[lbo-talk] Sociobiology

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Mon Jan 29 09:30:01 PST 2007


Adapting to the environment vs. adapting the environment to one's species seems a distinction without a difference. The only question for natural selection is the result: do the activities involved enhance or undermine reproductive success. Human modification of their own environment has generated some mal-adaptive results that are looking like they could become mal-adaptive we are now aware.

Human generated climate change is a species changing or modifying its environment, but the full effect is looking like it could challenge human's reproductive success at some point. Thus, that human modification of its environment which is extracting fossil fuels and using them as an energy source ( modify our environment , control it, in many ways) is not looking so evolutionarily "high" as it used to.

The development of nuclear weapons is an environmental modification that is looking mal-adaptive too.

As humans have developed their modes of production, controlling and modifying their environments more and more, evolving "higher and higher", they have not been able to avoid simultaneously developing the mode of destruction/war, losing control and making their environment more destructive to humans themselves, evolving "lower and lower. Humans have become the greatest known "environmental" danger to themselves! The human modification of their own environment has generated much _mal_-adaptive results. The net effect is that humans are not "higher". May have dug themselves in a "hole" ( lower).

Of course, Stephen Jay Gould proposes the metaphor of the "bush" instead of the "tree" for evolution, to move away from the lower to higher of the tree.

Charles



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