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From: thornley@cs.umn.edu (David H. Thornley)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: evolution is not a scale
Message-ID: <1990Dec21.190440.27159@cs.umn.edu>
Date: 21 Dec 90 19:04:40 GMT
References: <37034@cup.portal.com> <70996@bu.edu.bu.edu>
Organization: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis - CSCI Dept.
Lines: 50

In article <70996@bu.edu.bu.edu> colby@bu-bio.UUCP (Chris Colby) writes:
>In article <37034@cup.portal.com> mmm@cup.portal.com 
>(Mark Robert Thorson) writes:
>
>>The professor of the course had a table summarizing many experiments with
>>other species, showing a rise in information transfer as you go up the scale
>>to humans, who (by this measure) can assimilate hundreds of bits per second.
>
>	Mark, I liked your post but I cringed when I read the above.
>The idea that evolution is a linear scale with humans at the pinnacle
>is simply not true. Other animals are not "lower" animals as you call
>[Summary:  The evolutionary pattern is a tree, with various species
> splitting off and continuing to evolve on their own.]
>
>	The idea of evolution as a scale probably come from people
>wanting to view evolutionary change as progress. Evolution is not
>progress. It is just change. Organisms adapt to their current
>environments and that's it. 

Partly true.  However:  Here-and-now, it is about 0 degrees Fahrenheit
(that's -17 or so to you Celsius fans) with heavy falling and blowing
snow.  You could say that I have adapted to the current environment
by buying a house with a furnace, and heating it to 68 F (about 20 C)
and using walls to keep the wind out.  You could also say that I haven't
adapted to the environment at all, but rather that I changed it.

Only a very few organisms adapt their environments in such a way, and
most of those who do use fairly primitive means and do not adapt as
well as humans to varieties of conditions.

Furthermore, humans are the only species I am aware of that is capable
of transmitting experience without physical presence.

On these two grounds, I conclude that humans are, in a very real sense,
not just another species.

>
>	Humans may be the most intelligent species on the planet,
>but we are not the pinnacle of evolution. 	
>

Various types of critters can be looked at as pinnacles, depending on
what you are looking for.  For intelligence, humans.  For sheer ability
to live in adverse conditions, cockroaches or something.  For causing
ecological disasters, I think you'd have to go with those ancient things
(plants?) that totally changed the Earth's atmosphere from a reducing
atmosphere to an oxidizing one, and killed most of the existing life-
forms.

DHT