Innocence lost / innovations = bad

[Daniel Julius]

On 1/9/08, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>   I'd push it a step further and suggest that the very idea of balance
> here, maybe even the word "progressive," risk smuggling in notions of
> providence, of some kind of Edenic equilibrium (past or future) that is more
> "natural" than disruption and extinction.
>

Meh.  I didn't mean to open the gates to smugglers.  I only meant what I
wrote, using "progressive" in the sense of tending towards improvement, and
"strengthening" as growing stronger.  If "health" is described as either an
active resistance to disease, or as a passive non-disposition to receiving
it genetically, and there were a collective grade for the mean health of a
human population in a given historical moment, proportional to the number of
human residents in that moment, would you not say that we are healthier now
than we were one century ago?  Do you agree w/ that?

 In fact the "atrocious losses" are every bit as much part of (even
> essential to) the whole process as any idealized steady state.
>

Agreed; my "albeit" above may have appeared to soften my agreement w/ you
here, but that's unintended; the extinction is absolutely essential

 The "strengthening" isn't a benefit that comes to any given human body;
>

I believe it is.  As predisposition to contracting or developing certain
diseases is passed along genetically, so too must the resistance to getting
certain diseases be passed along, even if what we call
the "resistance" being transmitted is simply a non-disposition to the
development of that particular malady.

--
Dan
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