Darwin got me thinking about a great deal of things regarding our race and our society today. I have done a lot of thinking about our evolutionary track and where we came from and where we will eventually go. Darwin, and especially this class, made me realize a few things about evolution that I never really noticed before.
First off the human race is about as physically evolved as we are going to become. Therefore Darwin’s theory behind physical evolution loses most of its veracity with the human race. Where are we supposed to go from here? How are we supposed to evolve? This question I believe can be most easily answered by taking a new look at evolution, through brain science.
I have come to realize that although we are not physically evolving we are evolving drastically in mental capacity. We have taken the ideas of using tools and brought them to a level that has never been imaginable and these changes are so drastic that technology is changing quicker than we can really follow.
This then brings up another question. If we cannot physically evolve then how are we supposed to adapt to our surroundings? Well this can also be done through brain power through the development of medicines, prosthetics, lotions, or anything you can really think of. Technology has made evolution a thing of the past but what does this really mean for our world?
This is where my real revelation is stated. I have brought the topic up in class several times before but this is honestly where I believe our evolution is taking us. We are on the verge of a cataclysmic disaster that will destroy our world as we know it and it will be caused by our advancements in either technology or medicine. The following is my reasoning.
Throughout our selections we have read from Darwin we have learned a great deal about the general idea behind evolution. We learned about adaptation and how creatures have evolved into what they must to survive in the world today. In class we discussed a lot but they themes remained the same, everything came back to adaptation and the origin of species. The most interesting point I want to look at is that of adaptation.
Chapter 4 on page 111 of Appleman’s book covers natural selection. This chapter is a great base to start off my revelation. The idea that a species can physically evolve, grow more hair, grow larger, or even create weapons to defend themselves is amazing to me. This idea is a great example of the role nature plays in a species. But at some point you have to ask does nature really know what it is doing?
Dawkins came in at this point to attack the ideas brought up in natural selection but most importantly in the idea of creationism. Dawkins despised creationism and looked at evolution and natural selection as the only true way to understand the world. On page 577 of Appleman Dawkins basically rips apart any idea that religion plays any role in our evolution at all. He essentially is saying that the only correct train of thought is that nature adapts as it feels necessary and we need to accept that for what it is and stop making up a bunch of religious bullshit to explain something that already makes perfect sense. I can understand his frustration in this and his ideas make sense.
Eventually though we get to a point where nature can no longer take over, where the human race will rely just on their mental power to evolve, I believe we have arrived there already. Simply put we have stopped evolving and are now in charge of our own evolution through our fields of science and technology, but this can only work for so long, eventually something will backfire and we must be prepared for that, the root of this failure, could possibly be greed.
Phillip K. Dick wrote a great short story discussing this topic. It can be found on page 145 of the Phillip K. Dick reader and is called to serve the master. It discusses a war that occurred between the robots and the humans and the humans were barely able to survive from these extremely intelligent machines. This story made me think about what were to happen if we were able to make machines that could reconstruct themselves, think and even create on their own authority. That would be a reality that is not too far away and it is scary to think about what could happen if we ever created this technology.
This also reminds me of the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”. This article examined the effects on the Google search engine on our general knowledge as a society. Our evolution has not made our society smarter or advanced; it instead has taught us how to search for our answers easier. This is a step in the wrong direction, we rely on a machine to answer our questions, we don’t think on our own anymore, this is the beginning of degeneration in my mind and one that could lead to technology taking over our society before we know it.
The last thing that worries me is our advancement in medicine. We have created medicines that are able to really sustain the majority of human beings on this earth. We are becoming over populated and over immunized and that is going to end terribly. All I can picture is Mother Nature fighting back in one of two ways. The first is Zombies. I know I have mentioned this several times throughout the year but the more I think about our advancements in medicine I view zombies as an ever growing threat that could truly happen. Also with overpopulation come pollution and with pollution comes the end of our resources meaning our earth will simply crumble, both are very real and very scary.
Evolution can only take a society so far but Mother Nature can also only sustain so much. Eventually we will reach an end; there will be some sort of terrible event that will change our world as we know it. This event will surely be brought on due to our “over-evolution” and I’m very interested, scared, and intrigued as to what it will be and how it will come about.
This first video is a clip about how scientifically zombies could actually occur. All of which are based off of some sort of new invention or technology or medicine in our world today, it is a scary thought but the video brings to light some great ideas and even covers some things we already looked at in class. It is surprising to see how exactly this could happen, and also very scary at the same time.
This next video is the beginning of Terminator. I think it is a great example at how we could develop technology that could easily cause our world to fall apart and become overrun by a seemingly innocent or good technology. It is scary to think that such a “good” idea could backfire so quickly. This is just the beginning of a terrible apocalypse; if you haven’t seen terminator the robots become intelligent and take over the human race. It gets ugly……
Works Cited:
5 scientific reasons a zombie apocalypse could actually happen 5 January 2009. Video Clip. YouTube. 29 Nov. 2009
Terminator: The Beginning [Skynet Soldier] 9 April 2009. Video Clip. YouTube. 29 Nov. 2009
Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic. 2007.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
Darwin, Charles. “Selections from Darwin’s Work.” Pp 67-254 in Darwin. 3rd ed. Phillip Appleman, ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.
Dawkins, Richard. “The Argument from Personal Incredulity.” In Darwin. 3rd ed. Phillip Appleman, ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.
Dick, Phillip K. The Phillip K. Dick Reader, New York: Citadel Press. 1987.
Showing posts with label Dawkins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dawkins. Show all posts
Sunday, November 29, 2009
The Problem With Worshipping Darwin
Charles Darwin dramatically changed the face of biological science. In fact, he invented a completely new kind of science: the evolutionary kind. All of western civilization knows this. So what’s the problem? The problem is that because this man gave society his ideas, we worship him for it. He is to us as Aristotle was to the natural philosophers, or at least this is true within the average population. Despite advances in evolutionary science, much of society tends to look back to Darwin for knowledge about evolution instead of looking to modern science and this often leads to people not understanding how natural selection actually works.
But before we get into the realm of people misunderstanding the ideas that led from Darwin, let us first look into the problems with misunderstanding the man himself. Our society likes our heroes to be flawless; the most minor of blemishes on their character and all of their previous work is called into question. Darwin has been elevated to Hero status, and the same expectations have been held to him.
A good portion of The Origin of the Species talks about Darwin’s theories and conclusions as they have to do with women. To those of us that know this part of his work, it is clear that Darwin stood in line with his, male, contemporaries at the time in thinking that women were inferior, and that one could prove this scientifically. Evelleen Richards in “Darwin and the Descent of Women” writes that everything that could be seen as supporting sexism or racism now “is either ignored or tortuously explained away and Darwin himself absolved of political and social intent and his theoretical constructs of ideological taint.” It is of my opinion that even if a man is the most corrupt person in all of history, if his theories are logically sound, his theories are logically sound. Darwin’s theories are logically sound in the terms of the time period from whence they came. And even if Darwin were to be quoted as saying “natural selection is a sham,” it wouldn’t affect the theory because the theory is logically sound. Racism or sexism perceived in Darwin’s writing now doesn’t affect the logic of his theories, and it is therefore unnecessary to defend him.
Now we will step back into the problems of understanding natural selection that arise from the worship of Charles Darwin. The chief reason that people don’t buy into evolution and natural selection is that they don’t understand it. Richard Dawkins says in “The Argument from Personal Incredulity” that in many cases people “misunderstand natural selection to be ‘random’ and ‘meaningless’” which it simply isn’t. In fact, natural selection is about as non-random as nature can get. The problem lies in that many people look to Darwin for how the theories work.
Darwin didn’t know about genes, genetics, or DNA. He didn’t know the mechanisms behind inheritance, he didn’t know what traits were being manifested from. We now know that the only random element of natural selection is when errors crop up when DNA is copied and spliced. These are occurrences on the quantum level, where random is the name of the game. Once the traits are manifested, the game changes and everything becomes non-random.
Another pitfall that comes with only looking to Darwin is that holes in Darwin’s theories may not exist anymore in science. Michael Behe is the father of what he calls “irreducible complexity,” the idea of a structure that would be useless if it hadn’t popped into being perfectly formed. Darwin himself says in the Origin that if an irreducibly complex object was found, natural selection would collapse. Behe uses this statement as proof that his examples refute natural selection; that nature requires a “maker.” Even if Behe’s examples didn’t have problems with them, however, his proof wouldn’t be substantial because the “irreducibly complex” problem can be easily solved.
Dawkins gave a wonderful example of how an apparently irreducibly complex system could evolve by evoking the metaphor of a stone arch. An arch, by itself, is irreducibly complex. Take any one stone out of place, and the whole thing comes crashing down. But the arch wasn’t built all at once; it was built supported by a wooden scaffolding, all evidence of which is completely gone. The scaffolding is the support structure that makes the incomplete arch semi-useful. Once the arch is done, the scaffold is broken down, and the arch stands on its own. Apply this to biology. A structure, such as Behe’s flagellum example may appear to be too complex to evolve. However, we do not see the remnants of supporting structures that allowed limited functionality until the flagellum or other structure was completed. Once a fully-functional device is in the gene pool, the supporting structure becomes superfluous and will eventually disappear; an organism without that supporting structure is metabolically superior. This concept of a biological “scaffold” was not surmised by Darwin, and by looking only to him, we miss the totality of evolutionary science today.
Finally, one last thing is missed when we don’t look beyond Darwin when it comes to natural selection. If one were to look at Darwin’s work, they would conclude that the only things that are able to evolve are living organisms. However, this is untrue. Modern science has learned that non-living molecules such as viruses do indeed evolve over time. In fact, theoretically any replicator (such as DNA, RNA, or something human-created) could undergo a form of natural selection and evolution simply through errors in the replicating process. This general knowledge is not only useful in the realms of inorganic life or AI projects, but is absolutely vital in the realms of public health. Knowing how and why viruses and other pathogens mutate is very important. Below is the first of six videos concerning the fight between humans and bacteria and viruses. The video says that such organisms are the only real threat to our species and talks about the downhill battle which humans will certainly lose.
Darwin was an incredibly influential person. He changed the face of all science and rocked old religion to its core. However, the context in which Darwin’s theories and the theories themselves have changed to the point where the Aristotelian worship of the man is hardly necessary. It is time to move on from Darwin and look at the theories instead of the man.
Works Cited
Dawkins, Richard. “The Argument from Personal Incredulity.” in Darwin. 3rd ed. Philip Appleman, ed. New York: W.W.Norton, 2001.
“Evolution Episode 4: The Evolutionary Arms Race.” Posted by Gravitationalist..
Richards, Evelleen. “Darwin and the Descent of Women.” in Darwin. 3rd ed. Philip Appleman, ed. New York: W.W.Norton, 2001.
But before we get into the realm of people misunderstanding the ideas that led from Darwin, let us first look into the problems with misunderstanding the man himself. Our society likes our heroes to be flawless; the most minor of blemishes on their character and all of their previous work is called into question. Darwin has been elevated to Hero status, and the same expectations have been held to him.
A good portion of The Origin of the Species talks about Darwin’s theories and conclusions as they have to do with women. To those of us that know this part of his work, it is clear that Darwin stood in line with his, male, contemporaries at the time in thinking that women were inferior, and that one could prove this scientifically. Evelleen Richards in “Darwin and the Descent of Women” writes that everything that could be seen as supporting sexism or racism now “is either ignored or tortuously explained away and Darwin himself absolved of political and social intent and his theoretical constructs of ideological taint.” It is of my opinion that even if a man is the most corrupt person in all of history, if his theories are logically sound, his theories are logically sound. Darwin’s theories are logically sound in the terms of the time period from whence they came. And even if Darwin were to be quoted as saying “natural selection is a sham,” it wouldn’t affect the theory because the theory is logically sound. Racism or sexism perceived in Darwin’s writing now doesn’t affect the logic of his theories, and it is therefore unnecessary to defend him.
Now we will step back into the problems of understanding natural selection that arise from the worship of Charles Darwin. The chief reason that people don’t buy into evolution and natural selection is that they don’t understand it. Richard Dawkins says in “The Argument from Personal Incredulity” that in many cases people “misunderstand natural selection to be ‘random’ and ‘meaningless’” which it simply isn’t. In fact, natural selection is about as non-random as nature can get. The problem lies in that many people look to Darwin for how the theories work.
Darwin didn’t know about genes, genetics, or DNA. He didn’t know the mechanisms behind inheritance, he didn’t know what traits were being manifested from. We now know that the only random element of natural selection is when errors crop up when DNA is copied and spliced. These are occurrences on the quantum level, where random is the name of the game. Once the traits are manifested, the game changes and everything becomes non-random.
Another pitfall that comes with only looking to Darwin is that holes in Darwin’s theories may not exist anymore in science. Michael Behe is the father of what he calls “irreducible complexity,” the idea of a structure that would be useless if it hadn’t popped into being perfectly formed. Darwin himself says in the Origin that if an irreducibly complex object was found, natural selection would collapse. Behe uses this statement as proof that his examples refute natural selection; that nature requires a “maker.” Even if Behe’s examples didn’t have problems with them, however, his proof wouldn’t be substantial because the “irreducibly complex” problem can be easily solved.
Dawkins gave a wonderful example of how an apparently irreducibly complex system could evolve by evoking the metaphor of a stone arch. An arch, by itself, is irreducibly complex. Take any one stone out of place, and the whole thing comes crashing down. But the arch wasn’t built all at once; it was built supported by a wooden scaffolding, all evidence of which is completely gone. The scaffolding is the support structure that makes the incomplete arch semi-useful. Once the arch is done, the scaffold is broken down, and the arch stands on its own. Apply this to biology. A structure, such as Behe’s flagellum example may appear to be too complex to evolve. However, we do not see the remnants of supporting structures that allowed limited functionality until the flagellum or other structure was completed. Once a fully-functional device is in the gene pool, the supporting structure becomes superfluous and will eventually disappear; an organism without that supporting structure is metabolically superior. This concept of a biological “scaffold” was not surmised by Darwin, and by looking only to him, we miss the totality of evolutionary science today.
Finally, one last thing is missed when we don’t look beyond Darwin when it comes to natural selection. If one were to look at Darwin’s work, they would conclude that the only things that are able to evolve are living organisms. However, this is untrue. Modern science has learned that non-living molecules such as viruses do indeed evolve over time. In fact, theoretically any replicator (such as DNA, RNA, or something human-created) could undergo a form of natural selection and evolution simply through errors in the replicating process. This general knowledge is not only useful in the realms of inorganic life or AI projects, but is absolutely vital in the realms of public health. Knowing how and why viruses and other pathogens mutate is very important. Below is the first of six videos concerning the fight between humans and bacteria and viruses. The video says that such organisms are the only real threat to our species and talks about the downhill battle which humans will certainly lose.
Darwin had no idea about these implications of his theories. Now that we do, it makes little sense to continue looking to the past.
Darwin was an incredibly influential person. He changed the face of all science and rocked old religion to its core. However, the context in which Darwin’s theories and the theories themselves have changed to the point where the Aristotelian worship of the man is hardly necessary. It is time to move on from Darwin and look at the theories instead of the man.
Works Cited
Behe, Michael. “Darwin’s Black Box.” in Darwin. 3rd ed. Philip Appleman, ed. New York: W.W.Norton, 2001.
Dawkins, Richard. “The Argument from Personal Incredulity.” in Darwin. 3rd ed. Philip Appleman, ed. New York: W.W.Norton, 2001.
“Evolution Episode 4: The Evolutionary Arms Race.” Posted by Gravitationalist.
Richards, Evelleen. “Darwin and the Descent of Women.” in Darwin. 3rd ed. Philip Appleman, ed. New York: W.W.Norton, 2001.
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