(September 13, 2010 at 3:44 pm)Minimalist Wrote: I think you are confusing technological achievement with evolution. 70% of the planet is covered by water. Drop a human in and he will drown, sooner or later. The fish do just fine.
In fact in most of the industrialized world if you cut the electricity off for any appreciable length of time you can watch humanity collapse into a steaming mass of shit.
Uh... no.
To your first point, you can argue the 'fish out of water' scenario with any species to the same result. Our technological innovations are a direct result of our own evolutionary development. Discounting that you may as well discount the devleopment of the gorilla's hands or a cat's eyes in terms of their evolutionary ability to dominate in their niche.
You're right that humans are not naturally equipped on their biological bodies to handle living in the water for great lengths of time (though some people certainly can), but a group of humans could develop the ability to do so. Fish can never live out of water, no matter how many of them try.
To your second point, civilization has and often still does exist without electricity. You know as much as I that power has been cut to large swaths of the idustrialized world, then they would (for the most part) simply wait for the power to come back on. If it was more permanent than that (say an enormous EMP pulse fried half the planet's electronics) then there would be a great deal of chaos in the short run.
This is because the industrialized world's technology has allowed the land to support perhaps ten times as many humans as it could otherwise support. This is why the world has nearly seven billion humans on it instead of a few hundred million.
There'd be a mass die-off along with the mass extinction of certain animals as people desperately attempt to feed themselves as the population lowers to a respectable level. Assuming we didn't have to start completely over, then we'd simply rebuild a bigger and better society than the last one after a generation or two of normalizing after a major disruption in our society.
So my point is that shutting off our electricity doesn't completely bork humanity over. Worst case scenario is that we have to start over in a new bronze age and work out way back up after a massive die-off because the support system for our population went away.
Niether of those things is proof that humanity is any less a dominant species now or at any point in the past (say, before industrialization - because the major reason for our overpopulation really began with the development of agriculture - industrialized agriculture just enhanced this.)
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan