Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Evilution
Carl Woese proposes that species are an evil form of evolution:

Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency.

Now, Woese is claiming that our biology lives in a post-speciated evolutionary period. Couldn't that be backwards? Our culture lives in a pre-speciated evolutionary period. By Woese's own thesis, it makes greater sense that culture, which is a more recent development than organisms, has not entrenched itself in strict species that do not "share" their units of replication.

I'm skeptical either way, but I don't find it evil that a species evolves. If it is, then the whole world is condemned, and where does that leave us? Let us retain the term evil for despicable entities which have some hope of being reformed, not all species in general. And some entities for which it might actually be good to have reformed.

If species are evil, it makes me shudder at what interpretation gene therapy could acquire. It would be just the thing that an evil scientist would do, too.

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