In my next post, I will explain why, contrary to what most social scientists believe, all good science is reductionist, and all human behavior must be explained at the level of the genes (and molecules, and atoms, and particles).All good science is indeed reductionist, but genes aren't necessarily the level that controls all human behavior. For instance, it can be easily shown that the obesity epidemic has had profound consequences for human behavior, society, public health, sex relations, and probably lots more. Yet the obesity epidemic was not caused by genetic changes; our genes are still pretty much the same as they were 30 years ago. The environment has changed. So, while obesity is certainly driven by human biology, culture has caused the epidemic, culture in the form of promotion of low-fat diets, cheap food especially soft drinks, even a reduction in smoking. Genetics can explain hunger, or the desire for carbohydrates, but these have always been with us and thus don't explain the epidemic.
Economics, a branch of the social sciences, has biological elements, for instance humans seem to be hardwired for risk aversion, and time preference seems to have a genetic component as well. But just try explaining the housing bubble and the subsequent crash by reference to genes.
It's not so simple, Dr. Kanazawa.
Social sciences are disrespected by real scientists for a reason, because most of them are simply front-studies that promote cultural marxism as embedded text. Its like someone buying a history book authored by a follower of Ayn Rand or Lydnon LaRouche, they are going to get cherry-picked information that attempts to get them to form a predetermined conclusion.
ReplyDeleteReal science formulates hypotheses and theories and sets up experiments to test them in a measurable way, and then re-tests them many times trying to disprove them from all angles.
Thats my biggest beef with leftists of them ALL-----I'd love to have seen ONE country try multiculturalism just like one country (the Soviet Union) tried communism. When it fell on its ass and produced a dsytopia, we could all point to that failed state as evidence of its wrongheadedness. This is probably why the left pushed for the inuidation of the ENTIRE west at one time with multiculturalism so there would be no where to run when it fell, and the reason the neo-left and neo-right are so antagonistic towards Russia specifically, becuase they are not allowing massive non-white migration. m
"All human behavior must be explained at the level of the genes (and molecules, and atoms, and particles)."
ReplyDeleteInteresting hypothesis, Dr. Kananzawa. Now please take out your microscope and show us how that hypothesis itself is defined in terms of atoms and particles. Because everything human is reducible to atoms, right? Your human mind somehow perceived this thing called a "hypothesis", deduced it, reasoned it, conceived it...show us how atoms deduce hypotheses, please. Because if you can't explain how atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on can do something as ineffable as consider a set of facts and then, completely out of nowhere, conceive of a "hypothesis" to explain them, then you can't explain anything particularly important or interesting about human existence.
Science, which purports to be the only true way of knowing the universe, has itself nothing whatsoever to say about how it does what it does. Science has absolutely no explanation of how such a thing as an idea, a hypothesis, can be imagined by a human being. There's this huge glaring vast hole in what scientists can explain about life, and yet here's an example of one of them blithely presuming to explain all of human behavior with a theory that doesn't remotely begin to explain his OWN behavior in coming up with the idea in the first place! Their existence is just assumed - oh yes, hypotheses just appear in our minds from somewhere, no need to ask where or whether our understanding of the physical world can account for them.
The reason Dr. Kanazawa can't explain hypotheses is because he is not taking into account that the nature of existence is actually a continual evolution towards higher Quality that has evolved to higher and higher levels, levels which are built on lower levels but have nothing more to do with them than a computer's hardware has to do with the operating system that runs on it. You can't look at the hardware of a computer and see the software running on it...the hardware itself, if it had consciousness, would be unable to grasp the nature of the software that was using its registers and memory to perform useful operations.
In the same way, in the world there are inorganic molecules which Life is using to create cells, the nature of which cannot be found in molecules. And those cells evolved towards the higher Quality of being animals that could swim and crawl and fly and think. And those thinking animals evolved a new level of Quality we call "society", which operates on a level above individual human beings. And then another level, an intellectual level, evolved above society. And beyond the intellectual level there is pure Dynamic Quality. (This is all from Robert Pirsig's writings.)
So the reason Kananzawa can't explain hypotheses by looking at molecules is because a hypothesis is an intellectual idea brought into existence by an even higher level of evolution, Dynamic Quality. You couldn't explain an idea by looking at molecules any more than you could explain Adobe Photoshop just by looking at the hardware of a computer. (Sorry this is so long but this is an idea I'm passionate about and it's hard to explain briefly.)
I've found a lot of molecular biology and ecology to be useful in modeling hard problems in the social sciences. Most people haven't studied both, though.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, I'm now reading a book on epigenetics, which is a fledgling enterprise trying to find how our grandparents' environment affects behavior in grandchildren. As a LaMarkian I find this more interesting than perhaps I should. Nova had a PBS special on epigenetics on Tuesday. Doesn't sound reductionist to me, au contraire, a bit inclusionist. Between lumpers and splitters, I'll take the lumpers. But I like cats too... the ultimate reductionist splitters.
ReplyDeleteDr. Kananzawa is guilty of what Daniel C. Dennet would call "greedy reductionism".
ReplyDeleteagnostic wrote:I've found a lot of molecular biology and ecology to be useful in modeling hard problems in the social sciences.
ReplyDeleteAn example, please?
Without doing the work, without even speaking the language of science (for most of them are totally innumerate), they want the same respect as actual scientists. (Whether most of those 'scientists' do anything vaguely recognizable as science is another matter. But the point is, they are allegedly equipped with the ABILITY to do science.)
ReplyDeleteIt would be like saying that Joe the Bricklayer is an Engineer, because all of Engineering is reductionist. You know, like 'Sanitation Engineers'.
Here's another: the 'alternative medicine' idiots who want to be given the same respect as allopathic medico's. Although I have no respect for M.D.'s Anybody want a cup of herbal tea? It will cure stupidity!! There. Now I'm an alternative medicine moron too!
(Sorry for the quickness, misssssspellings and less than cogent arguments, just wanted to dip my quill and say 'Hi'. I enjoy your blog and read it nearly every morning with my coffee.)
The Wallflower
You haven't actually disagreed with him.
ReplyDeleteAll you have stated is that genes are in charge but the same genes respond differently to different environments. They are still in the driver's seat though.
Or did I miss something?
Genes respond differently to different environments, therefore the social sciences can't be reduced to genes.
ReplyDeleteWe must credit E.O. Wilson for pioneering the marriage of biology and sociology, which he called sociobiology. He himself studied ants for decades and he rightly saw the social lives of ants as suggestive of a pattern that theoretically could be explained genetically. However, at any point in time genes are interacting with environmental factors in complex ways, making reductionism difficult because of the time dimension. Changes over time can be captured in physical theories, however, so it may be theoretically possible for biological phenomena as well.
ReplyDeleteReductionism makes ample sense because complex structures like amoebas were preceded by primitive organic evolution of molecules at least on one lonely planet. The universe is vast, cold, and very dynamic. However, it's composition, structure, and history do make sense and can be understood in mathematical terms.We emerged from a soup that existed because physical conditions were propitious. The planet upon which the soup arose came from preexisting stellar material with the "potential" to build planets under the right conditions. The universe seems to have the toti-potence to build itself elaborate versions out of one singularity. This is mind-boggling.Theoretically we should be able to reason our way back from the final structures to the Big Bang event. Crime could be explained in terms of molecules but who qualifies to understand the explanation???
Instead, we will at least have the pleasure soon of reading about the creation of life in a test tube, so to speak. That will upset the creationists like Larry Auster, but it is quite inevitable. This achievement will foster scientific materialism but I cannot imagine how it can be avoided because bacteria are living beasts with very simple genetics.The reduction of such life to chemical explanations is fast upon us.
But Kanazawa would no doubt say that genes caused the change in environment, viz.: humans' genetically-based risk-aversion, desire to avoid discomfort and seek pleasure, have caused us to invent agricultural, food production, and transportation technologies which have resulted in the freely-flowing high fructose corn syrup.
ReplyDelete"Thats my biggest beef with leftists of them ALL-----I'd love to have seen ONE country try multiculturalism just like one country (the Soviet Union) tried communism. When it fell on its ass and produced a dsytopia, we could all point to that failed state as evidence of its wrongheadedness."
ReplyDeleteGo ahead and try to get a leftist to admit why communism failed. Most leftists see Russia as an isolated case, not a general illustration of the failure of communism or collectivist thinking.
It would not matter if there were a thousand multicultural dystopias that we could point to, the multicult would ignore them. They don't need people to actually think that "diversity is our strength". They just need people who don't think at all.
MnMark says:
ReplyDelete"All human behavior must be explained at the level of the genes (and molecules, and atoms, and particles)."
Interesting hypothesis, Dr. Kananzawa. Now please take out your microscope and show us how that hypothesis itself is defined in terms of atoms and particles. Because everything human is reducible to atoms, right?
He does not have to reduce it to the levels you chose. Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Dennis mentions environment, but the thing to remember is that genes, which are in control, are essentially a mechanism for accumulating information about the environment and getting the bodies they inhabit to pass them on.
Thus, as far as living things are concerned, genes are everything, and atoms are mere building blocks and lacking in explanatory power.
Of course, human environments consist mainly of other people, and the genes of those alive today contain many strategies for dealing with those other people ... some of them are very good at manipulating other people.
Anonymous wrote:He does not have to reduce it to the levels you chose....as far as living things are concerned, genes are everything, and atoms are mere building blocks and lacking in explanatory power.
ReplyDeleteOk then explain where a "hypothesis" comes from in terms of genes.
Explain how a chemistry professor - a collection of genes, in your opinion, and nothing more - stands there in his lab and studies a problem, considers it....and then out of nowhere a hypothesis appears that he can use to try to understand the world. How could genes, with their chemical interactions, do that? What conceivable genetic mechanism could explain that?
Science has nothing at all to say about where the hypotheses that it depends upon come from. It's a glaring, fundamental flaw in the reductionist explanation of the universe.
What a miracle life is. As Robert Pirsig puts it in his book "Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals" (p 143):
The law of gravity, for example, is perhaps the most ruthlessly static pattern of order in the universe. So, correspondingly, there is no single living thing that does not thumb its nose at that law day in and day out. One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution. Thus, while the simple protozoa just barely gets around on their cilia, earthworms manage to control their distance and direction, birds fly in the sky, and man goes all the way to the moon.
A similar analysis could be made with other physical laws such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and it seemed...that if one gathered together enough of these deliberate violations of the laws of the universe and formed a generalization from them, a quite different theory of evolution could be inferred. If life is to be explained on the basis of physical laws, then the overwhelming evidence that life deliberately works around these laws cannot be ignored. The reasons atoms become chemistry professors has got to be that something in nature does not like laws of chemical equilibrium or the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics or any other law that restricts the molecules' freedom. They only go along with laws of any kind because they have to, preferring an existence that does not follow any laws whatesoeer.
This would explain why patterns of life do not change solely in accord with causative "mechanisms" or "programs" or blind operations of physical laws. They do not just change valuelessly. They change in ways that evade, override and circumvent these laws. The patterns of life are constantly evolving in response to something "better" that that which these laws have to offer.
This would at first seem to contradict the one thing that evolutionists insist upon most: that life is not responding to anything but the "survival of the fittest" process of natural selection. But "survival-of-the-fittest" is one of the catch-phrases like "mutants" or "misfits" that sounds best when you don't ask precisely what it means. Fittest for what? Fittest for survival? That reduces to "survival of the survivors," which doesn't say anything. "Survival of the fittest" is meaningful only when "fittest" is equated with "best," which is to say, "Quality."
In short, Pirsig argues that what drives evolution is not chemical/physical interactions between atoms and particles, but an overarching undefinable force he calls Dynamic Quality, which drives nature to ever-higher levels of evolution. Inorganic particles are drawn together into molecules according to the laws of physics, molecules form life, which violates those laws of physics, life evolves mankind, having greater freedom than any other sort of matter, mankind forms societies to gain higher Quality than the "law of the jungle" affords, societies make possible intellectual development which is yet higher Quality. Trying to explain all this solely in terms of the lowest levels - molecules and genes - is impossible.
MnMark naively accepts the rather strange metaphysics of Pirsig. It happens to run counter to everything we know about science. If naturalism has any validity, then ideas like Dynamic Quality reside in the same domain as phlogiston and the ether.This odd interpretation of biological organization is unverifiable and useless.
ReplyDeleteLaws of physics are not "violated" at all. Regardless of the level of organization, matter obeys physical laws with relentless precision. Indeed, that is why we call them laws. Science works because the larger universe seems amenable to mathematical description and application. Of course, the theory of evolution applies only to living organisms while the Uncertainty Principle applies to non-life as well as life. QED seems to apply to all phenomena.
Thermodynamics is a system fully described by physics.Here we have properties like pressure, temperature, and entropy that "emerge" from collective behavior that most likely derives from basic particle physics.If this is not true then a law we have yet to find will be required.In any case the emergent features are unlikely to constitute some sort of "higher" force beyond our capacity to apprehend.
Reductionism is a logical outcome of naturalism but we are a long way from demonstrating its broad application.Naturalists will usually remain reductionists and creationists will by necessity remain anti-reductionists seeking evidence of a "greater power." As interesting as human nature is, it seems to contain nothing that is not in principle explicable in scientific terms. Descartes was found in error long ago and resurrecting "spirits" today only appears a feeble last ditch effort.
1) Of course, human environments consist mainly of other people, and the genes of those alive today contain many strategies for dealing with those other people ... some of them are very good at manipulating other people.
ReplyDeleteThe absolutely best Jew-baiting I've ever seen on the net.
2) "Survival of the fittest" is most certainly a useless tautology and anybody that disagrees is clinging tenaciously with a religious devotion and zeal to a creed.
Speaking of naive acceptance, I think I would say the same about someone who accepts the idea that there are genetic mechanisms that will explain, using the laws of physics, how something called Cornelius Troost comes to be forming complex ideas and arguments concerning the nature of the universe and posting them on a blog on the internet. I'm really looking forward to seeing the genetic mechanism that explains that. The idea that such a mechanism will be found seems naive to me.
ReplyDeleteA better of explanation of this phenomenon, I think, is that a dynamic, Quality-seeking entity/pattern/energy force that calls itself Cornelius Troost is using genes to express itself. This dynamic Quality-seeking entity is motivated by this mysterious force of Quality to seek ever-higher levels of quality, including intellectual quality, and thus it/he is drawn towards developing higher-quality intellectual arguments in places like this.
I don't think you can find Cornelius Troost in his genome any more than you can find the novel War and Peace in a list of the words from the novel. The plot, characters, symbolism, and meaning of a novel is not found in the words used to express it. The novel is another plane of evolution beyond words, that uses the lower plane to express itself.
A hypothesis, an idea, is every bit as real as any matter you can see under a microscope. Yet you can't see it under a microscope and you never will. That is the futility of trying to explain the higher forms of Quality in terms of the lower forms, such as matter.
MnMark seems too deeply into mystical properties to begin to grasp the error of his ways.Three propensities are at work when such rabid holistic thinking obstructs clear thinking:(1) One must be ignorant of the basic epistemology of science versus other ways of knowing,(2) One must simply lack scientific knowledge relevant to the issue, and (3) One must very likely have a strong emotional need to believe in things like "the ghost in the machine."
ReplyDeletePresently models of the machinery of brain function are being tested. Like any organ the brain operates on various levels of organization. As models are refined and robots demonstrate their efficacy, we will realize that "ghosts" are unnecessary as driving forces in mental life. Indeed, evolution itself produced the universal sentience we find in all life on earth. Natural selection built upon this basic property the various kinds of brains that demonstrate different degrees of ability in seeing, hearing, smelling,etc. Thinking of the kind we have is based upon profound specialization that derives from complex social interaction and erect stature. "Quality-seeking" is plain gobbledeegook. We have drives and instincts related to Neolithic life as hunter-gatherers who were extremely aggressive.The emergence of art about 37,000 years ago in France was the product of a genetic leap discovered by Bruce Lahn but not yet fully understood. Art and music may be accidental products of overspecialization, but science was directly related to larger IQ's in Northern Europe.The human mind can be well understood without holistic labels like "quality seeking" that sounds more like theological gibberish than real science.
Please excuse my "rabid holistic thinking" when I ask why "natural selection" evolved all these wonderful advanced and, in your view, completely robotic/mechanical interactions that you list.
ReplyDeleteWhy did simple chemical compounds become "alive" and begin struggling against gravity instead of just falling wherever gravity pulled them, and reducing their entropy instead of it naturally increasing?
Why did these life forms struggle to reach greater and greater degrees of freedom?
Why does "natural selection" evolve brains with amazingly complex structures that create music and philosophy?
Your answer seems to be just "it does". You're comfortable with the hammer of Darwinian evolution and so everything in the universe looks like a nail. This absolutely amazing phenomenon of life is, in your opinion, simply explainable as meaningless chemical reactions happening in a robotic, mechanistic way. A Beethoven symphony is nothing but a certain outcome of chemical reactions that could be entirely predicted if we just had enough detailed knowledge of brain chemistry. A few billion years ago some chemicals randomly happened to mix in the right proportion, life was created, miraculously knew how to eat and excrete right from the beginning, found food and warmth and water and not too much sunlight and not too little, all in the same place at the same time the chemicals mixed together just right, and life just started reproducing and this was all entirely predictable if you got the right chemical combinations. It's all just chemical bonds between atoms of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen, banging into one another, and from there a Beethoven symphony and the Mona Lisa was just a matter of time, like some gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption grinding through its mechanical processes.
This is preposterous.
You speak of "genetic leaps" without any explanation of why such a leap would happen. Why are these bags of chemicals evolving instead of not evolving? Why should chemicals care to "evolve"? Why don't they just stand still and start decaying into higher states of entropy as the laws of physics suggest they should? What is motivating them to "evolve"?
That's not theological gibberish. That's the most interesting question and you seem to take it for granted.
For MnMark: I guess your point is that the natural world would not be as it is without a "superior force" operating to initiate and guide these events. The laws and theories we discover, as well as the facts about properties and physical constants, would seem unnecessary or redundant.Who is it, the "force" or the discovered facts and laws? Does science discover how nature works the hard way rather than simply meditating on the meaning of existence?Is metaphysics the path to truth?
ReplyDeleteStudying science may be hard for many but it offers the consolation of the joy of decoding nature to explain how it works. Luckily, it seems to yield slowly to penetration by the very best minds we have.However, the rest of us must labor to know enough to grasp the power of scientific enquiry and its philosophy of naturalism.Operating with a slight knowledge of science is unfortunately a handicap that leads to confusion.
Use "Bruce Lahn" to search for abundant references.Again, genetics is a tough subject with few who have ever had a course in it. Its popularity notwithstanding, it is readily misunderstood by those with meager science backgrounds.At minimum everyone should read The Agile Gene by Matt Ridley.The void of knowledge can be readily filled with mystical repacements.
Descartes was found in error long ago and resurrecting "spirits" today only appears a feeble last ditch effort. -Cornelius Troost
ReplyDeleteIt does seem like a lot of people here are stuck in the seventeenth century, presenting arguments that have long ago been laid to rest.
Indeed, evolution itself produced the universal sentience we find in all life on earth.
I'm not sure that I would describe a virus or a cabbage as being sentient though. These seems to be coming perilously close to a metaphysical way of thinking.
Of course, the theory of evolution applies only to living organisms
At some stage non-life evolved into life so it seems to me that the theory of evolution could apply to non living things.
The problem seems to be that people cannot conceive of such a complex world coming to be by accident. All around us we see human inventions, artifacts that have been designed and built by intelligent beings so we figure that all complex things must be the result of intelligence. Even though a child can easily discern the difference between something natural and something man-made this still appears to be a major stumbling block for people when it comes to accepting evolution. Yet human inventions also have an evolutionary development if you study their history. A jetliner didn't just pop out of thin air. All human inventions are the result of things being happened upon by chance, being observed, selected and then being replicated. Researchers will greatly increase the chances of accidents occurring by conducting experiments - humans basically engineered accidents in order to observe if anything useful would come of it. Humans can even do this in their imagination but the same principles of mutation, selection and replication apply.
Inside a human cranium is the most accurate model of the world known. A sort of virtual world that can speed up evolutionary processes. Once these virtual worlds became aware of other virtual worlds contained within the heads of their fellows and were able to communicate with each other the stage was set for the exponential growth of evolutionary development. The replication of complex structures was no longer restricted to things that had DNA.
Evolution explains the mechanism behind creation and is not a competing theory with intelligent design. Once you have a good understanding of how human creations come to be it becomes inconceivable that complexity can come into the world in any other way but through an evolutionary process.
For Anglo-Amerikan:
ReplyDeleteI must take issue with several of your comments. For one viruses and cabbage are entirely entirely unrelated. Viruses are a borderline form of life that remain obligatory parasites and cause many diseases.They are less than cells, consisting of a nucleic acid surrounded by a protein coat. All plants and animals are cellular creatures with far more genes than viruses have.
Cabbage is a conventional plant and has sentience.All plants have some kind of reactivity because they are living organisms. They react to light, heat, or chemicals in various ways.
The theory of evolution is not constructed to account for non-life. Of course it is possible that viral nuceic acid evolved from regular cell genes, but before viruses appeared there had to be a pre-biotic process of chemical synthesis that produced molecules capable of later becoming enzymes that might engineer more complex synthsis of organic molecules.Chemical evolution would have its own theoretical framework that would explain the steps leading to the first cells. Since viruses are entirely parasitic they could not serve as the first forms of free-living cells.Indeed, it is more likely that photosynthetic life similar to bacteria may have been the first life on earth.
"Inside the human cranium is the most accurate model of the world known." This statement is flatly wrong.The best models of the world are located in the heads of people like Stephen Hawking and Ed Witten, espressed almost entirely in abstruse mathematics far beyong the reach of nearly everyone else.Since models of the universe are still being debated, there is no general aggreement on the ultimate model. What you have in mind is obviously something unrelated to reality.
You have reasoned improperly by ANALOGY from evolution to human cognitive function. They match up, my friend, rather poorly.Memes are not genes and do not obey the same laws.We understand the paradigm of human creative problem-solving only superficially because brain processes are still only partially understood. Highly creative people like Edison have high IQ's and abundant curiosity, but the specific mechanisms of that creativity are poorly understood.Nonetheless, the "evolution" you claim exists in the brain is a set of capacities resulting from the evolutionary development of the brain. That human brains can think through problems to often complex"virtual" solutions has remained basically a mystery until now.We do not know the precise molecular mechanisms involved.Still, dualists will conjure up "life forces" to account for creative thinking and the origin of life.Intelligent design and evolution cannot be reconciled because creationists cannot let go of the idea of a "designer." Your analogy is only a rough one and does not explain cognitive creativity, but even if you did you will find the dualists unconvinced as they retain their "ghost in the machine' faith.
Thanks for reading my sub-sophomoric rambling and commenting on it Mr Troost. I always thoroughly enjoy your comments and would consider myself to be on your side. However your comment has left me feeling a little disconcerted.
ReplyDeleteCabbage is a conventional plant and has sentience.All plants have some kind of reactivity because they are living organisms. They react to light, heat, or chemicals in various ways.
According to your definition fairly simple machines could be described as sentient. I'd wager that this is not most people's understanding of the word.
For instance from wikipedia:
Advocates of animal rights argue that many animals are sentient in that they can feel pleasure and pain, and that this entails being entitled to some moral or legal rights.
If Your definition of sentient only applies to living things then it is indistinguishable from "it is alive" and is virtually meaningless or at least redundant. Isn't it the dream of many to discover sentient aliens? I'm sure cabbages are not what they have in mind.
"Inside the human cranium is the most accurate model of the world known." This statement is flatly wrong. The best models of the world are located in the heads of people like Stephen Hawking and Ed Witten.
Last time I looked those two fellows were still human - how can it be flatly wrong?
Memes are not genes and do not obey the same laws.
I looked up meme on Wikipedia and discovered that the word evolution or similar was used about fifty times, eg:
Dawkins wrote that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission.
So cabbages scream when you cut them, Stephen Hawking and Ed Witten are not humans and "evolution" cannot be used to describe or understand anything other than Darwinian biological development.....?
Perhaps I used "sentience" too broadly. Responsiveness is fundamental to all life and evolves into sentience if we abide by the Wikopedia definition.Sentience would begin with brains of fish, birds, reptiles, and mammals because all of these demonstrate fear and suffering.Still, the distinction between primary and secondary consciousness is relevant. Only higher primates and perhaps dolphins have secondary consciousness and can suffer even more than the others.Sentience for humans, because of the degree of self-awareness, would be greatest of all. Cabbages would count only in terms of basic responsiveness found in all plants.
ReplyDeleteYour ambiguous reference to perfect world models inside craniums is exactly too ambiguous.The vast mass of souls unable to even describe a galaxy will be empty of such models. The value of abstract mathematical models and laws remain far beyond the grasp of nearly all of us.
Evolution in terms of human invention is really cultural evolution and it interacts with biological evolution over long time periods to modify human groups. The evolution"speeded up" by the brain events by no means necessarily speeds up biological evolution.Cultural evolution proceeds along its own track but at times interacts with biological evolution in important ways.The epidemic of obesity seems to not qualify because Dennis may be right about our genes remaining the same while obesity surges in our population. The great reduction of newspapers and great increase in visually exciting games may eventually change our brains into largely visual information processing machines unable to cope with complex written language.This seems a likely result of dumbing down across America. Many cultural events have no effect upon biological evolution, but I suggest you get my book to find out more.