For reference - change

[trixtah]

It 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.

Comments

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not a fan of Prof Dawkins, but I have read The Selfish Gene despite its really horrendously annoying title, and some of the conclusions towards the end. I suppose The Utilitarian Gene doesn't sound quite so sexy. :-)

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...)

[buddleia.livejournal.com]

One of his later books was about the necessity and proliferation of altruism, I forget which.

'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.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Heh, it's like those people who aren't climate scientists saying "Human-created climate change is bollocks!@!!1!". I mean, how can anyone speculate on sociology or psychology if they weren't there and there were no such quaint things as written records (or decent archaelogical remains)? I saw a hilarious cartoon once with some archaelogists-of-the-future digging up a toilet pan, which was then displayed in the museum as "an urn to receive blood from human sacrifices". Such a crack-up.

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!