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Thu 16 Apr, 2009 11:40 am
Has natural selection been aborted?
I would say that natural selection, i.e. evolution, has taken a dramatic turn since the birth of human consciousness. Natural selection produced the human species and the human species has derailed natural selection. World wide the species that survive, including the human species, depends upon human created meaning and no longer upon natural selection.
We have become meaning creating creatures and have developed a high tech society that overwhelms the process of natural selection. The selection of what species will survive in the future no longer depends upon the process of natural selection but depends upon the process of human meaning creation.
Who am I? Of what value is my life? The child, when asking these questions, is saying that s/he wants to be recognized as an object of value. S/he wants to know how well s/he measures up as a hero.
Freud saw that the underlying foundation for these feelings and ambitions was the "utter self-centeredness and self-preoccupation, each person's feeling that he is the one in creation, that his life represents all life" he tallied all this up and labeled it narcissism. Nietzsche saw this healthy expression as one of the "Will to Power" and glory.
This represents the "inevitable drive to cosmic heroism by the animal who had become man."
continued self-esteem possible.
Culture's task is "to provide the individual with the conviction that he is an object of primary value in a world of meaningful action."[/b]
The cultural hero system whether religious, primitive, or scientific is "still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations."
How does the American culture perform its task?
I claim that the maximization of production and consumption is the principal means for the satisfaction of self-esteem for its citizens. It is through the active participation as a member of a community that strives constantly to maximize the production and consumption of goods that the American citizen best satisfies his or her drive for "cosmic action".
We are all captives of our cultural systems. Whether the cultural system dictates the stoning of one's sister for destroying family honor or a system that finds cosmic heroism through a process that maximizes the rate at which we consume our planet.
Our culture is constructed from the meaning that we create. The future of our species and of all life is dependent upon our comprehension of our self and how we use that comprehension in developing a better meaning structure than we have done so far.[/b]
Quotes from The Birth and Death of Meaning Ernest Becker
@coberst phil,
The innovations and practices of humanity are nothing more than a highly successful survival strategy. Natural selection acts on us just as it always has -- it's simply that different features are what get preserved or eliminated through selection.
And organisms have always selected one another -- infections and predators have put selective pressure on humans and therein directed our evolution. So for the behavior of one species to exert evolutionary pressure on another is by no means unique to humans, though our footprint is very large.
@coberst phil,
I would say that natural selection was only aborted to human beings. Other species now got a major new factor to adapt to, the human civilization, but that is still natural selection, just like the zebras evolved into striped animals so they could confuse lions then moving in groups.
I believe humans stoped evolving significantly because nowadays genetics has a very small influence in the sucess of a human being. In other species, their health and in large amounts what they know are entirely dependent of their genes, but human beings can be born with a poor health and a slow mind but end up health and inteligent due to, for example, being born in a rich family with a lot of resources, and as a result these "bad" genes live on.
@manored,
manored wrote:I would say that natural selection was only aborted to human beings.
So we won't be selected by a new plague or climate change or change in food availability?
manored wrote:nowadays genetics has a very small influence in the sucess of a human being. In other species, their health and in large amounts what they know are entirely dependent of their genes, but human beings can be born with a poor health and a slow mind but end up health and inteligent due to, for example, being born in a rich family with a lot of resources, and as a result these "bad" genes live on.
That's not a statement we can really make. Evolution, fundamentally, is a change in population gene frequency over time. It can take hundreds or thousands of generations for certain gene frequencies to change on a population level. It's
abundantly clear that disease processes are mitigated and moderated by genetics. But on the span of one generation, or (at most) 8-10 generations since industrialization, you just can't say that genetics don't play a role in reproductive fitness.
@Aedes,
Aedes:
Stop saying what I wanna say before I say it lol.
@coberst phil,
Heh, say it anyway, you'll probably say it better!
@coberst phil,
And both of you did/would have beat me to the same thing I would have said!
@Aedes,
Aedes wrote: That's not a statement we can really make. Evolution, fundamentally, is a change in population gene frequency over time. It can take hundreds or thousands of generations for certain gene frequencies to change on a population level. It's abundantly clear that disease processes are mitigated and moderated by genetics. But on the span of one generation, or (at most) 8-10 generations since industrialization, you just can't say that genetics don't play a role in reproductive fitness.
I didnt said genetics is completly out of play, it just has got a very small part on it now. Off course there probally are some genes wich make people want/be able to have more kids wich will slowly push the race down some evolutionary path, but it will take much longer than it would take for other species because the genes will be under the interference of the several other factors that make up a person.
And with the speed robotics and genetic manipulation are evolving we probally will all be mutant cyborgs in like ten generations anyway
And stop hive-minding, thats cheating
@manored,
This is very similar to a
previous thread we had on this subject.
@coberst phil,
What has happened will happen again
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