re: #629 Salamantis

All quite interesting and somewhat disquieting. (Who wants to have citric acid eating e coli in the environment? Not I nor my orange growing friends. BTW, how did e coli live in a citric acid base for 31,000 generations without dying off beforehand?) And as for us being sons and daughters of the apes, well I think it preferable to being related to some humans. But that isn’t the point.

I have said that evolution works just fine for “cods and pine” (in Stove’s words)and makes an excellent story for man’s ascent. But that ascent meant something. It meant that the rules are not the same for us. We do all sorts of things that would kill off lesser beings yet we thrive. We believe false myths and survive. We invent ways to kill our competitors more efficiently, and we survive. We engage in killing our unborn young and fail to reproduce up to our ability and we flourish. We aid our wounded and infirm, to the point of each individual’s own sacrifice, and we endure. We go to battle believing in a cause that has no material substance, yet we advance. If alien anthropologists discovered our remains they might attribute this to our omnivorous teeth or ability to both climb trees and run on flat ground. But that is not why we advance. Human life is nothing like the life laid out by the rules of the game described by Darwin and his progeny. It is a very good theory. But at some point, it becomes inapplicable, in whole or in part. And evolutionary theorists refuse to see when those rules do not apply.