Charlie Mezak  wrote or quoted:
> iamrichichi{at}yahoo.com (iamrichichi) wrote in message
news:...

> > I'm looking for a COMPLETELY OPEN MINDED, generally knowledgable
> > individual to argue with me against the point that we are not the most
> > evolved of the species of life.
> 
> I doubt you'll find somebody to argue with you on your own terms,
> because the way you state your point seems to imply an overall goal
> for evolution.  Evolution is *not* a teleological goal-driven process.
>  Evolution is the complex relationship between species and environment
> whereby the former changes and becomes more fit for the latter.  It
> makes no sense to say that one species is further evolved than
> another.

Comparing the fitness of different species has some problems - but
it /does/ seem more reasonable to compare the fitness of different 
ecosystems - at least is you can make some assumptions about the 
environment.

In particular, you could cover half a planet with ecosystem A,
the other half of the planet with ecosystem B, let them stew 
for a while - and then see which one has more surviving DNA.

Planets could be chosen at random - to provide a fair comparison.

This sort of thing does not allow you to place competing ecostystems
on a unidimensional scale - since it's possible that:

* Ecosystem A will beat Ecosystem B;
* Ecosystem B will beat Ecosystem C ...and...
* Ecosystem C will beat Ecosystem A.

However - though you won't get a linear scale - you *are* likely to get
pretty close to one (i.e. the above won't be common).

Also, fitnesses can be rather different depending on the time period
over which they are measured.  Generally I would prefer to measure
over as long a term as possible.

With more constraints on the environment (e.g. say the last million years 
on Earth), it becomes possible to compare the fitness of individual species.

However, I'm not sure whether this "surivial ability" maps very well
onto whether something is "highly evolved" or not.

AFAIK, there's no established criteria for measuring how "evolved" 
a species is.

If the environment is specified - then life expectancy of the germ line is 
one metric which springs to mind.

By that metric, I reckon humans are probably not going to do too badly.

One obvious danger that might negatively impact the life expectancy of
our gene pool is that we might "stick our heads up" - and let an adjacent 
alien species know there's a half-decent habitable planet over here.

If something like that doesn't happen then our descendants ought to be
able to stick around for quite a while.
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