:-)

Sad that "people are under the impression that we are at our potential right now."

I agree.

Evolutionary science, like religion, get's blamed for beliefs it doesn't actually have.

For example- the mistaken "more-evolved" vs "less-evolved" paradigm. Humans are often described as "highly evolved", compared to "lower" animals. A moral counterargument to evolution is instances where different human "races" are discribed as being more or less evolved compared to each other.

But that's not what evolution says. There's no destination evolvedness, except for an equilibrium with the ecosystem.

Every living thing is the SAME evolutionary age, sharing the same origin over 3.5 billion years ago.

But even if we discovered another biosphere, perhaps much older, we wouldn't necessarily find "more evolved" life forms. We would simply find life forms in equilibirum, or equilibrating, with various niches in the ecosystem.

There's no reason to believe, as is taught in Mormonism, that the "perfect" form is human, a final state.

Interesting post, Amos.

amos Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> But that's not what evolution says. There's no
> destination evolvedness, except for an equilibrium
> with the ecosystem.

Exactly. And if we ignore your exception, Evolution can dispense with teleology altogether, as it should (and I wish it would).


This put in mind something I read about "Literary Darwinism":

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/12/against-literary-darwinism.html


"Literary Darwinism promises to show that literature played an important role in the evolution of the species, but what adaptive function could be served by bare themes, by subject matter as such? Failing to describe how “the adapted mind produces literature,” literary Darwinism often falls back on more general and even genteel notions of improvement (LD, p. xii). The move has a certain logic. Literary Darwinism has a difficult time finding a place for literary forms in the story of adaptation under selection pressure. At the same time, it is committed to the proposition that literature must have helped us to become the species we are. The result of this curious imbalance is that literature simply is about who we are in a relatively straightforward and uplifting sense. Literary texts provide “lively and powerful images of human life suffused with the feeling and understanding of the astonishingly capable and complete human beings who wrote them.”77 There is something tender-hearted in this bid for the function of literature to create “healthy human possibility” (LD, p. 68). It exchanges a hardheaded naturalism for mushier notions of moral cultivation. and strikes an ethical note reminiscent of F. R. Leavis. But surely this is a most remarkable turn of events. Casting about for a function specific to literature, the friends of adaptation seem to settle for it making us better, more decent, or more complete human beings (see LD, p. 68). Yet value-laden ideas like complete humanity have no meaning in the terms of evolutionary or any other science and tell us very little about any cultural artifact. And this is precisely my point. With the turn to a kind of pabulum, Darwinian criticism seems not very scientific at all."


What fascinates me about a lot of educated people, in the sciences and the humanities alike, is how easy they fall for the assumption that literature is good for you. On the contrary, literature can be very very bad for you. Plato had a point about the Poets.

This whole business of "casting about for a function specific to literature" seems so unscientific. Colour me black & white, but I like Science to follow "hard-headed naturalism" and the Humanities to follow, well, the heart -if you will.

Human

And if we mess up the equilibrium we may become the next species to go extinct!

:-)