:
|
for some reason i can't really agree with this. i remember you mentioning something similar before and i felt the same then. i believe because we're at the top of the food chain, we are above all other animals. our intelligence ensures that. but you could argue that we're only at the top of the food chain because of human values, the food chain itself is just another human creation, does that mean it means nothing? are we just blinding ourselves with human beliefs? i understand that human values wouldn't mean anything to an animal because they are an alien mind, but does that really mean that everything we know means nothing in comparison? i don't believe that, but as a human i guess it's hard to comprehend.
|
Being at the top of the food chain tends to be a temporary state of affairs. Something usually comes along to take the place or simply knock you off the top, or else you become the victim of your own success. We are all very aware that we subsidise our success on the back of the very environment that allows that success, which is the most sublime fuck-up I can possibly imagine.
Art and science and philosophy are all very pretty and engaging to particular kinds of minds such as my own, but the only real measure of success is that you are still here. When we judge other entities by different measures we end up with discrepancies between reality and our model of it. From one such point of view, a "successful" disease is one that causes the most death and destruction, yet when we look around we don't find too many of them. The ones we do see all the time are significantly less deadly under ordinary circumstances. The perennials: rhinovirus, influenza,
Staphylococcus,
E. coli etc. Now HIV, which is a masterpiece, these have successfully evaded our best efforts to wipe them out. Hell, we
mustn't get rid of
E. coli we need it to stay healthy!. The exceptions (like malaria) enjoy animal hosts and vectors.
The terrifying and deadly rare diseases don't become endemic for that very reason. They burn through the host, being extremely successful in the short term, but they subsidise their success on the back of their host organism so much that they kill it quickly, reducing their chances to spread further. Ebola never got a foothold in our species until a less deadly strain emerged, and it killed more people in a year than every other strain did through all human history. They, like Marburg virus and Lujo virus, are brief and passing fancies in the world of infectious diseases (DISCLAIMER: they likely still exist in their natural host organisms, to whom they are less deadly and thus more successful). Even the Plague burned itself out.
What I'm saying is, sure, we do amazing things and we value our accomplishments much more highly than the things other species do. But the means by which we do these things comes at a massive cost that renders them utterly unsustainable. We haven't been here for very long, and if we keep this up then we won't add much time onto that. A fine standard of success and notability, if all those special traits are what ultimately clobbers us before our time. We'll be like a Marburg outbreak: brief, scary, ultimately unimportant to the world at large.
:
maybe we've existed in the universe longer than we think, and maybe we were 'planted' to ensure the survival of our race. i'm not so keen on Darwin's theory of evolution. i think the missing link is a big indicator that it's wrong, but that's just me.
...
next question is "where did we come from?"
|
Our evolutionary history from other species of primate is very well documented from both fossil and molecular evidence. We know where we came from, research now is all about uncovering fascinating little details and wrinkles in the story. My favourite line of evidence are the endogenous retroviruses in our genome. Ask me about it some time.
what do you think the meaning of life is?
