I have been thinking about many of these same issues for many years and
have never seen them stated so well. I think we all owe you a big round
of e-mail applause for the thoughtful insights and interesting
comparisons you have provided. They are a big help in improving my
understanding of myself and how we realate to the world around us.
Still, I want to make sure that I understand the central points you are
making. So I will try to re-state them in my own words as simply and
concisely as I can:
In recent years, science has helped us learn that we are a part of our
environment and ecosystem. So we now generally view ourselves
individually and collectively as a part of these larger systems. We now
also generally accept that as humans we can have a big impact on both
our environment and the ecosystems we are a part of. This, in turn, has
had a profound effect on both our self image and our sense of
responsibility for the physical and biological realms of which we are a
part.
But you seem to be saying that there is an important corollary to all
this. From your observations, you seem to say that most scientists and
the public at large still do not recognized and/or flat out reject this
corollary. You seem to claim that when we fail to account for the
second order effects of this corollary, our ability to understand the
ways that evolution, ecosystems and the environment interact is severly
distorted.
What's more, these second order effects show up as what scientists might
try to objectively describe as uncertainies or non deterministic
exogenous factors. Yet since we humans often experience the effects of
our actions as the products of our free will and intentions, we can
easily subjectively say that what happened was no accident. Thus to
some extent, we can say with some certainty that whatever happened took
place with some purpose and forethought. In other words, we can
sometimes predict the future and we can sometimes intentionally change
what happens in the future.
The problem with these second order effects is that they throw the
reductionistic, mechanistic, deterministic model of evolutionary
processes into serious question. So traditional scientists are slow to
allow for uncertainties that bring into question their models and
theories which took so much work, energy and time to develop.
But your corollary seems to go beyond even these difficulties. It has
to do with fact that we have yet to fully acknowledge the ways that our
forebears and other non human individual animals can also change their
environment and ecosystems. But these conclusions seem inescapeable as
we learn how other individual animals of the same species learn to
interact and change their surroundings in much different ways. We also
see this same phenomena at the group level. It can show up as each
unique culture forms a variety of different interactive feedback loops
with its surroundings and ecosystem.
I hear you saying that these processes and their uncertainties are a
central part of how and why life systems change and evolve. If we
ignore them or try to sweep them under the rug of statistics and
probability, we may never get even a partial glimpse of what makes life
so special.
I would only add that I think these ideas are crucial to gaining a
better understanding of our human origins. We need to learn a lot more
about why we can even ask how and why we came to understand the ways we
do. How can we even hope to understand what our own understanding is?
If there are any lingering doubts or questions from anyone on this list
about all this stuff, now is the time to voice them. We learn from our
differences, so don't be shy about helping the rest of us work through
these vague and confusing issues.
Norm