"The whole key to evolution is the need to survive." (p. 84)
It is not. Before organisms existed, there was nothing that needed to survive. As I understand it, there were energized, randomly changing, complex molecules. When one molecule randomly changed into a self-replicating form, that was the first unicellular organism. It arose by chance, not to fulfill any need. If one organism lasts longer and reproduces itself more often than any others, then that organism's offspring and descendants displace the others, not because they need to but because that is what happens. Organisms that are sensitive and responsive to environmental alterations last longer and reproduce more than any that are insensitive or unresponsive. Some sensitive organisms have sensory organs. An organism that senses pain, hunger etc feels a need to end them. Thus, evolution is the key to need, not vice versa.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Rather like the old joke about which came first, the chicken or the egg!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Except that I think that there was no "need" before consciousness and that evolution began long before consciousness.
Kaor, Paul!
No "need" in this worldly terms, anyhow! I have quoted Dante to show how HE believed God wanted conscious life to exist. But that goes into metaphysics!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But God would be consciousness preexisting evolution.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Of course! Otherwise He would not BE God.
Ad astra! Sean
Human beings tend to see intentionality and planning even where they're not there, because we evolved those capacities ourselves to short-circuit randomness to our own advantage.
Nature as a whole, on the other hand, teems with order and spontaneous complexity.
An ecosystem as a whole is a monstrous struggle to grasp and bind the flow of energy, each organism "attempting" (an inescapable but misleading metaphor) to grab it all and use it to produce infinite copies of itself.
As the organisms become conscious, they do "attempt."
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