Disclaimer: This is just a draft
For long, we have been told that Darwin’s theory of evolution with its main proposal of ‘Survival of the fittest’ does not apply with in a species. That when it comes to with in a species, it is best for the species to work together in a group towards a common survival plan. This has been accepted more or less amongst the academicians for quite some time now.
On the other hand, we now have a scenario amongst humans with the exponential growth of technology in last few decades that access to technology can become one of the prominent factor in distinguishing within the human species. It is no longer the physical transformation within a species which will decide the future of the individual animal within the species. Whether the species has developed an extra thumb or different way of breathing will not decide whether the animal will be able to survive and reproduce. What will decide the future of the individual animal is based on how much access to technology it has.
A farmer in a remote village has much lesser chance of survival. He/she may be able to avoid all the disease using natural medicine but will his/her family survive without artificial insemination for long? That family may survive a flood or a drought, but without proper knowledge and mechanisms, surviving prolonged famines or floods will be very difficult.
A Taxi driver will no longer survive he/she doesnt use technology. He/she needs to accept online payments, take online bookings and also keep himself/herself updated online.
With demonetization in India, the government has virtually left no room for any non technical people to do business or even survive without using technology. You either have to accept payments digitally or refuse to do business with the customer. Similarly you can either know how to book a bus by paying through cards or just have no access to that service since you dont have any cash.
Technology in a way has always been this way. You either knew how to use technical machines or just got removed from the factory floor. As machines increased, the labour force which did not know how to operate them had to be laid off. This is similar to how when nature changed, those who had adapted to the new climate could survive and other had to get extinct. Nature has always been very cold in choosing its best for the future, technology it seems is no different.
Tag: nature
December 23, 2016
Its time we recognize Netizens as a separate species
June 4, 2014
Let us become the nature
The game, 2048, is an awesome game. Its simple but yet very addictive. Even after you know what strategy to apply. While I have been immersed in playing it for last one week or so, I came across this article in Hacker News about a javascript library developed to show Richard Dawkins’ Biomorph example to explain evolution. It made me think that even the game 2048 is a good example of this where 2 or 4 can be considered as basic biomorphs and the 16 blocks become the environment and then your actions of combining the blocks becomes the act of preferential choosing to lead the biomorphs into a certain evolutionary path, the concept of natural selection.
But just in its true sense with numbers, it is not very interesting as you can then easily predict the future children. You know that the exact path you need to take to reach a certain evolved child. Also the final result itself is fixed as you cannot change the criteria for natural selection in the game.
What if we could do that? What if instead of numbers, we had some biomorph similar to the one in the javascript implementation and we as the nature could decide the criteria of natural selection and what goes to next level. Ofcourse the number of blocks also have to be increased, may be the shape of the environment also changed.
It will be interesting to see how biomorphs would evolve overtime.
But this is still uninteresting. The killer feature would be if all the environments were connected to each other? Say in game 2048, once you reached 2048, you could combine with 15 other people who have reached that level and then each one of you combine to form a new environment where 1024/2048 is the numbers which keeps popping up on every move. This can be called as new evolved species in the new environment. Just instead of numbers it will be biomorphs. After the biomorphs have modified by certain factor in your environment, you get to combine with environments of others who have also reached that level and then continue playing with the higher species. Imagine how interesting it will be to see various developed biomorphs coming up on the internet thanks to the various criteria put up by people and their movements. I am thrilled with the idea.
Few fundamental questions that remain to be answered:
1) What kind of biomorphs can we use? Should the inital biomorph be of only one type? Can we just use elements in periodic table as the basic biomorph and then start combining them to form different molecules?
2) How do you calculate the amount of evolution to judge when to go to the next level?
3) What should be our environment and what should be the various actions in the environment?
4) When many environments combine, very soon the universe will be filled with environments which have very basic biomorphs to some which are very advance? Should these environments co-exist or can we just eliminate all basic environments as advance environments are formed.
