Ch. 1: Finding Your Inner Fish

Robert Tulip · Posted: Sat May 24, 2008 9:18 pm Post subject:

There are traits that are biologically maladaptive. The human hernia is an example, where the benefits of being able to walk on two legs outweigh the maladaptive negative that our guts squish out from time to time. More broadly, maladaption occurs when a niche changes, so for example the Australian wombat was well adapted to a pre-human continent, but is somewhat maladapted to dealing with cars, cows and fences invading its habitat. American megafauna were maladapted to deal with the small creatures who crossed the Bering Strait in 13000 BC and ate them. In this sense, all extinction and endangerment of species can be classed as a maladaption, except that the power to change the niche generally rests with people, so there is little the maladapted entity can do. With the burka, the question whether it is adaptive or maladaptive is a function of whether its use is expanding, stable or declining, and of whether its negative effects outweigh the positive.

DWill · Senior Joined: 31 Jan 2008 Posts: 379 Gender:

We may judge that one part or another of an organism is "maladaptive", but it doesn't matter what we think about it. The organism is reproducing and surviving as a species despite any variations from the "ideal." Look at the structure of our backs, how much less than ideal this arrangement is from a design standpoint. Doesn't matter; our total package is what counts towards whether we reproduce and survive as a species.
DWill

Robert Tulip · Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 12:47 am Post subject:

Excuse my pedantry, but I think it does matter what we think about adaptation. 'What we think about it' can be false or true, and it matters that we think things that are true, otherwise we are on a nihilist path. The point about maladaptation is that it is an objective indicator of a species failure to reproduce and survive - by definition. Knowledge about maladaption is important to see the similarities between human culture and the evolution of life. It would be true to say what we think doesn't make a difference to whether an organism is adaptive, but this is slightly different from your comment. There is a wiki at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maladaptation

DWill · Senior Joined: 31 Jan 2008 Posts: 379 Gender:

Robert Tulip · Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 8:46 am Post subject:

I finally got my copy of Your Inner Fish yesterday, together with my copy of Our Inner Ape, both mailed from the USA. I read YIF straight through. It is a wonderful book, full of intriguing factual implications about how we can better understand ourselves by understanding our natural origins. The excitement of scientific discovery shines through, as well as the sense that the science of evolutionary genetics is in its childhood, so we are invited along for the ride.

DWill, what you say about stoicism reflects common usage, but I was talking about the philosophy: as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism puts it, "The core doctrine of Stoicism concerns cosmic determinism and human freedom, and the belief that virtue is to maintain a will that is in accord with nature." This stoic theme of coordination of will and nature is deeply evolutionary in character.

I agree with you about the essential non-determinism in life, but the point is, going back to the stoics and Hegel, that freedom is the recognition of necessity. We are free to deny necessity, but the evolutionary standpoint holds that a freedom which understands nature and builds on it is a higher calling than a freedom which promotes basic errors (eg creationism). My view is that denial of necessity is in some respects a definition of evil, but of course who are we to divine the nature of necessity?

I don't agree with your description of emergence as unlawful. To me this hints at our earlier discussion on adaptation and evolution - in the sense that individuals adapt while species evolve. So an individual is free to break the law, adapting to circumstance, but a society needs to enforce laws, presenting a soft determinism - if you break the law you are likely to get caught. It is this collective law-like character of emergent nature where we can see a determinism, not hard in the sense that our decisions are pre-ordained, but soft in the sense that collective decisions are to some extent predictable and follow trends. A further point is that the further our free emergence departs from physical reality, the bigger the jolt in store when a natural correction inevitably occurs. We just don't know if our artificial human civilisation is attuned to nature or intrinsically alienated from it. If the latter then a big jolt is as inevitable as night following day.

DWill · Senior Joined: 31 Jan 2008 Posts: 379 Gender:

yodha · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2008 4:07 am Post subject:

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