For reference - change
Mar. 3rd, 2009 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trixtahIt is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
--Charles Darwin
Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.
--H. G. Wells
Now, the interesting thing about Darwin's theory is that some more recent thought (and I can't remember who) has asserted that it isn't adaptabiliy per se that means that an organism is more likely to survive a particular environment. Some believe that due to natural change/mutation, some organisms just happen to end up better adapted for a particular environment, while the others that have changed in the wrong direction end up dying out.
I have no idea of the current status of the debate on how evolution works, but it's interesting food for thought - in the non-evolutionary sense, do we "pre-adapt" and fortuitously end up suiting a particular environment, and/or seek out environments that are better suited to us (if they are available), or are we chucked in it and have to adapt or die?
In the microcosmic sense, I think it's a bit of both... but adapting-on-the-fly is the weaker aspect. There is only so much change we can cope with at once. We have also built up various degrees of capability due to our innate qualities, and also the learned ones. So, of course, our lives consist of constantly adapting on the fly - most of the situations we encounter are novel in some way, even the routine ones. We aren't robots who can only deal with pre-programmed responses. Matters of degree, I suppose.
--Charles Darwin
Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.
--H. G. Wells
Now, the interesting thing about Darwin's theory is that some more recent thought (and I can't remember who) has asserted that it isn't adaptabiliy per se that means that an organism is more likely to survive a particular environment. Some believe that due to natural change/mutation, some organisms just happen to end up better adapted for a particular environment, while the others that have changed in the wrong direction end up dying out.
I have no idea of the current status of the debate on how evolution works, but it's interesting food for thought - in the non-evolutionary sense, do we "pre-adapt" and fortuitously end up suiting a particular environment, and/or seek out environments that are better suited to us (if they are available), or are we chucked in it and have to adapt or die?
In the microcosmic sense, I think it's a bit of both... but adapting-on-the-fly is the weaker aspect. There is only so much change we can cope with at once. We have also built up various degrees of capability due to our innate qualities, and also the learned ones. So, of course, our lives consist of constantly adapting on the fly - most of the situations we encounter are novel in some way, even the routine ones. We aren't robots who can only deal with pre-programmed responses. Matters of degree, I suppose.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-03 04:12 pm (UTC)Forget Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness that Counts (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=kindness-emotions-psychology)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-04 11:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-03 05:03 pm (UTC)Actually, the perverse thing about evolution is that it's the stable, unchanging organisms that survive; the ones that change invariably do so with fatal results. Evolution, as I understand it, happens when a mutation first doesn't kill the organism and then makes it more likely to perpetuate itself and its nature. Have you read any Richard Dawkins? Ignore his rather don't-be-on-my-side approach to religion. As a cultural commentator, he makes, er, a brilliant zoologist. The Selfish Gene is fascinating.
ETA - I do realise that wasn't what you are talking about. I'm just a natural conversational rhino. *hides*
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-04 11:26 am (UTC)I'll have to re-read the last bit again to remind myself of what I found so objectionable, but yeah, it's rare that mutations are beneficial in a given environment. I do know I can't stand 90% of what evolutionary psychologists wank on about with their essentialist twaddle (not to say we aren't governed by our biology in many respects, but you know...)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-04 11:37 am (UTC)'Evolutionary psychologist'? I had no idea there was such a thing, although I've seen some stupid, shallow crap thrown about by people pretending to be scientists. Such bollocks. The interesting thing about human behaviour is precisely the way in which it departs from the apparently evolutionarily beneficial.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-04 11:51 am (UTC)As for the proliferation of altruism, I'm now thinking about those bacterium-thingies that discovered sex. You know with the one that extrudes a little pipe so it can "exchange genetic material" with the other one? Mmm, let me exchange my genetic material with you, baybeh!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-06 04:12 am (UTC)(Sorry, being a grumpy evolutionary geneticist here.)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-06 08:38 am (UTC)As for dragging in potential arguments about evolution, I wasn't going to, actually. Thinking about the quotes I cited - and I don't really think it's innately bad to draw a simple analogy if that's as far as it goes - got me thinking about the debates in populist (and presumably academic) thinking on evolution, and I kind of jumped into that topic. I then jumped back out of it to think about what I was really considering (change and how much are we may deal with it due to our personality versus previously-learned lessons).
So, yes, more of a stream-of-consciousness there than ordered propositions and conclusions!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-09 03:49 am (UTC):)