Re: virus: Technology (was manifest science)

AkA DanSHakU (k.k.trawinski@cable.a2000.nl)
Mon, 07 Jun 1999 18:16:54 +0200

Dylan Durst wrote:
>
> > Muscles and organs are not technology; they are the conditions of
> > our being-in-the-world's being-to-the-world, of our incarnation into
> > the midst of it. The dividing line is easy; evolution vs. innovation.
>
> The dividing line is always easy. Thats why the idea of it has stuck.
>
> Evolution has brought us to innovation.

This doesn't mean that evolution is the same kind of process as innovation.
You wouldn't say that gasoline is driving a car, would you? You'd still need
a car and some sort of driver, which are very different things from gasoline.
Innovation is not evolution because the dynamics that evolution uses are very different from innovation. This can be seen as a dividing line. of course no division is black and white but differences are certainly noticable.
so evolution has brought us humans which are capable of innovating.. evolution is not capable to control WHAT humans innovate.. it could determine
in what WAY we do it

> Multi-cellular organization brought us to organs and muscles (and us, i
> assume). At the time, it was probably an 'innovation,' but now it is an
> evolved, hmmm, 'condition'(?).

to be precice, it were errors in the genepatterns of organisms which gave
the organism an advantage that made organs like muscles see the light.. there were thousands of variations of the error and some have proofen quite handy. I think that this is not the way most innovators work.. they
often start with a problem instead of trying possible sollutions randomly..
Nature never had a problem....it was the same mechanism from the start..

> Innovation is just another part of evolution. As long as it is useful,
> it will stick.

What is determining what is usefull?... in evolution it is the balance of
all the organisms living.. humanity tends to disrupt this balance in an uncontrolled way by it's innovations...
What we have learned from evolution is now a means of controlling innovation..

>Just like, arms & legs, words, drums, telephones. Yes, the
> code for a telephone does not exist in our DNA, neither is the code for
> some of the nutrients that we need to survive. But our body parts
> dependent on those nutrients, as may become dependent on raw materials for
> our innovations.

I think that even without the presence of evolution human minds will find new
inspiration in things that are around them.. In this respect we are decoupling ourselfes from evolution (medicine anyone? genetic engineering?)