An End to Evolution.

I think quite frankly, that I'm sick of hearing the word "evolution". It's such a fucking hooker of a word - every Tom, Dick and Hitler has co-opted it at some point.

To my mind, Darwin, or at least misunderstandings and misapplications of his ideas both in the social and eugenic arenas, have caused more deaths in the past century than the atom bomb.

At the very least, the term evolution has become so ingrained with anthropomorphic overtones that I think in the grubby little mind of your average secular humanist, it has simply jumped into the hole left by the absence of God. Chop off God's beard, blind him and make him a little more slimy - ét voila - hello Captain Evolution.

Time to flush "evolution" down the lexical pan. And while we are Spring Cleaning our brains - let's bin a few other arbitrary and/or un-definable concepts - like "intelligence", "living/non-living", "progress" and "memes". They just cloud the issue and bog people down in their own definitions. None of them exist.

So what shall we replace them with..?

How about - two very simple things that we actually can understand without a dictionary - probability and persistance.

Complexity stems from simplicity, not so much within the actual percievable forms of any object, or idea, but in the relationships between them and the emergent properties these relationships create. Nothing exists in isolation, everything from a single quark to a supernova rubs up against its fellows, and by proxy of those fellows, rubs up eventually against everything, real or virtual, that is.

We'll start with energy, the fabric of the universe, whatever - it cools into different forms - each form occuring with a frequency concordant with probability. eg. Hydrogen is likely, iron less so.

Anyway - long story short: a progression:

* energy + inherrent physical laws > persistant inert perceivable forms - planets, enviroments etc.

* inert perceivable forms + interaction + time > persistant active perceivable forms - bacteria, pond-scum, Americans. (by inert and active I mean: a mountain does not expend energy trying to maintain a static form amid enviromental change, wheras a tree-shrew or a Liverpuddlian does).

* persistant active perceivable forms + mutation > persistant inferrable forms - thought/ideas. (By percievable and inferrable I mean - stuff you can sense directly - ice-cream and stripppers, and stuff you can't see - thought for example, but can infer from its physical manifestation in behaviour).

* persistant inferrable forms + physical vehicle > behavioural 'technology' > physical/virtual chimera - man.

Which takes us right from the big-bang or whatever, to now, in four easy steps - each step increasing the probabilty of the arisal of the next to the point of certainty.

Anyway - for me, there is not much difference between a gene expressing infromation as a physical form of greater or lesser persistance and an idea expressing information as behaviour facillitating or handicapping the persistance of its host form. Both are at bottom, information, and only the manner of storage and transmission differs.

Once we leave the mundane flesh and enter the mind - Are we fixed, or malleable..?

I want you to design something that will persist and proliferate in a place and under conditions which I will not disclose to you.

What kind of form will you design..? Something specialized..? Or a Jack of all trades..?

Any form of externally driven physical specialization eventually leads to extinction. A Cheetah starves to death when meat on the hoof gets low, but slowpoke Hank the omnivore just changes food-groups.

The Jack of all trades always wins.

This is why humans, physical-prowess-wise, are just a big bag of shit. On the novelty-engine-driven-behavioural variety scale however... We come out tops. (novelty-engine = self-aware-perceptive-brain in my book btw).

Humans adapt behaviourally to anywhere and anything. We are consumate behavioural chameleons - humans even make reasonable wolves for fuck's sake - in the case of feral children - but you don't see many real wolves wearing people clothes with a desk-job and a mortgage.

This is our strength, and also our doom. Read enough history and become convinced that nothing is fixed, what we call our innate selves - manifesting in a semi-rigid set of behavioural parameters - does not exist - it's a fairy story we tell ourselves. One minute we are Greengrocers with a smile for everyone and a bag of sprouts in each hand, then - boom - society changes and suddenly we are grassing up our relations to the gestapo and getting bored whilst shooting naked Jews in a pit.

Jack, in his Jackboots, persists.

...Continued...