Natural selection is a real thing, albeit that it did not (could not) lead to the "origin of species" and the diversity of (what we call) Life on earth.
What Natural Selection certainly can do, and does, is adaptation - or "selective breeding".
But, natural selection has no foresight - and this leads to all sorts of problems for the lineage of entities under selection.
By differential death and reproduction, Natural Selection amplifies or suppresses heritable variations and traits between members of the same species.
Indeed such change can happen very quickly (biologically speaking), observable over just a few generations - and this is indeed observable in the human species over the past decades.
Much is correctly made of the Western-leadership imposed replacement immigration in the Western nations; but this is only a surface symptom of much deeper biological changes by which Western populations have voluntarily changed to massive sub-fertility.
Thus all the native populations of all Western nations (indeed all the developed/ wealthy/ powerful nations, all over the world) are massively sub-fertile and en route to chosen self-extinction.
It is only because of this profound motivational change within the West, that mass migration has successfully been imposed on the West - because the world population of human beings is still growing; fuelled by rapidly increasing populations in the "third world" and undeveloped countries, in (for instance) Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, the North Africa/ Middle East, and South Asia.
Such population growth has been made possible by the developments in the West - technological and economic but especially medical and public health developments that have reduced infant and child mortality rates from more than half of children dying before maturity to only one or two percent - something like a fifty-fold increase in the proportion of children who survive to adulthood.
In sum:
1. The West and developed world have chosen self-extinction by massive sub-fertility.
2. The Third World has been made super-fertile by the West.
3. So across the human species overall, the population of the Third World is expanding, the West contracting...
4. And the Third World population will replace that of developed nations in terms of the make-up of human beings.
This will happen with or without mass migration - which is something extra to the situation, presumably motivated by the motivation of strategic destructive-evil that is endemic and (recently) dominant, within the Western "Establishment".
This demographic transformation of the human species just is natural selection, in action, in real time; already happened, still happening.
But natural selection is like an algorithm; it just increases the proportion of some gene variants and reduces others.
Natural Selection has no foresight, and no long-term aim.
It is a fact (so far as is known) that a Third World population cannot, therefore will not, be able to sustain the technological, economic and medical advances that led to the massive expansion of Third World population to replace the West.
So natural selection will lead to an unsustainable situation, an unsustainably large world population - which, because unsustainable, will lead to massive death ("giga" in scale - i.e. measurable in billions).
And, at the root of it, are the reproductive motivations and choices of the mass of Western people, and the people of all developed nations.
And at the root of reproductive motivations and choices is, ultimately, spiritual choices.
And at the root of spiritual choices?...
At the very bottom line, I would say, lies metaphysical choices - the choice of what we each (and en masse) assume to be the nature of ultimate reality.
Note added: I have previously written considerably about the business of fertility, and giga-death; because I have had an interest (initially as an academic) in the subject for some 20 years. But the events of the past two decades have convinced me that my earlier theoretical "answer" to this problem - which was a mass revival of traditional, and probably patriarchal, religion; will not work. The evidence that it will not work includes the collapse of Mormon fertility into below-replacement levels, even among devout Mormons; and the failure of the "Fire Nation" to reach replacement levels despite by-far the most significant national Christian revival in the developed world. This has led me to believe that the cause lies very deep, deeper than church religions; but that analysis does not point towards any solution to the looming problem towards which natural selection is propelling us - let alone a conceivably plausible socio-political answer.
The article teleology in biology makes a good point about how coordination in organisms cannot be taken for granted when so many things can go wrong.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, another reason for assuming life is not caused by random fluctuations is, why do higher level ordered structures even exist? Why is it that cells and molecules can even fit together in such a way as to make elephants, say? It is conceivable that only simple combinations might exist, maybe the only stable combinations would be simple organic molecules.
A more extreme version of this same idea is the Boltzmann universe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain). Quoting from the first paragraph of the second section of the article:
"The second and alternative theory, published in 1896 but attributed in 1895 to Boltzmann's assistant Ignaz Schütz, is the "Boltzmann universe" scenario. In this scenario, the universe spends the vast majority of eternity in a featureless state of heat death; however, over enough eons, eventually, a very rare thermal fluctuation will occur where atoms bounce off each other in exactly such a way as to form a substructure equivalent to our entire observable universe."
If one imagines all the positions and combinations of basic particles then there is a probability for all of them.
But that ignores the fact that giving a probability to particles does not explain why particles can even combine in the first place. Why isn't it all just haphazard jumbles of particles, why can they even combine into such things as stars or planets?
So, along with their persistence, the fact that such combinations exist in the first place gives another reason to believe in teleology.
@NLR - What I regard as the main problem with the idea of building upon "random" fluctuations and variations, is that when some order emerges by chance this is not locked into a stable situation.
ReplyDeleteOn the contrary, it is much, much more likely to be dismantled before order can be further elaborated - and this entropic tendency is continuous.
So random genetic variation is much more likely to be deleterious than adaptive, but even when it is adaptive, functionality is much more likely to be dismantled by the same "random/ entropic tendencies, than it is to be amplified by the much slower, much less powerful, tendencies of Natural Selection acting across generations.
For this reason I regard it as impossible that random/ entropic factors can explain an elaboration in functional complexity over time.
There *must* therefore be a purposive, teleological, creative tendency of some sort - to overcome the entropic tendency. In other words, some divine agent.
But this cannot be a part of science, so this limits the scope of science. Which means that my post is only necessarily true is there is not some other factor that has been missed out, and of course there is - probably many factors - but one is the effect of creation.
I recently came across a commentator from a hundred years ago state that the modern social and economic organization had led not, as one might expect, for women to approximate masculine forms of mentality but rather that men were a lot more like women—and remained childish in the sense of never really growing up and thinking for themselves. But thinking for oneself is in many ways a hindrance when it comes to getting along in the modern economy. To have families you need polarity between man and woman, and the powers that be have done everything they can to erode this. Mormon culture has totally subsumed a bourgeois American ethic and the last word I would use to describe it, despite the surviving religious forms, is patriarchal, so the slide to average fertility is not surprising to me.
ReplyDelete@JE - That's a observation but not an explanation - and the striking thing about the voluntary global choice of subfertility and extinction - is that it happens in All cultures and races that have participated in the industrialization/ socio-economic development of the past 250 years. This suggests to me that the cause is deep, and almost universal. It is encouraged top-down, but even when there is strong official encouragement of large families (even in coercive totalitarian states) - it does not succeed in any significant and sustained fashion; so there seems to be a mass/ individual choice of subfertility at work. While top down persuasion has an effect, there is very little resistance or opposition.
ReplyDeleteHm. I would suggest the metaphysics of technology itself, in the view of nature as something to exploit. Though this isn’t original to the modern world, the form of it as expressed by Francis Bacon, “knowledge is power”, I think is. This then has downstream effects, quite unexpected. I wonder if ancient people cared so much about “making memories.”
ReplyDeleteThen one has to consider the correspondence between the nature of the souls being incarnated and the bodies and the world they are to inhabit.