Re: Reinforcing/Balancing in Humans LO607

Eric Bohlman (ebohlman@netcom.com)
Wed, 29 Mar 1995 17:57:06 -0800 (PST)

Replying to LO566 --
> >
> > Are there reinforcing processes in human beings that are healthy?
>
> Evolution may be regarded as a reinforcing process which keeps
> improving and improving the various lifeforms.
>
> Lou Kates, louk@teleride.on.ca

Nope. Evolution is *not* teleological; it is not directed to any
particular end. It's simply a result of the fact that given any
particular environment, those organisms that are the best adapted to that
environment flourish. If the environment changes enough, what was
adaptive in the old environment may be maladaptive in the new environment,
and vice versa. Evolution is purely driven by environmental change.
There's no such thing as "fitness" in general, only "fitness for a
particular environment."

That's why statements like "modern medicine is interfering with evolution
by allowing people with genetic diseases to survive long enough to
reproduce" are uninformed nonsense. Modern medicine amounts to a *change*
in the environment, which in turn amounts to a *change* in what it means
to be "fit." The fact that organisms that are "fit" in one environment
may have been "unfit" in a previous environment is the very driving
principle of evolution, not something that "interferes" with it. The
notion that evolution is a process directed toward perfecting each species
to some sort of Platonic ideal was abandoned by biologists decades ago
(though K-12 biology teachers don't seem to be fully aware of this, which
is the sort of thing that leads academic postmodernists in humanities and
social-science departments to start crowing over the death of the
"foundational assumptions" of the "hard sciences," not realizing that
practicing scientists held the funeral for those assumptions ages ago).

In fact, there *is* a balancing process present in evolution: Fisher's
Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection says that the better adapted an
organism is to its present environment, the less change in that
environment the organism can survive.

Eric Bohlman (ebohlman@netcom.com)