Clarke-enliten mentioned evolution:
> As the subject of "origin" has been touched on recently I ask if the moq takes
> Evolution (in the general Darwinian sense) to be a given? And also wonder if
> this Evolution is inherent in the moq? I think one could rightly assume that
> the journey of the cells that Pirsig alludes to would have traversed a linear
> progression from single-celled organisms to it's present highest form as Man.
I suspect that Pirsig's position is biased towards the "naive" view of evolution
as continuous progress with man at its highest peak, which is more or less what
the common sense about evolution is, too. I recall that somewhere in Lila he
equates evolution and DQ (at the biological level).
Unfortunately the naive view of evolution (as represented by some classical
drawings that depict "lower" animals slowly turning into humans) is really
"fabricated" by us and has long been criticised as a myth by evolutionists
themselves.
Evolution is of course, for example, not a linear but an ever-branching process.
There is no scientific reason to consider beetles or bacteria "lower than man" in
the evolutionary "scale", nor there is any scientific reason to speak of a scale
(ranking) at all. Even if you argue that beetles have changed very little in the
last billion years with respect to us, from an evolutionary point of view that is
a *good* thing about them; they changed very little because they were closer to
the perfect fit in their environment (which spans at least as much of the globe
as that of man, by the way).
I think that biological evolution, and especially the myth of evolution as a
"progress towards man", may have had bad influence on MOQ (but I am mostly
wondring aloud to see if anyone has quotations or ideas handy). If evolution is
DQ, and evolution is aimed at "fitting the environment" (in the sense of being
able to survive and persistent, as a race), it seems that biological quality is
about fitting the environment too. By the way, saying things like, (biological)
evolution eventually progressed enough to become able to support intellect, etc.,
we are implicitly affected by the myth of man as the peak of evolution. Actually,
there is no evidence that intellect was such a great achievement for evolution.
Surely intellect required a high level of complexity, that took long time to be
there. But still, intellect looks more like one of several promising alternatives
for longterm survival (another alternative being, for example, extremely simple,
quickly reproducing beings such as those mentioned above). Intellect might be
even considered as a side-effect with respect to the overall purposes of
evolution. (See "Galapagos" by Kurt Vonnegut).
Also, one thing that biological static patterns teach us is that evolution of
static patterns is based on persistence of static patterns. Our sense of quality
might think that a Panda bear is "better" than an amoeba, yet amoebas are more
likely to be here to stay. So in a linear view of evolution, with amoebas at the
left end and Panda bears at the right end, the Panda bear is actually a suicide
of evolving life, a failure. Now another point is: can it really be different for
social and intellectual patterns? What about a "bad" society that finds the means
to protect itself into endless survival (eg., 1984 by G. Orwell). Do you think it
really is inherently impossible? (Don't be influenced by the fall of prior "bad"
societies... is it *inherently* impossible for a bad society to perpetuate
itself)? Don't society progress much more towards the one that is more likely to
perpetuate itself than to the "better" in any other sense?
Thus, are all evolutions in the static levels *just* about survival?
Any thoughts?
--
Andrea Sosio
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