(August 26, 2017 at 3:00 am)bennyboy Wrote:(August 25, 2017 at 11:43 am)Mathilda Wrote: Some evolutionary niches will allow more complexity to evolve over time than others. Crocodiles and alligators have not needed to develop much at all over the last 65 million years. Peacocks are stuck on a local maxima in their evolutionary landscape (evolutionary dead-end). So yes I think it is fair to say that some forms of life are more highly developed than others, as well as being disparately developed.
I'd agree with your general sentiment, because I too think people are generally pretty amazing, but "high" implies that there's some ideal state toward which life is reaching-- maximal complexity for example. But some animals, like cockroaches, have had a truly epic run, and it's very highly unlikely that humans will survive that long. If we don't, we've been relatively less successful in our evolution.
I'd argue that life is the struggle of matter and energy to sustain form in the face of the pressure toward entropy. Therefore those species which bring most organization to the universe, both at one time and in their entire era, might be said to be more highly developed than humans. This very well COULD be humans, if we survive long enough to spread out into the cosmos. But it probably won't be.
I don't think that we're in disagreement. I would never for one moment suggest that there is an end-goal with evolution. I know that it is not a directed process. Seeing evolution as a form of self organisation I would be the last person to describe it as so. I don't think describing something as more highly evolved as something else is a problem though. Tracing the path of the human species through the phylogenetic tree, we could describe human beings as being more highly evolved than one of our ancestors. That's not to claim that we are better able to fit an evolutionary niche than something less highly evolved, just that more steps would be required to reach this point.
