Do you feel lucky Humanity, do ya ?
Do you think you can accurately predict now what genes, species, geniuses we will need in the future ?
Do ya, do ya ?
Accurately enough to pick the most productive corn variety in America and bin all the underproducing heirloom varieties ; enough to pick the most Aryan children in Europe and eliminate all the rest together with all the adult defectives and asocials ?
Da ya, do ya ?
Think then of the resulting 1970s Corn Blight ; think if mass murder has ever really brought mass happiness.
Do you still feel lucky punks and punkettes ?
If so, perhaps then you have a hubristic personality (aka being left brained or possessing the conservative mind) : you oppose the need for any wasteful precautionary principles and biodiversity, because you already know all the answers.
But us who are more cautious about the human ability to accurately predict the future, store up our treasures of human diversity and biodiversity.
The more the better.
Because, dear Mr Harper, inside all that messy diversity, inside all the flood of refugees, inside all that 'humanity washed ashore', just could be Humanity's Plan B,C,D or X,Y,Z ---- when the cosmic poop really hits the planetary fan...
Showing posts with label precautionary principle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label precautionary principle. Show all posts
Saturday, September 5, 2015
Thursday, September 3, 2015
Eggs in a basket : too many or too few?
On a continuum of human personality types, there will always be those of us who uncomfortable about the numbers of eggs in the basket - even there are just two eggs, one black and one white, they'd still like them in separate, non touching, baskets.
And there will be others, like Martin Henry Dawson, who feel you can never have too many different eggs in the basket - never have too much diversity in your portfolio or too much biodiversity or too big a gene pool.
But what these varying opinions really reflect, in my opinion, is something that might come as a surprise to most of us.
They reflect different confidence levels in the human ability to safely predict and prepare for the future.
The first group is only comfortable if the complexity of the future is reduced to a few firm categories of 100% bad and 100% good.
It does not really matter if the future can be so reduced - it only matters if we can imagine that it can be so reduced.
Thanks to a bit of "pop" Reductionism, the problem is solved - at least in their own mind - they then relax.
They feel a few basic categories of good and bad can be easily controlled and that being so, we can face the future upbeat and optimistic.
(There might be baneful climate change in the future, but even if so, we can easily solve it with a few high tech schemes.)
The second group is cautious (think the Precautionary Principle) about most things - particularly human claims that smell of hubris.
They see a future so complex and unpredictable and the human capability to accurately predict and control as being so limited than they feel we need friends to get by.
Lots of friends.
So we need to retain all the species and varieties of species in the world, we need all the mis-shaped and disliked bits and bob of human society.
One can never have too many friends.
Or the unlikely but useful tools they might possess.
Think of that much loathed common household pest, penicillium slime all over our fruit and our basement walls.
And of the penicillin it produced....
And there will be others, like Martin Henry Dawson, who feel you can never have too many different eggs in the basket - never have too much diversity in your portfolio or too much biodiversity or too big a gene pool.
But what these varying opinions really reflect, in my opinion, is something that might come as a surprise to most of us.
They reflect different confidence levels in the human ability to safely predict and prepare for the future.
The first group is only comfortable if the complexity of the future is reduced to a few firm categories of 100% bad and 100% good.
It does not really matter if the future can be so reduced - it only matters if we can imagine that it can be so reduced.
Thanks to a bit of "pop" Reductionism, the problem is solved - at least in their own mind - they then relax.
They feel a few basic categories of good and bad can be easily controlled and that being so, we can face the future upbeat and optimistic.
(There might be baneful climate change in the future, but even if so, we can easily solve it with a few high tech schemes.)
The second group is cautious (think the Precautionary Principle) about most things - particularly human claims that smell of hubris.
They see a future so complex and unpredictable and the human capability to accurately predict and control as being so limited than they feel we need friends to get by.
Lots of friends.
So we need to retain all the species and varieties of species in the world, we need all the mis-shaped and disliked bits and bob of human society.
One can never have too many friends.
Or the unlikely but useful tools they might possess.
Think of that much loathed common household pest, penicillium slime all over our fruit and our basement walls.
And of the penicillin it produced....
biological High Flyer stock or Diversified Portfolio ?
If there was one creature that got more dismissive pats on the head over the years than any dog or cat, it was little old ladies with dogs and cats.
For centuries, male scientists ignored claims by LOLs (little old ladies) that cats and dogs had personalities and each dog and cat had distinct personalities.
Ignored almost as much as these male scientists had been ignoring their own children's personalities.
All our children are distinctly different, said their much more observant mothers.
(Ever wonder how so many men, who can't see beyond their own nose at home, ending up directing the whole world based on - wait for it ! - their deep observations into Nature ?)
Scientists today (maybe because more scientists are women and mothers, who knows ?) are much more willing to accede that animals have personalities and individual animals all have different ones.
So perhaps now, we humans are finally reduced to differing from our fellow beings only in that we seem to worry much more about the future than they do.
Worrying about futures, really.
What will happen to me, my parents, my grandchildren, my hometown, my religion, my ethnic group, my language group, my world.
We only get to sleep at night when we finally settle in on a plan that is very much like our own retirement investment plan - because both plans in the end reflect our basic personality, as found on a wide continuum of variety.
The financial advisor basically asks us to decide if we want our pension plan to focus on a few (high yielding) high flyer stocks or should we hedge our bets and diversify our holdings over a wide variety of (lower yielding) stocks.
Similar is our own internal mental choice in deciding how best we humans should plan for an uncertain future.
Some of us may be so confident in the ability of the human will to overcome great physical odds that we even quibble about the future being seen as 'uncertain'.
We feel confident we can predict the future's winners and losers now, confident we can discard the losers, certain we know the winners best suited to our efforts to make the future as happy as possible.
We are from the old school, the school of Progress and Modernity, when great effort went into dividing the world world into two mutually exclusive boxes : the useful and the useless.
We are Penicillin's Howard Florey.
We eagerly gathered up the fastest growing plant types that gave us the sweetest fruit and binned all the smaller, slower maturing, less tasty "heirloom" species --- we want to 'reduce' biodiversity to a few certain winners.
We did similarly with humans, attempting to greatly 'reduce' the gene pool and focus on a few best human types, by both positive and negative eugenics.
Progress and Modernity were indeed the Era of Reductionism, in the widest possible meaning of that term.
Others of us were much more cautious and skeptic by nature. We took a jaundiced view of the abilities of the human will, as evidenced by history.
And we remained unconvinced that the past, present and future were as unchanging as Sir Charles Lyell and his fans among the scientific elite always claimed.
We were content merely to survive, not to fly high in success and possibly later crash and burn on the ground, to adapt the concepts of Margaret Atwood first used by her to contrast Canadians to Americans.
We could only sleep at night if we had not just a Plan B, but a Plan C,D,E,F and onward.
The more diversified our portfolio the better --- the more biodiversity in nature and human society, the better.
We didn't think we should discard heirloom varieties of tomatoes, or mentally and physically challenged humans, or aboriginals, Jews and Negroes, or bacteria and fungus.
We are Penicillin's Henry Dawson...
For centuries, male scientists ignored claims by LOLs (little old ladies) that cats and dogs had personalities and each dog and cat had distinct personalities.
Ignored almost as much as these male scientists had been ignoring their own children's personalities.
All our children are distinctly different, said their much more observant mothers.
(Ever wonder how so many men, who can't see beyond their own nose at home, ending up directing the whole world based on - wait for it ! - their deep observations into Nature ?)
Scientists today (maybe because more scientists are women and mothers, who knows ?) are much more willing to accede that animals have personalities and individual animals all have different ones.
So perhaps now, we humans are finally reduced to differing from our fellow beings only in that we seem to worry much more about the future than they do.
Worrying about futures, really.
What will happen to me, my parents, my grandchildren, my hometown, my religion, my ethnic group, my language group, my world.
We only get to sleep at night when we finally settle in on a plan that is very much like our own retirement investment plan - because both plans in the end reflect our basic personality, as found on a wide continuum of variety.
The financial advisor basically asks us to decide if we want our pension plan to focus on a few (high yielding) high flyer stocks or should we hedge our bets and diversify our holdings over a wide variety of (lower yielding) stocks.
Similar is our own internal mental choice in deciding how best we humans should plan for an uncertain future.
Hubristic Reductionism
Some of us may be so confident in the ability of the human will to overcome great physical odds that we even quibble about the future being seen as 'uncertain'.
We feel confident we can predict the future's winners and losers now, confident we can discard the losers, certain we know the winners best suited to our efforts to make the future as happy as possible.
We are from the old school, the school of Progress and Modernity, when great effort went into dividing the world world into two mutually exclusive boxes : the useful and the useless.
We are Penicillin's Howard Florey.
We eagerly gathered up the fastest growing plant types that gave us the sweetest fruit and binned all the smaller, slower maturing, less tasty "heirloom" species --- we want to 'reduce' biodiversity to a few certain winners.
We did similarly with humans, attempting to greatly 'reduce' the gene pool and focus on a few best human types, by both positive and negative eugenics.
Progress and Modernity were indeed the Era of Reductionism, in the widest possible meaning of that term.
The Precautionary Principle
Others of us were much more cautious and skeptic by nature. We took a jaundiced view of the abilities of the human will, as evidenced by history.
And we remained unconvinced that the past, present and future were as unchanging as Sir Charles Lyell and his fans among the scientific elite always claimed.
We were content merely to survive, not to fly high in success and possibly later crash and burn on the ground, to adapt the concepts of Margaret Atwood first used by her to contrast Canadians to Americans.
We could only sleep at night if we had not just a Plan B, but a Plan C,D,E,F and onward.
The more diversified our portfolio the better --- the more biodiversity in nature and human society, the better.
We didn't think we should discard heirloom varieties of tomatoes, or mentally and physically challenged humans, or aboriginals, Jews and Negroes, or bacteria and fungus.
We are Penicillin's Henry Dawson...
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