Sarah Katilyn on the evolution of modern man

Society's problem?  We're bored.  Overestimulated, but utterly bored.  Human beings are hardwired for adventure.  To hunt and hoard, to fight and fuck and conquer.  To rise against challenges and adversaries and emerge victorious.  Failure wasn't an option.  It was victory or death.  What we were not wired for is a placid life on a hamster wheel of 9-5s, endless streaming services, processed foods, social media scrolls & 30 second Tiktoks.  We adapt to our environment.  Too many are walking around numbed out in pastel Crocs with shrimp spines and plus sized fupas.  Couldn't fight a pigeon and win.  What a fucking tragedy. 

~ Sarah Katilyn, tweet, August 6, 2023

Nassim Taleb on evolution

How does evolution happen?  Not by convincing people, but by replacing them with better people.

~ Nassim Taleb, "Why Correlation is Unreliable," Greenwhich Economic Forum, 10:45 mark, April 2022

Mike Green on evolution, fragility and survival of the least fit

People think about evolution as progress.  Evolution's not progress.  Evolution is fitness within an environment.  And it actually breeds its own fragility, right?  If I'm a finch who happens to inhabit the Galapagos Islands and nobody has a beak that's seven inches long that can reach into a particular pine cone, then I can grow a beak that is first 1 1/2", then 2", then 3", and eventually it's 7"; it provides a huge advantage.  But if that environment changes, a 7" beak becomes an extraordinary disadvantage and I go extinct almost immediately.

What we have done is create a system that is so stable and where the focus itself becomes stability -  preserving the status quo - that we've created all the problems of specialization and fragility and inequality associated with it, where very few members of our society control so much of the resources and are actually in a position to defend those resources...  That sort of environment needs to be disrupted.

~ Mike Green, "The End Game Ep. 3," The Grant Williams Podcast, 1:25:35 mark

Carl Sagan on extinction

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

~ Carl Sagan

Bill Bonner on evolution

There are two parts to Darwinism as it is popularly understood. One part is based on observation – at which Darwin was a master. The other is extrapolation – not so much on Darwin’s part, but his followers. The problem is that the part that is probably correct is child-like and obvious. And the part that is more grown up is nothing more than empty guesswork. He notes that some animals are better suited to their environments than others. If a polar bear were suddenly born to a hog here in Nicaragua, it probably wouldn’t last long. On the other hand, if a mutation produced a naked polar bear at the North Pole, it wouldn’t stand much of a chance either. Both would probably perish, leaving no heirs or assigns…and thus removing from the gene pool whatever crazy aberration that created them. Some things survive and reproduce; some don’t. The essence of Darwinism is nothing more than that simple-minded observation, as near as we can tell.

But the application of this notion far and wide is a threat to the intellectual eco-system. Because of it, people think they know a lot more than they actually know. To the question, why is the polar bear white, rather than black, they have a ready answer: because evolution made him white. But this is no answer at all…it just postpones thinking until the next question: why did evolution make him that way?

Then, the guesses begin: because he can blend into the snowy background and sneak up on seals. Oh. They tell us, for example, that he covers his nose – which is black – with his paw, so he can get closer without being spotted.

Smart bear. But you’d think if evolution could turn his whole body black it could whitewash his nose too. And what about the seals? Are they morons? You’d think those that couldn’t tell the difference between a bear with his paw over his nose and an iceberg would have been weeded out by now. Besides, why aren’t seals white?

Of course, the biologists and know-it-alls have their answers, but they are just putting 2 and 2 together in the clumsiest way. They really don’t know why polar bears are white. All they know is that nature hasn’t exterminated the white polar bears – yet.

Many of these deep thinkers also believe that Darwin proved that God didn’t create man. Instead, man arose by the process of evolution, they say, one accidental step at a time. Man is the product of pure chance, they claim. As if God couldn’t make it look like an accident, if He wanted!

~ Bill Bonner, "A Broken Down Stock Market," LewRockwell.com, February 26, 2008

Nassim Taleb on on survival of the least fit and their vulnerability to the rare event

Recall that someone with only casual knowledge about the problem of randomness would believe that an animal is at the maximum fitness for the conditions of its time. This is not what evolution means; on average, animals will be fit, but not every single one of them, and not at all times. Just as an animal could have survived because its sample path was lucky, the "best" operators in a given business can come from a subset of operators who survived because of over-fitness to a sample path - a sample path that was free of the evolutionary rare event. One vicious attribute is that the longer these animals can go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it.

~ Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness, 2nd Edition, p. 92

Charles Darwin on "survival of the fittest"

Can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others would have the best chance of surviving and procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.

~ Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859)

Nassim Taleb on evolution and continuous progress

One must be blind or foolish to reject the theories of Darwinian self-selection. However, the simplicity of the concept has drawn segments of amateurs (as well as a few professional scientists) into blindly believing in continuous and infallible Darwinism in all fields, which includes economics.

... Owing to the abrupt rare events, we do not live in a world where things "converge" continuously towards betterment. Nor do things in life move continuously at all.

~ Nassim Taleb, Fooled By Randomness, 2nd Edition, pp. 90-91