Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/5/84; site uwmacc.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!uwvax!uwmacc!dubois From: dubois@uwmacc.UUCP (Paul DuBois) Newsgroups: net.origins Subject: Re: the real case against Falwell et al Message-ID: <1277@uwmacc.UUCP> Date: Fri, 12-Jul-85 20:11:53 EDT Article-I.D.: uwmacc.1277 Posted: Fri Jul 12 20:11:53 1985 Date-Received: Tue, 16-Jul-85 21:18:02 EDT References: <356@imsvax.UUCP> <3570033@csd2.UUCP> Organization: UW-Madison Primate Center Lines: 28 > Paul Dubois writes: > > Simulating Ernest Hua, I ask: what is perfection? Or competence? > > [Isaac Dimitrovsky] > I think a reasonable working definition of perfection might be: > Something is perfect if there is no straightforward way to improve it. It seems to me that this simply rephrases the problem in different words without getting us any closer to solving it. I suppose, for example, that an adaptation may be said to be an "improvement", so that the organism possessing the adaptation may be said to be more "perfected" than the one not possessing it. But given the difficulty of assessing whether a given trait is "adaptive" or not, this is a non-trivial exercise. Some of Gould's stuff about the Irish Elk horns being adaptive comes to mind. (To be fair, he seems more recently to have lost some of his enthusiasm for the idea that all structures must be adaptive and therefore useful. Once one reaches this stage, one becomes less subject to the generation of paradigmatic artifacts, less subject to the notion, for instance, that one *must* find a use for a structure because it *must* be a useful adaptation. I am glad to see that Gould has reached that stage, at least partially.) -- | Paul DuBois {allegra,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!uwmacc!dubois --+-- | "More agonizing, less organizing." |