Regarding stuff like this:
>> Math as artificial? You mean if humans didn't exist there
>wouldn't be exactly nine planets in this galaxy?
>
>Who would there be to count them?
I suppose Bishop Berkeley might argue God would count them in our absence - but,er, what is your point? That counting is entirely an artifice, and that, er,quantity-in-itself doesn't exist? That stuff ain't there if it ain't perceived? Or that our definitions decide that quantity (we might decide Pluto doesn't rate - creating eight where there were nine. Or that if Pluto did rate, the theorised presence of a similarly proportioned rock in the outer shell might culminate in a system of ten).
I'd go with the last, but I can't see anywhere useful that the first two might take us. (Or is that too utilitarian?)
>> A species that does not reproduce goes extinct. In what
>sense can you call such a species successful?
>
>?? Only if you measure success in regards to some arbitrary
>aim. Reproduction is an arbitrary goal. One could just as
>easily say that the failure to move from one location to the
>next is a failure. There might be great biological pressure to
>reproduce, but Dawkins is reductionist when he says that this
>is the only "aim" of a species. It's an ad hoc statement. One
>can only make the statement in retrospect.
The dinosaurs went extinct - but lots of species of dinosaurs kicked serious temporal bottom compared to us and our paltry +/- 1.5 million-year tenure. All species are ultimately bound for the dustbin of history, right? I mean, whether we tag a species' relatively long tenure a 'success' or not doesn't really matter, does it? A rose is a rose and all that. Dinosaurs were around for a long time, period. A suicidal biopath (nice neologism, eh?) might consider this a terrible failure on their part, but that wouldn't change the fact that dinosaurs were around for a long time. It's all to do with values, and a fact discovered is a value incarnate. But it's still a fact, innit?
And anyway, Dawkins doesn't make this claim for species, does he? He makes it for genes. On that view (as my pathetic grasp of these things would have it, anyway), a particular species represents a contemporarily tenable conglomeration for said genes, I suppose. If species can be said to have 'aims' at all, those aims would be part of what decides the genes' future. In an ever changing world, a species blessed/cursed (bloody values again) with self-consciousness (ie. one that could conceive of itself as a species) would realise its aims have something to do with whether it ends up as an evolutionary *dead*-end or an ancestry-in-waiting for succeeding species (the nature of which would be similarly contingent).
>> However, a lot of biologists do think that the Darwinian
>notion of success and fitness needs revising.
>
>Agreed.
Do you mean revision a la SJGould ('punctuated equilibria') or revision a la 'evolution is merely a contending discourse, and can be distinguished from eg. creationism only in respect of how the currently widespread acceptance of its enunciation plays out in the microphysics of social power'?
I mean, where are you going with this?
Cheers, Rob.