Even organismic development has remained a deep mystery until recently, and still remains far more complex and hard to model than biological evolution. Evolutionary biology and sociology still have little that is definitive to say about environmental development. We reach a more adaptive future, or not, by attention to our many problems today, not by focusing on futures that may or may not come. It’s important to make guesses about our destination, but just as important to realize that these are only guesses. Only the universe can validate, post facto, whether we have guessed well. We should engage in our best efforts humbly, and not be so sure that they are aligned with where the world is in fact going. The 95/5 rule tells us that 95% of our work is evolutionary, incremental, and experimental. We continue to overinterpret and misuse them today.įor example, some of today’s transhumanists, a group that I consider myself a member of, seeing the inevitable rise of superior machines on the horizon, can use this developmental foresight to ignore, dismiss, devalue, or disregard the variety of STEEPS problems that biological humans face today, and the need to prioritize addressing those problems with our present imperfect tools and strategies. The ideas of directionality, of a ladder of complexity, and of cosmic purpose were too easy to overinterpret and misuse in earlier, less evidence-based and scientific times. The vision of the inevitable ladder of progress has also been used to justify various indefensible social theories and actions over the last three hundred years, including social Darwinism, racism, sexism, animal and environmental abuse, eugenics, and sterilization.Īs evo-devo biologist Wallace Arthur explains in Creatures of Accident (2006), these are just some of the ideological, political, and practical reasons why evolutionary biologists have preferred to say so little about the causes and predictability of the directional increase in complexity among our “higher” species over megaevolutionary timescales. ![]() Ideologically, more primitive versions of an inevitable ladder of complexity ( Scala Natura) were used to justify the view that humans, as long as they believed in a particular God, were creatures separate from nature, with a right of “dominion” over it, allowing us to brutally exploit our environment. What are the dangers of believing too strongly in the evo devo universe hypothesis, at this still early stage of human understanding of universal change? Let’s consider just a few to start.įirst, the idea of an inevitable “ladder of complexity” of leading-edge life forms, a ladder which has led to biological humanity in our little corner of the universe, and may soon lead beyond our biology, is a concept with plenty of moral dangers attached to it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |