it would, since most politicians and people in power are criminals. If you put them to death it would radically change the infrastructure (for the better.) I recommend starting with China, pollution in that nation has reached apocalyptic levels.
In the short run, maybe, but not in the long run, and evolution is more about the development in the long run.
Exactly.
The fact that it was an organized act brought on by culture is important in the long run. Thus it depends on time and on the capability of the humans to circumvent the nature by culture.
False dichotomy of nature and culture. Evolutionary theory does not care about such things because it cannot identify why some trait survives and why it dies out. Nor does it care. The ‘environment’ is too complex to identify single direct causes.
It is not really a dichotomy, because culture is embedded in nature.
Which evolutinary theory? That is the question. And the next and more important question is: Is it false?
What do you exactly mean by “identify single direct causes”?