Admin stream of consciousness rant of the evening: The fundamentally flawed premise in the organic movements approach to achieving sustainability is the erroneous assumption that more natural always necessarily equates to better or more sustainable. Why not use science to discover what ACTUALLY works best for each goal, instead of arbitrarily drawing the line at what can vaguely and subjectively be construed as more natural? In many respects, farming itself is not natural (not even organic farming). Selective breeding is not called artificial selection for nothing. The entire edifice of the organic paradigm is centered upon a logical fallacy called the naturalistic fallacy, or the appeal to nature fallacy: the notion that something is better because it is considered to be natural, or worse because it is considered to be unnatural. And that encroaches on one of the most basic differences in our fundamental world views. I understand and accept the fact that nature is under no obligation to conform itself to whatever is convenient for humans. Nature does not think like an engineer. With respect to biology, it operates under the brutal process of evolution by natural selection. It gets the job done if you wait a couple billion years, but it is not efficient by any means, and it leaves considerable casualties and carnage in its wake. Roughly 99.9 percent of the species of life that have ever existed on earth are now extinct, most of which were long gone before the first homo sapiens came on the scene. Humans actually didnt invent the idea of pesticides: natural selection did. It first emerged as an evolutionary arms race between plants and the organisms that preyed on them. Were just spinning off of that idea and engineering it to work more efficiently towards our own intentions. We didnt do that because we thought the fact that the idea was first arrived at via natural selection meant that it was inherently good. Rather, we did so because we recognized that we could rebrand natures designs in ways that would be useful to us. Do I think humans can do better than natural selection? Absolutely. We have the advantage of building off of what nature has already hodgepodged together, and to do so with directed intentionality instead of just waiting for random mutations to occur and propagate in hopes that 1 out of every few hundred or so mutations will be useful. The concept of natural is not even well-defined. Its a worthless criterion from my point of view because everything is natural in the sense that its a part of the natural universe. Why is what we do considered unnatural unless other species do it, but its considered natural if beavers do it? If what we do isnt as natural as what any other organism does, then what is it? Supernatural? Its nonsensical. Our brains are a product of natural selection. We ARE nature. It is literally impossible for us or any other organism in the natural universe to be or to do anything thats not natural. It is for that reason that I condone a pragmatic evidence-based approach to all problem solving such that the focus is on what actually objectively works for whatever were trying to achieve. If producing and distributing sufficient amounts of quality food efficiently, while minimizing undesirable environmental and ecological effects is our goal, then the only way we have a serious chance at accomplishing that is through the employment of ALL of our best tools, and thats going to demand that people start giving a crap about science and its methods: both as an investigatory medium, and as a platform for engineering better solutions to problems.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 04:18:09 +0000
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