![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prof_pangaeaAn argument against "progress" and instead for INCREASING VARIATION in evolution, from Full House, by Stephen Jay Gould
7. Even a parochial decision to focus on the right tail alone will not yield the one, most truly desired conclusion, the psychological impetus to our yearning for general progress -- that is, the predicatable and sensible evolution to domination of a creature like us, endowed with consciousness.
We might adopt a position of substantial retreat from an original claim for general progress, but still a bastion of defense for what what really matters to us. That is, we might say, "Okay, you win. I understand your point that the evidence of supposed progress, the increasing right skew of life's bell curve, is only an epiphenomenal tail that cannot wag the entire dog -- and that life's full house has never moved from its modal position. But I am allowed to be parochial. The right tail may be small and epiphenomenal, but I love the right tail because I dwell at its end -- and I want to focus on the right tail alone because this little epiphenomenom is all that matters to me. Even you admit that the right tail had to arise, so long as life expanded. So the right tail had to develop and grow -- and had to produce, at its apogee, something like me. I therefore remain the modern equivalent of the apple of God's eye: the predicatably most complex creature that ever lived."
Wrong again, even for this pitifully restricted claim (after advancing an initial argument for intrinsic directionality in the basic causal thrust of all evolution). The right tail had to exist, but the actual composition of creatures on the tail is utterly unpredicatable, partly random, and entirely contingent -- not at all foreordained by the mechanisms of evolution If we could replay the game of life again and again, always starting at the left wall and expanding thereafter in diversity, we would get a right tail almost every time, but the inhabitants of this region of greatest complexity would be wildly and unpredictably different in each rendition -- and the vast majority of replays would never produce (on the finite scale of a planet's lifetime) a creature with self-consciousness. Humans are here by the luck of the draw, not the inevitability of life's direction or evolution's mechanism.
In any case, little tails, no tails, or whoever occupies the tails, the outstanding feature of life's history has been the stability of its bacterial mode over billions of years!
7. Even a parochial decision to focus on the right tail alone will not yield the one, most truly desired conclusion, the psychological impetus to our yearning for general progress -- that is, the predicatable and sensible evolution to domination of a creature like us, endowed with consciousness.
We might adopt a position of substantial retreat from an original claim for general progress, but still a bastion of defense for what what really matters to us. That is, we might say, "Okay, you win. I understand your point that the evidence of supposed progress, the increasing right skew of life's bell curve, is only an epiphenomenal tail that cannot wag the entire dog -- and that life's full house has never moved from its modal position. But I am allowed to be parochial. The right tail may be small and epiphenomenal, but I love the right tail because I dwell at its end -- and I want to focus on the right tail alone because this little epiphenomenom is all that matters to me. Even you admit that the right tail had to arise, so long as life expanded. So the right tail had to develop and grow -- and had to produce, at its apogee, something like me. I therefore remain the modern equivalent of the apple of God's eye: the predicatably most complex creature that ever lived."
Wrong again, even for this pitifully restricted claim (after advancing an initial argument for intrinsic directionality in the basic causal thrust of all evolution). The right tail had to exist, but the actual composition of creatures on the tail is utterly unpredicatable, partly random, and entirely contingent -- not at all foreordained by the mechanisms of evolution If we could replay the game of life again and again, always starting at the left wall and expanding thereafter in diversity, we would get a right tail almost every time, but the inhabitants of this region of greatest complexity would be wildly and unpredictably different in each rendition -- and the vast majority of replays would never produce (on the finite scale of a planet's lifetime) a creature with self-consciousness. Humans are here by the luck of the draw, not the inevitability of life's direction or evolution's mechanism.
In any case, little tails, no tails, or whoever occupies the tails, the outstanding feature of life's history has been the stability of its bacterial mode over billions of years!
