Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Evolution: What Next?

What are we going to evolve into , has been the much researched subject around the world...
I myslef have given ample time to it and have concluded that today the evolution process is aiming at reducing the stress level for the calculating machine called Brain...
For two reasons ... consider the evolution of Engines or Processors .. they have become faster and better and any previous 'difficult' load or situation can now be handled without any stress or with burden on the resources..
Example 3D games... ,... Now food hunting is not a tough job..
The problem or the stress appears when we create new difficult or unsolvable problems .. like creating a Trillion dollar empire ,having complete control over the planet , enjoying the pleasure of having all the females or solving the most complicated Mathematical problems with Deep Blue..or going to the nearest star (how ambitious we are:-)).... etc .. so the problem resurfaces and we are again given a new set of problems ....thus resulting into stress...but noticeably we have devised a new set of rules with respect to our status as species or technology..
In whole process look at the Brain ... it is just trying to solve the problem or reduce the stress but due environmenat factors or external influence we are ending up with a new set of problems...
In maze of event the desire of Brain's objective remnains one and same .. that is to accomplish more n more with minimum effort with its computing power....it allows itself to chnage the previously accepted laws of narture..
IS Evolution is all about creating new set of Problems to solve ...
However I disagree becuase objectively all problems are a farce if it can not give an extended lifespan for e.g Totoise or Corcodile...
If our species dies before the crocs then definetly crocs have more 'understandable' existence than any other species...
Whats the use if you are no more there to enjoy ..(even other animals know how to enjoy)

Therefore my assertion is that the sole objective of evolution is(or should be) to extend our lifespan and for that brain should be ready to change(devleop brain to help increase lifespan...)

PS:
In my opinion Evolution can not be modeled using any set of laws and the future prediction of evolution can never be made with good precision...just imagine that someone want to create a program (like weather forecast) to capture each and every detail of Environmental , Pshycological, External , Internal changes...
it is nearly impossible(i ma known to be an optimist or rather I am scared of being called a fools:-)))

The premise of your question is faulty. You make the assumption that evolution has a goal ... a direction: It does not.

The truth is that any attempt at prediction is stillborn.

So you mean to say that evolution process has no goal?!!
In that case the whole meaning of existence reduces to meaningless (or rather a goaless) struggle for survival between species....
We have already reached at the top of the food chain and we have also reached at a threshold of environmental food chain disaster...
Such is the condition that we manufacture some of the species for our food ....e.g Chicken
Finding Chicken in wild is wild dream .. atleast for me...
So species have vanished before and how many will ...but the question is do we need prevent this vanishing act ...
to put it simply I would like to ask can we prevent the cataclysmic downfall of our species ?
How has the reduction in Whale number affected our chances of survival in say next 1000 years..?
What kind of role the population of Human species will play in our chances of survival ?these are important issues because
I feel that the chain of destruction has its own inertia...and therefore we must understand and act before it is too late...

Evolution works towards no goal and no purpose. Of course that doesn't mean that we can't ascribe our own purpose for our existence. It just means that the universe doesn't care about our opinions.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote (I think he was quoting a philosopher) "To be what we are and become what we are capable of becoming is the only end of life."

There is no discernable purpose - for the cosmos, for life writ large, or for us as individuals. Probably this is the main reason that many people (notably creationists) choke on the idea of evolution.

But science is not Truth. And not everything that is important is scientific.

I'm not sure I understand your rebuttal, but surely understanding the relationship between ourselves and our environment (to include the other species on the planet) is part of "understanding the problem," which as any good scientist knows is the first step of solving any problem. (Well, that's the first step according to Georg Polya. The first step according to Dewey is recognizing there IS a problem.)

The meta-problem is that the environment of which we are a part is the archetype of the complex adaptive system. The system itself is inherently complex and changing. How certain can we ever be of our conclusions. How certain do we have to be before we take action - realizing that taking the wrong action is not without cost.

As far as I can see it, any predictions about future evolution can only be as strong as our predictions on what the environment and other relevant factors will be like in the future. Anything else is just speculation. We might be able to see why a particular species has evolved when we look back through evolutionary history, but even then we can be wrong on occassions.

A goal or purpose for life is propogating life itself, I think that's it really. If life had any other 'purpose' would suggest intelligent design. I don't think that because life is the sole purpose of life necessarily means that brain development in humans is a foregone conclusion. Perhaps, for example, we develop a mechanism - such as lungs or gills - that allow only humans to process high levels of nitrogen, or something, over other species of animals. More simply, maybe a virus will wipe out all traces of human life. Would this mean the virus had the bigger brain, that they out-smarted us?

Even if we knew the environment, any guesses we made about future evolution would be wild. For all we can tell, evolution is random.

True, evolution has no goal or purpose. It is a description of how factors act in conjunction with each other. That which is best suited to survive tends to survive best. This is a statement like one of Newtons laws of motion.

"Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it."

or

"For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."

Evolution is not a force, like electromagnetism or gravity. It has no mind, no intent, and no purpose. It is simply a rule governing certain forms of complex systems.

Change the system, and the direction of evolution changes. What is beneficial in one environment is harmful in another. Evolution has no moral standards, no agenda, and no direction. It simply is.

Given this, there is no next step in evolution. Evolution will procede blindly, without intent, supporting those who reproduce most effectively and eliminating those who fail to reproduce.

It's quite true: Evolution has no goal and no purpose. It can't because it's not a sentient being able to make decisions or have goals. This is probably why it is just another false reductionist 'explanation' of processes.

Everyone should know by now that aliens planted us here as part of their world-harvesting agenda to milk out all the precious metals. What can be more efficient than dropping off a few monkeys and coming back 10,000 years later to take the gold and platimum? Of course they'll kill us and start again when they come back...

We also have technological evolution. If you make a better product then you can make a big profit by selling it. Your product will replace the older one. This is how stone tools we used tens of thousands of years ago evolved into cars airplanes etc.

Within a few centuries from now humans will be replaced by robots. The technology we created will replace us.

"Technological evolution" is a metaphor.

It's more than just a metaphor. Consider an isolated society which uses tools. The blueprint for making the tools is stored in the brains of the people. Tools are replaced when they wear out. If e.g. by chance someone invents a different tool for the same job, people will try it out and if they decide it is better they'll use that one instead. That tool will then replace the previous one in the following generations.


Technological evolution will ultimately replace hmans. Human employees are no more than tools that can in principle be replaced by machines. Once these machines are developed, humans will become useless.

So do you consider evolution to have a blueprint?

DNA

DNA? I think you're on a bit of a slippery slope here, Iblis, because if you're saying that DNA is a blueprint for evolution you are saying that DNA is non reducible.

Evolution is a population's response to a force acting on the population. That force has a name; it is "change". Change is the only meaningful constant in the universe. The universe is constantly changing. We and all other things in the universe are constantly evolving in response to change, whether on an organismal or population basis.

Two things are coming out:
1.Evolution has no direction ..or rather the next step is going to be a random one...
2.Life's only purpose is to propagate itself.

I dont think any of those conclusions are actually scientific(Life also has a brain at its disposal...thanks to humans)
The Next Step question still reamins a mystery because even if the Next step is random...we should be able to find the finite set of possible Outcomes with different probablities for a period(tomorrow,100yrs,10000yrs etc), in principle atleast.I think that we have enough data to start playing with it... but unfortunately my conclusion has been very discouraging to me because the initial condition is itself is very complex for any computing machine and therefore we may never be able to extract any useful informtaion about the future(say after 1000 yrs).
Given the kind of presence we have on this planet and the amount of reasearch we have done .. Hope we(or rather Life) does not end up with a scenario where she looses us!!

Idea that the Life's only purpose is to propagate itself... is sensible only upto some extent ...
Any uncontrolled population growth often results in conditions which can make the life vulnerable to various kinds of internal and even externam threats... for e.g India a highly populated country can not claim to have the ability to fight Aliens as of Now!!:-))
There are very limited resources ...and only if we decide to stop using our brains ,we would like to go on reproducing like rats when we are not.
Therefore Life's should not(and cannot) aim at indiscrimitnate population growth.
And the actual goal of Life (in my opinion )is to survive at any cost under any cirumstances..

As far Machines are considered... i dont think that they will ever be able to enslave us because as we work hard to manufacture them we will also evolve ...
but in what way that was my question ....

So far as we can tell, life has no purpose AT ALL - not even to propogate itself. Propagation is what life does, not what it's assigned to do.

But just because we can't discern that Nature has assigned a purpose and a meaning for us doesn't mean we can't have ANY purpose.

Science doesn't tell us why - at least not in some cosmic sense. It can't answer questions about "ought."

We can make our purpose whatever we wish. We can work it out collectively or we can figure it out as individuals. Or we can even decide that having no purpose at all is okay.

I disagree with your idea of choose 'your goal concept'... but anyways given that you have allowed me to have such a great degree of freedom I would like to have 3 goals atleast:
1.Life must survive
2.Humans must survive
3.Other Species must also survive
Threats to survival:
1.Internal (from activity on the planet e.g Nuclear misadventure)
2.External (from activity outside the planet e.g asteroid)
3.Suicidal or Psycological(due to severe stress we decide to call it off e.g Sarin gas holocaust)

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Artificial Interest:
DNA? I think you're on a bit of a slippery slope here, Iblis, because if you're saying that DNA is a blueprint for evolution you are saying that DNA is non reducible. [/QUOTE

That's right. DNA and RNA also evolved from the primordial soup. Reproduction using DNA is probably much more efficient than anything that existed before. So effectively we can pretend as if DNA is the blueprint of an organism...


If you compare the evolution of life to our economy, then our economy would be analogous to the primordial soup. The economy can grow as a whole but you can't isolate a part, say a factory, and let it make a copy of itself. Similarly molecules in the primordial soup were able to eproduce themselves, but only with the help of all other molecules. So, the soup had to grow as a whole.


Organisms reproducing themselves would be analogous to (nano)machines that can copy themselves. Just like the primordial soup evolved into organisms, our economy will give rise to self reproducing, fully automated factories.

In your opening sentence you already concede the point that DNA and RNA ?evolved? from the primordial soup. Even if DNA and RNA are ?efficient? means of reproduction, you cannot ?pretend? that they are not reducible just because it suits your argument.

I don?t really follow your analogy of the economy and the factory, and I can?t see how it helps your argument, as you again conveniently overlook the fact that the factories that help comprise the economy were built by other energies altogether; as was DNA and RNA.

The slope gets slipperier