Herself said:
With all due respect, Nem, are you expecting to be following any evolutionary proceses in their entirely within your lifetime?
The catch to a powerful, centralized government is that it can accomplish things of serious personal impact on a timescale incredibly fast by any standard. And there is no way to avoid having to interact with it.
If the process moved at the same pace as organisms gettin' situated in their environment*, or at the normal rate-of-change for social institutions in the absence of severe extrnal stressors, that would be one thing. But it doesn't; government moves with the speed of a computerized asset seizure and the precision of a no-knock drug raid on the wrong address, and quite often with an objective far less clear than in those small-scale examples.
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* I have used the folksier term deliberately, as organisms don't merely adapt to their environment, but in many instances, adapt their enviroment to themselves. And as you know but others may not, Nature rewards survival not only to the fittest but to any that are fit. Just barely good enough to get by is good enough. This simple point is often overlooked when we set out to "uplift" our neighbors without their consent....
Herself, your question in the first paragraph quoted above is a reasonable one. Let me see if I can offer a reasonable answer without turning this thread into a biology lesson or a debate about climate change. My intent here is to add another dimension to the thread, to provide some additional context for the discussion, not to hijack it.
First, I totally agree with your assertions about the rapidity of political change in your paragraphs, including your footnote about adaptation. No arguments there at all. That assertion alone makes this thread worthwhile.
But to answer your question - "are you expecting to be following any evolutionary proceses in their entirely [entirity?]
within your lifetime?", my answer is yes, it is possible. I'm hedging with the word "possible" only because no one can predict the future (I don't believe in prophets & soothsayers who can make
specific predictions), but such a rapid change is now understood by many scientists to be the norm rather than the exception.
What most lay people (with respect to evolution) don't realize yet is that evolutionary biology is undergoing a substantial evolution itself, almost as large as the revolution that Darwin started. Even though the view that I'm going to state here is still controversial, and would take many, many posts to fully explain (obviously THR is not the place for that), and this view
will draw fire from many if not most 'old school' evolutionary biologists (belonging to the neo-Darwinist school of thought that reigned from the 1930's through almost now), the evidence for it - both in terms of theory & paleontology - is substantial and compelling.
We're beginning to understand that evolutionary changes occur rapidly, NOT gradually over many, many generations as the neo-Darwinians argued for almost a century.
Paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould & Niles Eldridge put this idea forward first in the early 1970's. They noted from long study of the fossil record that - unlike the view held up as dogma by contemporary evolution - evolutionary changes happen
very fast. And not in just a few cases or a few places, but ubiquitously. Species remained largely unchanged for extremely long periods, then
WHAM! - rapid change. There was no sense arguing with the fossil record, they said.
They called their theory "punctuated equilbrium". Long periods of no change (equilibrium) followed by rapid change (the punctuation).
The theory was controversial into the '90's. While I was still in grad school working on my doctorate in evolution (~1990), I heard Eldridge speak in front of 100 biologists. Most grilled him mercilessly, refusing to buy his idea. It simply did not fit their accepted dogma.
Now, with some major changes in science at the hands of 'systems theory' and a related branch of mathematics (nonlinear dynamics, AKA chaos theory), and some new ideas called symbiogenesis put forth by microbiologist Lynn Margulis (U Mass), that gradualist dogma is beginning to crumble substantially.
The emerging new view is that nearly all substantial evolutionary changes occur via punctuated evolution. It's turning out that evolution in nature is more like evolution in politics and economics than previously thought: changes are often not slow and gradual, but rapid and brutish. Coup detat & black market Mondays are as common in nature as in politics & economics.
The same is true with climate changes. As little as thirty years ago, the accepted (read dogma) view of climatologists was that climate always changed slowly. For example, it was believed that ice ages come and go over thousands if not tens of thousands of years.
In the 1990's, as a result of new work involving chemical analysis of ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica (several hundred thousand years of ice containing 'fossilized air' trapped in the tiny bubbles), that view changed radically. That data shows unequivocally that rapid, HUGE climate changes - read from ice age conditions to temperate and balmy - can and do regularly occur in a decade or two or even less.
See this page for more on that topic.
All of this - rapid changes in evolution & in climate - were unsupported by more linear models that dominated science until the 1970's & 80's, when computers made working with nonlinear systems more tenable. Now we realize that natural systems, like human ones (political, economic, etc) are not linear, but nonlinear, and thus do not change gradually but rapidly at those nonlinear breaking points or critical thresholds called phase transitions.
Which relates to my point somewhat flippantly offered last night. Whereas this thread IS interesting, and in current conditions it IS important - I do NOT argue otherwise - in the face of a major global climate shift like we appear to be entering now (asserts the teacher of a college-level climate change class, recognizing the provocative nature of his statement and braces for flames from skeptics), all bets are off as to which is more important: a debate about politics or dealing with (AKA surviving) the climate change.
(Parenthetically: climatologists have now determined that 2005 was globally the hottest year since record keeping began, surpassing 1998 for that title. Add to that the fact that greenhouse gases are statistically AND substantially higher now at any time in the last 430,000 years, and the recognition that atmospheric systems don't change gradually, but catestrophically in events called phase transtions, and you've got the makings for a disaster.)
My sense is, a major climate shift could easily level the playing field in terms of agricultural disruptions, for example, and America could quickly lose its status as 'exceptional'.
Layer on a helping of crisis resulting from
peak oil (another thread entirely; i'm still skeptical but studying it), and things could get very interesting.
Just food for thought. Only time will tell.
Happy new year, everyone. Let's hope that politics and 9 mm v .45 debates are the least pleasant issues we will have to face this year.
Nem
