This page contains email messages, Forum posts and newsgroup postings on the subject of evolution. It shows my continuing struggle to educate the world about evolution, a subject that everybody thinks they already understand.
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This is simple. Firstly things are evolving. Just ask any Doctor about drug resistence in bacteria and viruses. Why would apes want to become humans? Would a slightly brighter chimp manage to survive better when we are destroying their habitat? There is no evolutionary pressure pushing chimps towards being human. Chimplike chimps and slightly more human chimps are likely to die at about the same rate. When our ancestors became more human they thrived at the expense of their less human cousins. There was an advantage to being more upright in stature, smarter with tools and social organization. Now a chimp with 10% better language skill than his cousin is no more likely to survive or breed. Evolution is powered by differential survival and breeding success. Human evolution has stopped. The girls with the prettiest smiles have fathers who can afford dentists, not naturally straight teeth. The smartest people marry later in life and have fewer children than the mass of the population. Everybody lives, everybody breeds, even the infertile are trying to breed. Evolution has past us by. In twenty thousand years the human population will be no taller or smarter, only much more diverse with far more hereditary diseases. If a bunch of chimpanzees started to use tools, fire or a crude language they would not have a survival advantage. They would stand a good chance of being massacred. There is no room for apemen in our world.
The most important lesson to remember about evolution is that most people don't understand it, including most of the people who are comfortable with it as the most important belief in their repertoire. Looking at evolution as having any kind of a purpose is bound to end in tears. Evolution is not a force of nature, it simply describes the way things happen, the way they have to happen. Thinking about evolution as being A Good Thing in and of itself is a nonsense. So is the idea that evolution serves the purposes of the animals and plants that are evolved. The only sensible view to take is the replicator's eye view. Genes do not have purposes, however it is convenient mental shorthand to look for how genes have their purposes fulfilled in order to appreciate what is really happening. Evolution has not shaped the sting of the bee to help the bee. Evolution does not care about the bee, neither does the bee's genes. The worker bee stings and in doing so rips the sting from her body. This has an effect and a side effect. The effect is to release a chemical into the air which alerts the rest of the bees in the vicinity to the mortal threat. The side effect is that one bee dies. The worker is sterile. The genes inside that bee were going to die out anyway. What matters to the genes is the future of the rest of the genes in the hive. The beehive is a collective. It only breeds through the queens and drones. The workers play no part in providing genes for the future. Why the bee has evolved a sting that is fatal is no harder to understand than why a crane fly leg will come away from the body if you trap it or why your white blood cells kill themselves defending your body. The leg of the fly and the white blood cells have no future without the rest of their body. A bee without a hive is just the same as an amputated limb. The sacrifice of a single worker for the good of the hive makes perfect sense. But why does the sting have to be fatal? It doesn't have to be. The point is it doesn't matter if it is. As long as the suicidal action of a few workers pays off to the hive as a whole it is good behaviour. It is relatively easy to imagine how a beehive that is already alerted to associate the smell of squished bee innards with death and possible hostile action could benefit from such a fatal alarm call. Wasps and hornets do not benefit from a fatal sting because they forage alone and need to use the sting as a regular weapon to kill their prey and to defend themselves. In addition they do not share the same genetic pattern of inheritance of genes that is peculiar to the bees and ants which makes the setting up of colonies with sterile workers so likely. To simplify it very crudely the workers are much more closely related to each other as sisters than they would be to any offspring they could have. This strange pattern of inheritance makes the construction of seemingly selfless co-operative ventures so much more likely. The beehive could never be a model for a human society because we do not share the same goals and crude genetic self interest in the way that bees do. In a beehive what is good for the hive is good for the worker, more or less. In a human society that is very far from the case, there will always be a potential benefit for a cheat. Bees do not act in a way that shows any awareness of self interest. They don't care for themselves other than as efficient cogs in the machine of the hive. As far as bee genes are concerned selfless acting bees suit their own selfish "desires" to be propagated. A bee never shirks or shows off, a bee does not think that way, the bee genes don't waste their effort in making such a self consciousness in a bee, any more than our genes make our legs conscious of the burdens our arms might be putting on them. We have been bred to see our own interests and to follow them, which usually means acting in a semi-social way, exploiting the collective for our own interests, without being seen to do so. We have a brain that identifies a self and an interest for that self, we are self conscious, self interested and potentially self satisfied because of the thoroughly mathematical selfishness of our unconscious genes and memes. |
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