The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #108349   Message #2254824
Posted By: GUEST,Keinstein
06-Feb-08 - 03:29 AM
Thread Name: BS: Darwin Day Coming Up Feb 12
Subject: RE: BS: Darwin Day Coming Up Feb 12
Considering that we can now diddle with DNA and all that, obviously there is an intellectual component to evolution. We're learning to control it.

But it isn't "we" who control it, even if we change DNA. The changes get tested against everything else, in a process called selection. We've actually been "interfering" in selection since humans began, and a billion years before- in a way that puts the wildest fantasies of the "holists" to shame, because every organism interacts with everything else (other organisms, the environment etc). And even "the environment" isn't a passive external given, in that organisms change that. For example, life created our oxygen atmosphere, fairly late on in life's history (for the first 2 billion years or so "life" meant bacteria, archaea and other forms perhaps that we haven't found yet).

Given that it's a chaotic process, and that the outcomes are sometimes sensitive to minute changes in inputs (the proverbial butterfly in Brazil), the prospect of human control over the world ecosystem is remote. We don't even know how whole chunks of it work- we are almost as ignorant of the deep seas as we are of Venus.