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echo: evolution
to: All
from: Peter F
date: 2004-10-25 22:54:00
subject: Knit picking Erwin`s evol

"Erwin Moller"
 wrote
in message news:4177a3a1$0$78749$e4fe514c{at}news.xs4all.nl...

> I think you (we) have to take a step back and just state:
> --> Life evolved to best fit its environment <--


The words "to best" bugs me. "To" does because it too
much carries a meaning of purpose; "best" does because it
compells the question:"than what". 

IMO, it is better to as far as possible throw such bioevolutionary ballast
over board. 

Would not  "a necessary requirement of individual examples of living
forms to evolve is that they it fits (as in is capable of reproductively
regenerate)" a purer and more precise description? 

> 
> ('Best fit' in the sense of 'making-the-most-copies')

Again, the word "best" rears its ugly head. 
It does in the (for a unifying understanding unhealthy, as I see it) sense
that it tends to restricts the lingual-associative Train of thought. 
It does by making an (Evolution Pondering) "Train" more likely
(at least my own "actention modular" model of it gets biased, by
"best") to track towards, and to get stuck at, the
'inter-and-intra-species-competition station'.

Lastly, a comment about the "'making-the-most-copies'" sense of
"best fit", that you suggest.

The words, "the-most", hamstrings it, as I see it. 

But perhaps you only had in mind the certainly very important
'competition-dimension' in biological evolution.(?) 

But even if you did, this "dimension" seems to me to be more
significant, and a more instructive an image, in/of the phylogeny of fauna
than in/of our evolution's DNA-forming phase.

"Making *enough* copies", would be a to me far more agreeable alternative.

That is, eith "enough" used in the sense of: enough for divergent
(and mainly sexually convergent, until definitely split by speciation)
lineages of living forms to keep sprouting.

P
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