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Ärende: Re: The uncertainty of ev
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> From: ragland37@webtv.net (Michael Ragland)
> The whole Universe evolves, so does life on Earth, and so does human
> society.

No, that sentence is a lie. The Universe as a whole evolves in one
sense of the word, and life on Earth doesn't do the same thing at all
but it evolves in a completely different sense of the word, and human
society doesn't do the same thing either but it evolves in yet a third
definition of the word slightly related to life evolution. By
pretending like the three different meanings of the same word are the
same, you are playing a stupid children's game of punning and actually
believing the pun represents reality.

The most fundamental property of living matter is chemical fecundity.
The chemicals in living matter take in chemicals unlike themselves and
convert those chemicals into more of the living matter's own kind of
chemicals. For example, plants take in CO2, H2O, and various inorganic
minerals dissolved in the H2O, and convert them into cellulose and DNA
etc. Different kinds of plants compete with each other for these
inorganic resources, and for sunlight to energize the work of all this
conversion. Some plants do better than others in certain environments.
But mutations change plants in random ways, causing some to
occasionally do better than their ancestors did, causing them to
multiply in quantity at the expense of other kinds of plants that
formerly were doing better. These mutations, and the subsequent
increase in numbers of plants with those very rare good mutations, is
what we call "evolution" of livings. But the word as applied to the
Universe as a whole has a totally different meaning, merely random
change, without any fecundity of any kind, some things last longer than
others before they decay, but matter that performs chemical fecundity,
what we would call "living", seems to be rather rare in the Universe.

"Oranges have navels. So do human beings." No, oranges have embryonic
growths which we **call** navels because they resemble human navels in
a superficial way and we needed a name for them, but oranges and humans
don't have the same thing when we're speaking of navels, they have
totally different things that happen to have the same name.

Do you begin to see how stupid your opening sentence really is when you
consider the true meanings of the word rather than being blinded by the
pun?

> What is the aim of evolution, if there is one?

There isn't one. Evolution is just the name we used to refer to change
in allele frequencies over time, which we understand are caused mostly
by mutation and natural selection in the situation of fecundity greater
than one except for competition. Evolution isn't a purposeful being.
(Neither is the inappropriately-named "Mother Nature".)

> It could be only aimless change, chance fluc-tuations like Brownian
> motion, but it does not seem to be.

To make that stupid statement, you must be considering only mutation,
not natural selection. Natural selection is most definitely not random!
That which works to enhance survival wins out over that which doesn't.
If you think that's random, think again.

> It has been evolution toward complexity.

Nope, not at all in any uniform sense. It has been evolution to
survive, to solve whatever the most life-threatening problems in any
given niche. By chance some critters solve those problems and have many
descendents while the rest don't solve the problems and go extinct
during the same time period. Sometimes (much of the time), in fact
increased complexity was what happened to solve the problem, but the
rest of the time improved efficiency via decreased complexity has
solved the problem. At the very beginning of life, life was very
simple, perhaps just a single catalytic cycle, and just about anything
else that can survive would be more complicated, so of course for a
while there was a trend toward increased complexity, and all the
super-simple lifeforms died out in favor of the more complex lifeforms
that are more able to survive. Also perhaps the very most complex keeps
stretching toward more complexity just by random drift. (If you have a
box that is closed at the left end, closed along far and near sides,
open at right end, and has a numeric scale that runs from zero at the
closed end, and you drop a bunch of ants right at the closed end,
they'll diffuse randomly as they explore the box, and the rightmost one
at any time will tend to be further to the right as time goes on. This
isn't because the ants are biased toward the right, merely because they
started out in a non-uniform situation all at the left end and are
merely diffusing to more uniformly fill the available space, and their
standard deviation increases with time, but they are constrained to
have left-most position fixed, so the mean and the right-extreme both
drift toward the right.)

> Only a narrow sphe-rical shell around the centre of our Galaxy (and
> probably other galaxies as well) can sustain life.

I disagree. Once life has evolved to be technological, and has in fact
developed technology to travel between the stars and build habitats out
of materials they find along the way, that technological life can build
shelters to survive near the center of our Galaxy, and can build
efficient mapping tools and material&energy collectors to travel far
from the galaxy, even to other galaxies, and survive alive all the way
from here to there. It's only *without* such technology that primitive
life can't form and live naturally too close to the galactic center or
too far away.

> Similarly, there is only a narrow shell around the Sun in our solar
> system that can keep water in the liquid state, and thus support life.
> Too close to the Sun a planet is too hot, like Mercury and Venus. Too
> far away from the Sun, a planet is too cold, like the outer gaseous
> planets; Mars may be in an ambiguous position.

This statement is even more obviously false. With appropriate
technology to supply energy far from the Sun or to shield from too much
radiation cose to the Sun, it'll be standard in a few centuries for
people and their accompanying pets and pests to reside and survive and
thrive in all such places. And as for natural life without technology:
Europa might very well have life already, in that salty ocean with lots
of geothermal energy under that thin ice shell.

> In the future, when we may be "dumbed down" enough to have lost
> the original skills, it could be much worse. We should always keep up
> those skills as a fall-back position.

In the book/movie "Fahrenheit 451", there was an "underground" culture
where people preserved their favorite books by memorizing them. With
the aid of computer-assisted-instruction, we could do even better,
deliberately maintaining *all* the "how to do it" knowledge, trained
into randomly selected individuals, with lots of redundancy (maybe 10%
of the population i.e. about a billion people would know each branch of
mathematics and science and any other essential craft, allowing such
skills to survive even a disaster that killed 99.99% of the population,
and 1% would know how to build other important but less essential
technologies, and a few hundred would be trained to know each little
tidbit of obscure but possibly useful or worth-keeping knowledge or
culture, allowing each tidbit to survive a loss of 99% of the
population and allowing a good fraction of them to survive a loss of
99.9% of the population.

When the Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed, many of the
important manuscripts there had no copies anywhere else, and were
permanently lost. With proper planning as I outlined above, we might
never have to suffer a similar fate again.

> We need to pay attention to both local and global levels of
> organi-zation and problem-solving, and several levels in between.

I agree, but:

> The optimum number of levels from person to planet would be about 8:

I disagree. The military has a rule of thumb that the chain of command
must have at each level at least three subordinates and at most appx. 9
(I forget the exact number) to avoid wasteful command and to avoid loss
of command due to overloading the superior officer. A similar rule of
thumb may apply to political organization. If so, what we optimize is
the number of sub-units under any next-larger unit, and whatever the
number of levels is depends on the total population at a given time.
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