John Henry

Natural selection is never bypassed, never superceded, never sidestepped. It's just natural selection. Do you think that the invention of the staircase decreased the value of the universal gravitational constant? Or that aeroplanes fly by making the Earth's gravitational pull weaker? No.

The theory of natural selection is very simple. It uses ockham's (or however the fuck you spell it) razor to reduce the following postulate:

"Shit happens because it is the will of Allah"

(As believed by medieval European Christians and as still widely believed in some of the more culturally primitive (if technologically and fiscally advanced.) western countries.) To the following postulate:

"Shit happens"

It does NOT mean

1) " We have conquered nature."
2) " We ought to gas all the cripples."
3) " It is morally right for me to do what furthers my cause at the expense of everyone else."
4) " Surely these days, we have scientifical proof that God does not exist"
5) " THE WEAK MUST PERISH!!"


It simply answers the question " Well, if the toolmaker God didn't sit down in his little workshop and design all these creatures like I would, then how come they are all able to survive in this crazy mixed up world? Why aren't there like, y'know, snakes what eat themselves an fings what like drowning?"


With the reply "Because if they can't survive, they don't survive and if they can survive, they do! Simple, huh?"

As for medicine, society, cybernetics, blah blah, blah, it's all part of natural selection.

If medicine reaches a point where we can keep surviving all sorts of illnesses, but keep our population at a maintainable level, that is natural selection.

If we keep all the weak alive and consequently become so weak as a species that we all die out, that is natural selection.

If the increasing number of physically weak phenotypes leads to stronger selection of mentally strong phenotypes, which then leads to a load of super-intelligent people designing reproducing, bionic bodies and moving to Alpha Centauri, that is natural selection.

If there is life on Earth when it eventually spirals into the Sun and everything dies, that is natural selection.


So to put it simply, if something lives, dies or breeds, guess what, it's natural selection.

Hope that clears it up a bit.

__________________
"No one was behaving from very Buddhist motives. Then, thought Pigsy, he was hardly a Buddha, nor was he a monkey. Presently, he was a pig spirit changed into a little girl pretending to be a little boy to be offered to a water monster. It was all very simple to a pig spirit."