Delete comment from: Edward Feser
Timocrates said..."Furthermore, there are serious problems with every living thing trying to become a master species, as it were, because the hierarchy of life requires lower organisms: if every living organism were advancing up the ladder, so to speak, then what is necessary for life - food and especially vegetative food, which being the most basic form of life would also be the most desirous of advancement, as it lacks even mobility to evade destruction - would vanish, and this would result in the death of all living creatures on earth. Mass extinction is progress now?"
Timocrates said..." Now some might point out that it is exactly vegetative forms of life that seem, as it were, most content with their own destruction by way of consumption as in part this is one of the most efficacious ways for the creature to perpetuate and multiply its kind. But if this is so, then evolution runs up against a serious problem, as vegetative life is the most basic kind of life and in an evolutionary model necessarily the mother and root of all life. But it is specifically this kind of life the existence and preservation of which is most necessary for more advanced forms of life. Therefore, if evolution is true, then evolution is inherently an existential threat to more advanced forms of life, tending to their extinction. But this is exactly what every living thing is supposed to be open to becoming and even, if anything, tending to! Evolution turns out to be a necessarily self-destructive system caused and perpetuated by a an innate impulse towards evading destruction!"
Please just crack open any ecology textbook to the chapter on population dynamics. There is no hierachy of life. Even the fiercest predetors fall prey to parasites and desiese. Ecological systems are dynamic and resilient webs of energy and material transfer. I suspect someone smarter than me could model it all in terms of thermodynamics, but essentially the dominance of any one species creates a potential that other species can unlock. One of the simplest illustrations is the S-curve model of a predetor-prey species.
The very existence of coal and oil is evidence of an ancient triumph of the plants. The incorporation of lignin let some plants stand taller than the others, resist herbivory, and microbial decay. Far from being simple, plants have complex biological defenses, inclucing phytotoxins, irritating botanical features, and signalling pathways that can warn neighbors to prepare for herbivory, or call to predetors of insects.
And we know that mass extinction happens, and that explosions on new types follow from them. There is nothing neccessarily perfect or eternal in the specific forms of animals, (as contingent being they are neccesarily flawed), nor does the internal causal structure of kind after kind guarantee the internat structure will be effecting in the face of changing enviroments.
The fundamental thermodynamic, chemical reason that life can exist at all, even though it takes energy maintain, is that life is much more effective than non-life at accessing and releasing potential energy. Evolution can unlock even more effective ways of accessing that energy, and sure even sometimes so much so as to lead to mass extinction. This is not a reason to reject evolution. There is no fundamental reason as to why to rules and internal causal structure of the whole of life, both on earth nd elsewhere, must be commensurate with the rules and internal causal structure of individual living things. The fossil record shows not just one, but 5 mass extinction events from which life has recovered.
All things are eventually destroyed, and the fact that evolutionary theory reveals one way many things may come to destruction is by no means a reason to reject it. Your attempt to set up a reduction ad absurdum fails, precisely because the consequence you set up is merely a rarity rather than an absudity.
Mar 20, 2017, 2:58:34 PM
Posted to Meta-bigotry