Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to re: Order and constraints

You make some interesting points
Tom Brosz — (archived)

I particularly like the concept of the government taking the metaphorical place of the environment as a restriction on individual species. However, in nature the gorilla didn't get to vote on how big it was going to get, or slip Mother Nature a cash contribution to tilt the scales a bit against other primates.

The ideal government reins in force and fraud, provides a legal infrastructure of police and legal and civil courts (including enforcing contracst) and lets most other things go their own way. If you look at the history of monopolies in America, most of them were the result of a cooperation between some industry and the power of the state to restrict competition.

Too much of what the government does in meddling with economics screws things up as much as it fixes them, and then more interference is deemed necessary to fix the screwups. A good analogy in ecology would be the well-intentioned imports of species by humans into areas they didn't belong, sometimes even in order to "fix" a situation created by earlier well-intentioned efforts.

A lot of the rest of what you talk about falls under the category of "cultural evolution," something only humans are able to do, and IMO, the prime reason we are as successful as we are. Imagine physical evolution if Lamarck had been right.

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