From: Damian Morton (morton@dennisinter.com)
Date: Wed Mar 01 2000 - 08:08:39 PST
> > There's a meme floating around that says that natural
> > selection isn't the only driver, and that part of the reason life exists
> > is to create ever-more complex and large-scale, highly-networked
> > "organisms." Society itself is one of those organisms.
>
> How very Victorian[1]. I'd taken a different approach to that meme:
> natural selection isn't the only driver; entropy and diffusion
> (square root of t) drive life towards ever-more complex and
> large-scale, highly-networked "organisms"[2]. However, just because
> those of us on FoRK are out near the complex, large-scale, and
> networked end of the life distribution, we tend to see it as
> "optimal" and not just "outlier".
>
Hmm, I always felt that evolution wasnt so much towards something, but
rather was away from something. That is, evolution is a continuous
adaptation to a changing environment. As the tigers get faster, so the
monkeys learn to climb trees or run faster or hide or make spears and clubs
_or_ become smaller or less tasty or grow hard shells or wings or spiny
poisonous coverings. From where we are standing, it may seem that we are on
a path to some darwinian shangri-la, but in fact we are just trying to keep
ahead of the things that would cause us to cease to be.
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