... and love's the only engine of survival

Guo Yi:
Thank you.

<<<Do you agree that our species will suffer from control system malfunction in future ?>>>

Not neccessarily, imo.

As individuals, I think our ability to create new ways of life in changing environments has been our most important asset. The degree to which we may be "mismatched" in our modern life to the environment of evolutionary adaptedness is at least somewhat offset by this.

In general, unless taken too far out of its range of conditions, life tends to find a way; finding new ways to use existing traits, to adapt to changing environments, select preferred ones, and construct new ones. The question is whether we might drag ourselves, or be dragged, either by our own nature or something in our environment, into a range of conditions so extreme and so rapidly that we can no longer use the biology and cultural inheritance we've carried with us over time to adapt.

As to the distant future, most of us at some point harbor at least the secret fantasy they we'll be the first one to escape death, and we collectively fantasize that we might somehow escape eventual extinction. It will more likely be a matter of *what* if anything remains of our legacy, rather than whether we can possibly remain in our current form forever, which seems very unlikely.

If the evolutionary model we use for other life applies, then if we domesticate ourselves to the point where we no longer have the intrinsic variation for populations to meet new challenges biologically, we will probably go extinct as the biological environment around us changes, otherwise *we* will change, at least partly as a result of adapting to the consequences of our own legacy of choices and our influences over time on our own living conditions.

The biological model considers two primary trends under different conditions, K-selection and r-selection. We tend to think of human evolution in terms of K-Selection; that the environment is relatively stable and our species expands to carrying capacity in it. K-selection involves relatively lower rates of reproduction, higher parental investment, greater immediate cooperation, and a tendency towards larger organisms. r-selection occurs more in unstable environments where population is low compared to available resources, there are high rates of certain forms of biological altruism, high rates of reproduction, less investment in offspring, and smaller individuals. The strategy favored in r-selection is to exploit a niche and then move on to another before it is depleted or changes.

Have a great day !

Todd
toddstark@aol.com

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