[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: I’ve been thinking about evolution a lot lately and every solution under evolution is kind of necessarily half-assed. We’re the product of four billion years of evolution roughly and that has led to a lot of deep efficiencies and elegant design, well not design because design implies intention, but elegant forms like there aren’t a lot of straight lines in biology that all our bones, even the long bones are not perfectly straight and there’s usually some efficiency of form in the curves of bones. So, evolution’s a tragic combination of elegance and half-assedness because stuff only has to work well enough for the species to reproduce and continue to own its niche. There are a lot of issues around the human body that seem to have stemmed from us going from walking mostly on all fours to standing all the time when we’re moving that happened around half a million years ago maybe.
The spinal erectors or these teeny muscles at the base of your back that I fuck up, you know when I fuck up my back it’s usually one of those teeny little muscles that helps you stay erect but not strongly. So you’re supposed to be sufficiently erect and sufficiently able to stay erect that you don’t need a lot of muscle there keeping you erect. You’re supposed to be able to kind of just maneuver or keep your legs under yourself so those muscles don’t have to work very hard. Those muscles are the ones that bug me the most, they just seem too small for their job and they get strained a lot. We sit a lot and there have been a lot of articles lately that sitting is as bad as… it’s one of the worst things you can do which seems like an overreaction to sitting but sitting probably isn’t great because it’s a recent adaptation. I don’t know if other animals’ adaptations are any better. I mean like horses, which you work with can die just from getting their stomach flipped over inside their bodies. I think ditto for cows, I think ditto for like any animal that grazes; they’ve got this huge long digestive system because it takes a while to suck the nutrients out of grass. So that seems like a design flaw.
We’ve talked a lot at length about the issues around horniness that we’re compelled to reproduce thanks to our heritage of 100 million generations of sexually reproducing creatures but that shit leads is often bad or risky for the health of the individual organism. So it’s not a design flaw as much as it’s like a cruel set of motivations that are at cross purposes. Evolution not being a teleological just doesn’t care about anybody’s or anything’s feelings. So we have feelings, often profound because there was a reproductive advantage in being able to think but those feelings make us suffer and also we’re never able to fully satisfy our motivations including not wanting to die.
So the cruelty of being thinking beings in these shitty bodies is a huge design flaw, though by calling it a design flaw, design implies intention. That’s a problem; we weren’t designed, we evolved and that means that with nobody being in charge there’s nobody to say “Well that’s fucked for those creatures,” and it’s so bad that every creature that’s ever lived has to die. It’s with and until now there’s been no way to pass on conscious experience. There’s no way to share what you feel consciously though within the next 30 years that I think will cease to be. Via evolution we all ended up with our brains locked in our heads and no way to merge our thoughts except very inefficiently through making noises that are semi-understood by other members of the same species.
So that whole thing is a huge tragedy for any feeling being and we can reasonably assume that these flaws extend across the universe, that it’s not unreasonable to think that creatures of arisen via evolution on quadrillions, quintillions of planets throughout the universe; 10 to the 22nd stars in the observable universe, almost all of them with planets though most of them without planets that permit the evolution of life. We’re I think statistically an unlikely planet; a rocky planet with a hard surface and a thick atmosphere in the temperate zone, the distance from the sun in which water can be liquid. That’s a rare planet and the planet that we might have ended up where we are via some lucky collisions among Proto planets and who knows… but still 10 to the 22nd stars and even if only one star in a thousand or ten thousand has an earth-like set of characteristics, that’s still 10 to the 18th planets where life could arise.
But talking about the flaws linked evolution means we can also talk about eventually being able to engineer out a lot of those flaws. Via technology, we’re slow. The fastest we can run is around 20 miles an hour for an elite athlete for very short stretches but we can go 1200 miles an hour in a fighter jet or 25000 miles an hour in a rocket to the moon. I mean we’ve been able to design workarounds for a lot of our shortcomings and eventually that will increasingly be able to engineer our very selves and that’s creepy because it leads to the end of human dominance but it’s also the opposite of tragic, that we’ll have powers to re-engineer ourselves and make things better for us and for other creatures if other creatures end up surviving the havoc we’ve wreaked and we will wreak.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 