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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."                                  |