Philosophy Now Forum

Your evolution, not mine. I've quit the gene pool. It's your problem now.

As to human evolution, I guess you got a pretty fair answer in this thread to where that's at. Do you really want to see the stage that follows from this one? More of it! Billions more of it! And you can you now see why I have also declined to multiply?

As to evolution in general, it doesn't come in stages. That cartoon of the fish morphing into an executive in, like, seven steps - that's not really how it works. How it works is a whole lot of wasteful trial and error (an astonishing amount of it involving ants), with lots and lots of freaks, owl-food, stillbirths, poor fits with a changing environment and no definitive final forms - except maybe plankton, the cockroach and a couple of entero-bacteria - just messy, unsatisfactory reproduction, with no objective. It's tempting to substitute Evolution for God: a process that had wonderful us in mind the whole time. But it's just not so. There is no intelligence and no design. (Eyeballs are cool, all the same.)

Good on you, Skip. Not just another 'pretty' face, eh?

A very pretty face, as it happens. When I was born, the doctor told my mother: "You should make these on an assembly-line." She was sensible and only made one more: the even brighter and more handsome sibling, who - quite independently and without consultation - also resolved not to replicate. I wonder how many times in nature quite promising genetic variants simply ended the line without explanation.

Promising genetic variants take their own paths, and don't follow the herd. Let the herd go on its silly way.

The next generating will belong to those who produce the most offspring. If you want to see what the next generation will look like, go to the ghetto where each woman makes many children with as many different fathers.

There is a theory that we have stopped evolving. Without anti-biotics and all the other things we depend on to keep us alive and reproducing, most of us wouldn't have lived for more than a few years, if we had been born at all. How long would someone with poor eyesight survive in the wild? Everyone thinks it's their birthright to reproduce and have the best medical care well into old age, and I suppose it is, just don't expect anything much to happen in an evolutionary sense except that we might lose the use of our legs through lack of use, or our brains might get smaller because of all the dumbing down.

When we finally have the guts to exterminate school administrators.

thedoc wrote:The next generating will belong to those who produce the most offspring. If you want to see what the next generation will look like, go to the ghetto where each woman makes many children with as many different fathers.

Naw. Those children are the cannon-fodder for the tiny minority of ultra-rich who own the world and turn most of it into bigger and dirtier ghettos.

If you want to see human development, start a fad for solid gold yachts.

Skip wrote:

thedoc wrote:The next generating will belong to those who produce the most offspring. If you want to see what the next generation will look like, go to the ghetto where each woman makes many children with as many different fathers.

Naw. Those children are the cannon-fodder for the tiny minority of ultra-rich who own the world and turn most of it into bigger and dirtier ghettos.

If you want to see human development, start a fad for solid gold yachts.

Yep. If the poor where smart, they'd not breed, and force the wealthiest to breed a new labour force from their own loins.