h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

i have some books i recommend to people that involve this argument:

the werewolf principle - can't remember who by but it is old and a classic so should be easy to find.

spiderworld: the tower + spiderworld: the delta - both excellent books well worth a read.

Could you give us a rundown of the arguments?

I think your first para pretty much sums the evolutionary imperiative Noggin.

There is no cause to "better the species" as creachy puts it, merely to obtain advantage ...... and evolution teaches that that is a temporary advantage at that. Predators develop teeth, prey learns to run faster, predators develop greater intelligence and the ability to cooperate in the hunt, etc, etc. We're all one step away from a geological, biological, metereological change that can affect our habitat and survival chances. What works today may not work tomorrow.

Will we devolve - well we might if intelligence becomes an impediment - there is a reason why our brains stopped at the size they are. It's because if they were larger then females pelvises would have to be wider and they'd porbably lose the ability to run. As it is as a species we have the highest incidence of childbirth and mother mortality in nature. It's worth it as it's conferred a survival benefit on us - if it hadn't we wouldn't be here as one of those catastrophes that Ste alluded to would have done for us by now.

At the moment, intelligence is a survival advantage. I am sure I don't need to list the ways that it has allowed otherwise frail apes to prosper. It has also allowed us to build and use nuclear weapons, and there is a real possibility that we could destry all mammalian life on the planet sometime in the next million years.

If that happens, we will have lasted barely 1% the length of time that the dinosaurs did. What value then for intelligence? For dinosaurs, sheer size was often an advantage - until a catastrophy (meteor strike? climate change?) wiped them out and allowed a group of rat-like species to diversify and take over in their place. From them are descended all modern mammals. Like it or not, mass extinctions are a major part of evolution's history and likely to remain that way. They are also triggers for 'bursts' of evolution, since a mass extinction is a major change in the envioronment (for example, dinosaurs dying out allowed our ancestors to move from burrows to plains-grazing).

Should mammals die out, the likelihood is that many niches would be left open - I guess that within hundreds of thousands of years, there would be cockroaches roaming the plains of Africa.

My point is that we are no more the 'peak of evolution' than dinosaurs were. We may, in the fullness of time, go extinct and be replaced by some other species - probably one less intelligent than us, but with other advantages. Like the stock market, evolution isn't 'heading' anywhere - the value of your investment may fall as well as rise. Nortel investors used to think that they had discovered a whole new economy - now their shares have lost 97% of their value. We think that intelligence is more important than size, but that's really just self-centred of us.

Xanatic: The OT is indeed full of apparently - how shall I put it - 'ethically dubious' actions by God and his followers. But give his PR machine some credit; they have had 2700 years (ish) and the finest minds in Christendom to come up with explanations (not to mention ditching whole books if they are too problematic), and there are few they haven't covered.

Ste: thanks, I'll take a look.

Gif

Precisely ! A slam dunk I think

everything you have stated is very understandable and deserves a pat on the back Giford. yet we still have this 'beast' called evolution roaming the ages and wiping out and subsequently causing new life.
in the cause from no cause argument someone posted a link to ( by the way. very interesting), a main part of that theory revolved around infinity being an impossibility.
so to accept there was no greater cause/reason we must accept there is an end. so where does it end and why? evolution cannot go on forever yet it keeps, well, evolving things. so what is the purpose? we cannot go back to the 'accident, deal with it' theory as that is now irrelevant.

creachy,

You ask: "so where does it end and why?" just after saying: "to accept there was no greater cause/reason we must accept there is an end." Well, I think you've inadvertantly answered your own question, there - You state there is no greater cause/reason and then ask 'what is the greater cause/reason'.

But to attempt to answer... evolution on Earth could end when our sun dies. Or, if the universe stops expanding and starts shrinking back down to a single point... or when any other number of phenomenon occurs. As to when this will happen - I don't know, and I wouldn't believe anyone who told me they did.

"we cannot go back to the 'accident, deal with it' theory as that is now irrelevant."

I think 'accident' was your word. As someone else pointed out, life is more a statistical probability than an accident (i.e. if you have elements x and y, there is a high probability you'll get z).

Hi creachy,

'everything you have stated is very understandable and deserves a pat on the back Giford. yet we still have this 'beast' called evolution roaming the ages and wiping out and subsequently causing new life.'

I'm not sure how this comment is relevant. It would be exactly like having gravity explained to you and responding with: 'But still we have this gravity monster prowling the universe holding stuff down on planets'. Evolution is just a simple process that results in a fractal-like complex patterns that we have named 'life'.


Where does it end? End of the sun, as Flake says. A cosmic cataclism that truly wipes out this planet.

What is the purpose? There is none, there doesn't have to be one.

'we cannot go back to the 'accident, deal with it' theory as that is now irrelevant.'
Sorry, I don't understand, what do you mean here?


Thanks for being patient and suffering my questions and answers.

Ste