I love synchronicity. Right after I get an e-mail from Crawford about my post on evolution yesterday, I check out Slashdot and find a post put there under two hours ago about the very same thing he brought up in his e-mail. Then again, maybe he got the idea in the first place from Slashdot, or the article they linked to. 
Here's one neat comment on Slashdot.
Ok, I wrote back to Crawford. Here was my take on the topic, arguing from an evolutionary point of view:
... For the sake of argument, survival of the fittest never ends, it's just that the standards of fitness change. There may be a larger percentage of people in the future who have poor eyesight than there were thousands of years ago, but people in the future may be smarter. It all depends on the selection criteria. It is interesting though, that humans are the only species to be able to partly control their own selection criteria, in a way, because we're able to control our environment (in terms of which we're 'fit').
I left out part of what I had sent to Crawf... I've just decided to include it:
Of course there's much more to the discussion, including that a worldview which believes in all aspects of "evolution" would (sort of) negate what I just said about being able to control our environment, since that worldview would destroy any possibility of human freedom. But that's another topic.
Sunday, February 3, 2002
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