Creative Evolution - So.. What Comes Next.. ?

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The confidence in scientific and medical capability in this era is a bit overblown. People still die regularly of incurable diseases, bacteria and viruses are handily outstripping at a regular evolutionary pace all of the antibiotics we come up with and we are quickly running out of new ones. Stupid and clumsy people die annually by the hundreds of thousands by their ineptitude and inability to earn sufficient income to keep up with the health insurance rates and the huge overprice of the modern medical miracles and they are creating conditions on Earth that within decades will ensure millions will drown by the rising seas, die of pollution poisoning, starve when food supplies do not keep up with population growth and destruction of agricultural resources and there is a very good chance that the abysmal stupidity of the ruling classes will release enough radioactivity by military or other means to murder colossal numbers of people. If people survive it might be by being lucky or smart enough to prepare properly. That's the way evolution works.

Well, compared with any other point in the history of the planet humans are doing pretty good. There are very few natural disasters now that we could not possibly deal with. Given a few years run up we could conceivably even stop an asteroid from hitting the planet. Global warming is not going to lead to anything like an extinction level event.

Anybody who knows anything about animal populations knows they peak to a point where they become a tempting target for a predator or use up all the resources that caused the peak. I don't know if there is something out there hungry for human flesh or if we simply will destroy all the resources we need to stay alive. You would have to be immensely stupid not to see we are quickly edging towards the latter. It's a matter of decades.

The predator does not have to be a bug-eyed monster with tentacles. We have enough potential predators living within our digestive systems to do the job handily. AIDS was a good attempt but nature is infinitely ingenious and probably can produce much nastier things.

I hate it when I'm immensely stupid.

Maybe we'll run out of resources to maintain civilization as we know it, but humans are intelligent and adaptable enough to continue on in some (but probably diminished) form.

You can be immensely smarter than a butterfly just as a butterfly is immensely smarter than a paramecium but how smart are the viruses that defeat our best scientists? Humanity is too stuck on itself to realize how dangerous the universe can be. This site is a fine example of that.

Yes, but butterflies, parameciums (paramecia?) and viruses can't think about surviving. Human's can. That's what makes us different. We know more about the dangers of the Universe than any other form of life on the planet.

I suppose that it's more a matter of hope that anything else.

Last edited by burnse22 on 29 Aug 2008, 11:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

I hesitate to evaluate your intelligence, but your ignorance is profound. Human intellect is an attempt to analyze and predict causes and effects. Nature and evolution do not "think" in the same manner but they create infinite variations on existing structures a good deal faster than humans can figure out how they're going to move as they have resources to draw on that humans cannot imagine. The bulk of evolutionary trials are failures but the very small percentage that have succeeded have produced all the intricate life forms that have ever existed. Humans have cataloged only a small percentage of all the life forms that exist now and each of these unique forms has the potential as a starting point to evolve very quickly into a formidable enemy. A huge human population is an obvious reservoir of nourishment for one of these potentially successful varieties. New diseases are popping up all the time and each new human is a test bed for microbe nourishment. In the end, it will get us.

Or maybe not. Diseases have been coming and going through all of history. I can only see an incredibly deadly and expertly man-made disease actually wiping us out. Maybe a natural disease could evolve that way, but it's not very likely.

Any chance on toning down the insults? We could call each other idiots till the end of the Universe and not get anywhere.

Humanity has existed a mere couple of million years. That extremely short time permitted us to live in rather ideal conditions. The few plagues we have endured in the temporal flash has tested our defenses a bit but if you think human intellect is a total match for what nasty surprise packages nature has up her sleeve you are, as I indicated, profoundly ignorant. That is in no way calling you an idiot. We are both profoundly ignorant of a great many things and that is the natural state of things as our potential capacities for data and potentials is extremely limited. But I seem to be somewhat more sensitive to our limitations. I am, of course, an agnostic or an atheist, whatever you prefer, but the rather simple but absolutely calloused forces of nature have no regard for our existence and are the nearest thing we will encounter to a thinking god and, in the long run, we are no match. Anyone aware of the huge stupidities we as a species are currently committing has no grounds whatsoever for feeling much admiration for human mental capacities.

There's an awful lot of idiotic crap about all sorts of things floating around. Why should evolution be an exception?

But that might be diet - just as people got taller after WWII when the amount of fat and protein fed to kids increased.

And then again, it might not.

To quote:

"Life on Earth has suffered mass extinctions many times in its 3.5-billion-year history. In the worst of these crises, Earth came close to death: 250 million years ago, life teetered on the brink of total annihilation. In a matter of years, across the globe, at least 96 per cent of the species were snuffed out."

"When the globe begins to grow warmer, polar ice masses melt, flooding the sea with freshwater.

In theory, this event could shut off the north Atlantic conveyor -a massive ocean current that normally brings warming waters northwards to moderate the climate of northwest Europe. A mini-ice age would soon take hold (see Inside Science No. 44)."

"Less certainty surrounds the late Devonian extinction, which may reflect a period of environmental stress lasting for perhaps half-a-million years. Some commentators blame high sea levels and high temperatures-possibly reaching greenhouse conditions. However, other researchers suggest that global cooling was once again the likely immediate cause of the biotic crisis.

A double blow-falling sea levels, combined with continental drift (see Inside Science No. 107)-caused havoc at the end of the Permian and produced the greatest extinction of them all so far. At this time, all the continents of the world merged into one big supercontinent, called Pangea. This event dramatically reduced the extent of fertile shorelines and continental shelves shrank drastically, so severely disrupting major ecosystems. Many extinctions must have stemmed directly from the loss of habitat space: the species simply had nowhere to go.

But worse was to come. As the shallow continental shelves lay high and dry, the organic matter that was once safely buried in the sea became oxidised. In effect, this chemical process sucked oxygen out of the air, and pumped back in carbon dioxide. The concentration of oxygen in the air may have fallen by half-a severe blow to active, oxygen-hungry land animals. Then, sea levels began to rise as temperatures climbed, flooding land habitats and generating great swathes of oxygen-starved or anoxic areas in the sea. Huge deposits of organic-rich black shales in the Earth's sedimentary rocks tell the tale of this disaster. So the mass extinction at the end of the Permian "appears to be a story of death by suffocation for both terrestrial and marine life," concludes Paul Wignall of the University of Leeds."

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/lif ... 422167.700

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Although the mass of humanity is not necessarily stupid it is, in general, very ignorant which is altogether a different thing. Nevertheless, nature is no less brutal to ignorance as it is to stupidity. What you don't know can not only hurt you, it has a very good chance of killing you. Very strong social forces today find great advantage in keeping the world ignorant . It permits all sorts of financial manipulation of the mass of humanity and permits firm control. These controls are being used to destroy the planet and species are disappearing daily at a rate not seen since the past great extinctions. It is most probable that some life will sustain and when conditions improve will again repopulate the Earth but this is a matter of millions of years. A few of the most intelligent and capable people may survive the disaster living in sealed enclaves as one would on an alien and hostile planet but life would be extremely hard and dangerous. Hopefully, this might be averted but it requires massive action immediately and there is no sign that this is taking place.

You've taken a lot of quotes out of context there, and even the way in which you did present them does present a strong case for the current predictions for climate change leading to a mass-extinction event for humans.