E. Coli vs. Linux (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Thursday, May 13, 2010, 03:49 (5117 days ago) @ David Turell


> 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.-Having not read Gould (Sin, I know!) I don't know how much of his thinking has indirectly influenced my own--but on economic lines, there's always a set of a population that never chooses to change/alter markets. Think of farmers. Some of them don't want to change. (My family.) Some of them can't. (Farmers in Ethiopia.) This of course depends on the level of intelligence one is willing to attribute to bacteria, but as a comparative model I think its an incredibly strong one. Eliminating intelligence, you simply have some bacteria that have no capability to change, which in an environment where there is no environmental stress--there's your link to natural selection, as well as your explanation of why some bacteria has been (largely?) unchanged. -The more I compare economics to biology, the more it simply makes sense of the whole mess. No teleology. (None needed. It just is.)

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"