by Jenab6 » Sun 25 Jun 2006, 17:45:33
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Kylon', 'T')he problem is who is "fit" to survive, or who "fit" for selection.
Ultimately the people who are "fit" are the ones with the guns, the military behind them, and the political power, regardless of how destructive and useless they are.
That's the point I was trying to make with my lifeboat parable. Being able to win the struggle for survival does not make one the fittest for living after that particular struggle has been decided. I'm not certain what Monty means by making a distinction between the "survival of the fittest" and "the struggle for survival." The struggles of men and those of wolves are the same in principle. For both, the fittest learn who they are by struggle, and the struggle for survival is what determines who is fittest to survive
whichever struggle they had just been engaged in. But the struggles never end, and the array of advantages (and shortcomings) that served the winners of the past struggle might betray them in the next.
In a dieoff triggered by a resource overshoot (like the one we're approaching), there are two struggles of major importance. First, there's the military struggle, in which the soldier has the advantage on the farmer. Second, there's the struggle to grow food in a world without petrol, in which there has been a reduction of soil fertility. In this second struggle, the farmer has the advantage on the soldier.
How does the farmer survive the military struggle, so that he can be alive to produce food when the fighting is done? It seems that the farmer must be protected by soldiers.
But these considerations involve
skills, which aren't heritable, but learned. I'd been referring to innate potentialities that aren't learned, but heritable. Not "farming knowledge" or "marksmanship," but the potentials for developing strength, intelligence, dexterity, stamina, and so on. Although exercise will improve anyone's muscles, up to a point, some people have an inborn capability of taking the process further than others do. Likewise with intelligence: everyone benefits to some extent from using his mind, but some have an inborn ability to benefit more than others do.
These innate potentialities are what I would maximize when trying to decide who would be preferred for surviving the die-off. Some of them would be trained as soldiers, and some would be trained as farmers, but the soldiers and the farmers, though differing in skills, would be alike in having an uncommonly high set of potentialities.
Now the correlation of these potentialities to fitness seems rather reliable to me. A strong man will, all else being equal, do better than a weak one. An intelligent man will, all else being equal, do better than a stupid one. A man who is both strong and intelligent will, all else being equal, do
much better than one who is both weak and stupid.
Won't those having great potential simply rise in the natural course of things? Usually, perhaps. But maybe not during the die-off. The reason for that is that the capitalism of our times, run as it is by terawatts of exosomatic power, and organized as it is by the legal and corporate hierarchy, has divorced genetic potentiality from success. A small bulldozer will win a tug-of-war against the world's ten strongest men...as long as there's gasoline to put in it.
And that, more or less, is why those of lesser potentiality might survive while their genetic betters die off. The political and corporate elites have gathered to themselves a massive head start in resources;
they, not the supremely gifted with heritable potentials, will win the military phase of the struggle, after which they'll find themselves at something of a loss when their stored food supplies run out and they can't figure out how to farm efficiently.
Jerry Abbott