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re: Tom's famous spotted dog!
Tom Brosz — (archived)

If I was good enough to write this kind of thinking up in a book, that dog might be on the cover.

So much of what we are is the result of our evolution, and certainly I'm not the first to think so. The deep irony is that evolution is a haphazard process, and has no problem dumping two incompatible functions in one creature if the net result still enhances immediate survival.

I already mentioned the unnecessary pattern-making that is probably the source of most religions, new wave thought, and other attempts to shove an overriding order onto something that really has no overriding order.

Another flaw is that intelligence and rational thought, a process that is intensely individual, developed in a primate that had a million years of social heirarchy already built in. Ever wonder why there AREN'T libertarian societies? Is it cultural, or do human beings have a deep-seated need to be either the boss monkey or the flunky monkey? To rule over others, or be ruled?

I believe we'd have learned something interesting about our nature if Ayn Rand and Jane Goodall had been stuck together in a cabin for a month or so. Rand missed a lot.

The world might be a different place if intelligence had developed in a non-social primate, like the orangutan.

But then, someone could probably make a good case that social behavior helped drive intelligence. Certainly without social behavior, it's hard to imagine division of labor, an essential beginning to advanced civilization.

This, and the pattern-making, are what I call "essential flaws," something that makes problems, but the system would not function without it. The example I use around geeks is Green Lantern's ring, which doesn't work on anything yellow, but if you fixed that, it wouldn't work at all.

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