E. Coli vs. Linux (Humans)

by David Turell , Thursday, May 13, 2010, 00:33 (5117 days ago) @ xeno6696


> I haven't had a good round in awhile, so lets have some fun...-> 
> 1. It trends upwards in time. This is analogous to evolution: no one can deny that there's been a trend towards more complex organisms. And everyone knows that life suffers from "recessions" from time to time. 
> 
> 2. Each of the individual actions in an economy are typically taken for an individual's personal gain. Each action within an organism and in an environment are also modeled in that way. 
> 
> However, there is no *goal* of the economy. No one started out 10k years ago and said, "I want this to trend upwards." It just happened that way. It was undirected towards its upward trend--and for the most part it remains so.
> 
> Similarly in this analogy--there's no goal for life. -Your's is Gould's reasoning. Bacteria started life and they are still here and very successful. But the reason everything else is so complex is there is no way to simplify bacteria. If anything developed, by necessity it had to be more complex. 
The same applies to caveman economics. It just had to get more complex if it changed at all. The view has no teleology, I agree, BUT, under the rules of natural selection the very successful bacteria had no reason to get more complicated. Their success for 3.5 byrs does not demand any complexification. Did it just happen or was it designed to happen? This is where you take your choice, since evidence is sparse.