From: Kevin Freels (megaquark@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Sep 04 2003 - 12:39:15 MDT
Thanks for the terrific input. One of these days I expect to be as well read
in these matters
as so many of you seem to be. I'm 32 and playing catch-up from the time I
wasted from age 14-28 where I did absolutely nothing but waste precious
time. I'd like some input on a couple of things you wrote in your last
message.
"If anything, it's those
with the least resources and most disrupted family arrangements who are
likely to have a larger brood."
--This doesn't bode well for the future of humanity. Especially since there
is a tendency for the brood to feed back on itself and reproduce the same
type of environment in their own offsping. Fortunately, there is the
occasion where the offsring get out of that loop and try to make a more
positive life...much like my own life.
Accumulating errors exceed the ability of
repair systems to proofread fix them, even (to a lesser extent) the sex
cells. But this analysis, as we have seen, assumes part of what needs to be
demonstrated - that older organisms automatically cease breeding reliably.
While that is contingently true of complex creatures, as we have just seen,
what we need to ask is: why it should be so
Has this in fact been demonstrated? It would make sense.
It seems to me that nothing could be reproduced perfectly every time. It
would require perfection which I don;t think is natural. Nature only gives
us the lower boundaries of the possible. Perfection, not being necessary to
reproduction, does not exist. If errors did not occur that exceeded the
repair systems abilities to correct them, we wouldn't even be here.
So if you take uncorrectable errors as a natural part of life, it would only
make sense that older organisms fail to reproduce reliably over time.
"Why, after all, shouldn't the machinery of the body's maintenance systems
keep working at peak efficiency forever? The accepted answer is that there
are better strategic trade-offs for available energy and coding, trade-offs
that allow the old to wear out and die."
The accepted answer may be close to correct, but I think it is much simpler.
Nature simply doesn't have a goal. Without a goal, perfection could not be
reached. Nature could produce the bird, but it couldn't produce the f-16.
(not that the f-16 is perfect and yes, it is far less efficient). It takes
intelligence to create something likened to perfection. If anything were
perfect, or close to it, it would simply stay the same. Cockroaches come to
mind here for some odd reason.
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