Re: PROBING

Brandon Van Every (vanevery@blarg.net)
23 Oct 1996 19:52:00 GMT

Publius <publius@gate.net> wrote in article <548p89$ufo@news.gate.net>...
> Martin Dann (mdann@j39to56.demon.co.uk) wrote:
> : >
> : >
> : I can't disagree with that. The "superiority" I was referring to was
> : intellectual superiority. The reasons we humans think we are so damned
> : smart is because we are. My challenge is to the notion that smartness
is
> : necessarily a "good thing" in evolutionary terms. There are species
> : around which have been around longer than we have, and will probably be
> : here when we are long gone. And many of them have little if any brain
at
> : all.
>
> If 'survival' were the whole story, then Palaeontology would confirm
> this by producing evidence that the fossil record is a gret mass
> of bizarre and eventually failed attempts at adaptation and
> survival. In fact, the current landscape would be swarming with
> such a chaotic mass. The fact is, of course, no such evidence
> exists. There is order and a 'Vector' guiding the progress of
> Life on Earth. PUBLIUS at <alt.fan.publius>

Doesn't this presume that the paleoanthropologists have had time to find
ALL the fossils out there? They haven't. Also, it presumes that ALL
fossils are available in the archaeological record, and we don't have a way
of proving this to be true. We have to be wary: the "Vectors" you refer to
are often created by our attempts at linear interpolation on a limited set
of samples. The physicists often adopt the tact of using the "simplest
possible model" in the absence of other evidence. But when they do this,
they are not typically trying to explain the phenomenon further, they are
merely trying to use the results. If you want to explain the history of
evolution, you have to allow for the fact that we really don't have all the
data.

Cheers,

-- 

Brandon J. Van Every       |  Free3d: old code never dies!  :-)

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