It isn’t an issue of “learning”. It is an issue of declaring.
To be “fit” means to compatible with the environment of that moment - to “fit in”/“mate well”/“harmonize sufficiently”. It doesn’t mean stronger or better in any way at all. To fit merely means to be suited for that situation at that time.
If the dinosaurs really died out due to a meteor strike, is it because they were inferior? Or was it because the environment instantly became incompatible with them? Such a thing can happen to any species. No matter what species develops, by no matter what means, the environment, its situation, can change or be changed such as to destroy that species in favor of another.
When it comes to the issue of having to be compatible with the environment of the moment, every species is equal and Darwinism is irrelevant.
If you fit your environment, you survive. If you don’t, you don’t survive.
It doesn’t matter how “strong” or “better” you are.
Darwinism presumes that there is an objective “fitness”. There is not. Fitness is always relative to one’s situation. As the situation changes, “being fit” changes.
And what that means is that it isn’t fitness determining who survives. It is harmony and disharmony, anentropy and entropy. Fitness is merely the presumption.
And homo sapiens is the only species that is relatively free of having to be compatible with the environment and can even destroy it. The environment of the very modern homo sapiens is the whole world.
Beavers tear down trees, change courses of rivers, and flood entire forest areas just to make themselves a cozy pool in which to swim so they won’t have to walk instead. Unlike many mammals closely related to them, they have eliminated the need to hibernate, spending the winter months eating food that they stored up and grooming/socializing inside their dens.
How do humans or beavers falsify the principle of selection?
Unfortunately I cannot get into the psyche of a beaver in order to determine whether it does anything willfully. However, the case is hardly made for human behavior to be unlike that of beavers. Both transform the environment to suit their desires first and foremost, and in a way that is careless for the consequences.
There is no beaver equivalent to setting off a bunch of explosives because it is fun to watch or because they are pissed off at their dads. Beavers are very destructive to local ecosystems, though nicely within the u of cycles that ecosystems can handle. I do understand why you focused on them, though. With us doing our stuff, when beavers do their thing, it does further simplify ecosystems. They are like little punk brothers to the adult gang. Though extremely little. Like 4 year olds.
But as you say transform the environment to suit their desires, yes. But their desires are about food and shelter. When they play, it is not destructive. Their goal is not destruction. And they won’t go damn a stream to ca up the fish they hate in that stream. They will do it for food. So the stream they are in is enough, until they have to move for food reasons.
We are a species, even when we are intentionally being destructive, that would risk an entire planet because the company we are in wants to get all the farmers in the third world to have to pay for their seeds. Sure, some of the people tell themselves they are saving sthe worlds’ poor, but that is not what is happening.
We’ll put nanoproducts on the market - we can haggle over the chances - that will each have some probability of, say, killing this bird species or that type of plant.
Beavers do not know the potential wider effects of their acts and cannot eliminate categories. We know the wider effects and do eliminate categories and we will risk permanently eliminating categories to make it easier for us to masturbate without standing up or have a better shoehorn.
And then, from where I started, we will destroy because some of us love to destroy, not because it will provide food for our children, though we do that also, even when they suffer from obesity already.
If a beaver really destroyed its environment like humans do, then it had to have the same intelligence, it had to know what “destroying of the environment” means, it had to be as cynical as humans are.
Beavers are not capable of destroying their environment on purpose, thus willfully, consciously. They know absolutely nothing about destroyimg of the environment, nothing about ecological destruction … and so on.
Most of human deatructive behavior is not due to a desire to destroy, but due to a lack of care for the consequences while obtaining something we desire.
That is not to say that we don’t destroy things for pure amusement at the destruction, but my opinion is that that’s a lot more rare than the former.
I’ve seen such things as elephants knocking down a tree in the process of scratching an itch, and rhinos stomping and stabbing at small animals that pose no threat to them and they have no interest in eating, simply because it upset them.
What I am trying to get at is that, taking into considerations the differences in territoriality and other behaviours between rodents and apes and pachiderms(sp?), I wouldn’t think that there is anything beyond natural in human behavior, and that between beavers and rhinos and humans, the difference is a matter of degrees.
In adition, Arminius, you seem to be making the case that the artificial environments we have created are buffering us from natural selective pressure. How does that falsify the selection principle?
It’s true. There are so many things today that us humans have created that prevent natural selection, which means the less evolved breed to out number the more evolved of which the human species will suffer HUGE consequences for.
If what I said is what you are arguing Arminius, then we think alike, judging from what I have seen so far.
I voted no by the way. Just because it does not happen much anymore due to human interference/creating does not mean it does not happen or is not capable of happening.
We’re talking about natural selection right? The stronger surviving while the weaker falling?
