Correction: This story has been modified from its original version. — The headline has been modified for grammatical correctness. The Collegiate Times regrets this error.
Brought to my attention by Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan in their book “Mean Genes,” the California State Lottery consists of picking six numbers, any combination, between one and 51, and having these numbers match up to the numbers randomly drawn. Most lotteries and gambles have awful odds, yet humans do not realize it statistically — studies show that humans oftentimes
overestimate odds by more than 1,000 percent.
Perhaps this is the reason that more than $50 billion a year are lost on gambling, and perhaps it is also the reason you did not realize that the odds of winning the California lottery are one in 18 million.
Burnham and Phelan praise the statistical prowess of the woodpecker. Woodpeckers have to take their luck and guess which tree contains their next meal. However, how do they know if the tree they’re pecking on is completely empty, or if they are simply looking in a bad spot? Complex mathematics shows that in a tree with 26 holes, woodpeckers should leave after encountering six empty holes — and studies show that woodpeckers do just this. We can call woodpeckers and other organisms stupid all we want, but we will still lose to them in a game of Texas Hold ’em, no matter how good our poker face is.
In my evolutionary biology class, we learned about one of the most flawless organisms ever. This organism, nicknamed the “Darwinian Demon,” essentially maximizes all aspects of fitness, with an extremely high reproductive rate after birth, high-quality offspring and an indefinite life span. The only catch is that this organism is purely hypothetical — it cannot exist because of the tradeoffs and constraints of life. If it were to exist, it would out-compete all other organism, including humans. Humans are by no means the winners of the evolutionary race — we are no “Darwinian Demons.”
This is just an opinion of mine. People will disagree with me, saying that humans were made in the image and likeness of God, and so be it. I acknowledge that if I deny evolution and take a creationist standpoint, my argument would suddenly crumble. However, if you do take an evolutionist standpoint,
it stands that there are no such things as higher organisms. There are simply more and less complex organisms, made adequate enough to survive in their environment. Humans have no right to hold their noses up high — if we do, we just might drown in the rain.
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A version of this article appeared in the May 4 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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We may not be Darwinian Demons now, but the beauty of it is that we can be using what we have now - our brains. Our science and technology can turn us into Darwinian Demons.
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I wonder hat provoked you into writing this article. Who was being so egocentric that it drove you to write this splendid article. You know I saw an amp at the Zoo take a banana right from under the nose of the other ape. Sounds pretty selfish to me. Maybe it's our ability to understand not only separates us from the animals but also allows us to comprehend what we arbitrarily define as ethnocentrism.
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I think human beings would very much succeed without technology in the wild today. Chimpanzees also cannot out-run many predators but that is why they exist in social groups. It is not as though people were any faster back in the stone age. Our brains are our evolutionary advantage. If an apocalypse occurred tomorrow and people survived I think we would be just fine - we are an innovative and intrepid species. It may not make us the best but I think you underestimate people.
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