3 ms·

You'll have to take that up with Mother Nature and its evolution & natural selection. She's the one who imprinted "progress" in our genes and I do not think we

• ben_w 4y ago
  What evolution optimises for isn't what you'd call "good" if it came up in any other context. It's as much why covid happened as it is why we happened.
• _heimdall 4y ago
  Comparing natural selection and human invention is a drastic over simplification. Meaningful change due to natural selection takes place over thousands of years of random genetic mutations and changing environmental conditions. Change due to human invention is happening on the scale of years or decades and is the result of us making decisions just because we can. Would you really like to compare the evolutionary change from species that walk on four legs eventually becoming bipedal to the change caused by industrialization or nuclear technology? The level of impact humans have managed to have on the world around us is massively different from any other species we're aware of. No other species appears to sit around making decisions that reshape large portions of the environment in a single generation. "Progress" in that sense is not genetically ingrained in us, it can't be if we're the first species to do this.
• loa_in_ 4y ago
  Nature doesn't pursue progress. It fosters any (at least some) that might appear but it doesn't actively pursue it. If it did, there would be instinctual drive to seek out ionising radiation proportionally to the amount of offspring for particular species. To iterate as fast as possible and get any edge in selection.
• JohnFen 4y ago
  Evolution and natural selection have nothing to do with "progress".