3 ms·
The Human Error Darwin Inspired
- wombatmobile 6y agoIf Huxley's calculus is a "human error", humans have yet to see it. The world's population has not collapsed but is still increasing, towards a peak predicted to be 40% higher than today's 7.5 billion. The collapse of the food supply has been forestalled by the human capacity for innovation. Nitrogen fertilizer now supports approximately half of the global population. How long will human innovation forestall catastrophic collapse, and, alternatively, when might it be recognised as the cause?
- richardbrevig 6y agoWe should celebrate the move from traditionalism to innovation. Prioritizing tradition over rational thought held our species back for millennia.
- dontcarethrow2 6y agoYet innovation also is leading us back to cave times. Can we innovate ourselves out of this hole we innovated..
- rickdangerous1 6y agoDo we have a choice at this point? Innovate or perish it seems to me. Luckily there doesn’t appear to be any limits on said innovation.
- gumby 6y agoAnd there is the fundamental error: > us insensibly from the crown and summit of the animal creation down to creatures, from which there is but a step, as it seems, to the lowest, smallest, and least As if one species is in some absolute sense superior to another. It's the Victorian conceit (with the picture of the "ascent of man" from ape to upright biped) steeped in a hierarchical society which intuitively they would project over evolutionary development. I doubt that one person in 10 understand that the cockroach is far more "evolved" (in the sense of having undergone several orders of magnitude more evolutionary iterations than humans), much less that all that means is they are better adapted to current conditions than humans are. It's a huge parallel processing experiment with no single node superior to any other.