Yeah, sometimes that stuff happens - all the time really - but it's more of a side effect when you get down to it.
You know what Evolution is? It's the continuation of things that continue.
Elephants exist.
The reason elephants exist is not because at some point up the evolutionary tree all the little mice with gigantic noses and freakish tusks growing out of their faces reproduced more than their not-so-disfigured friends. No. There are elephants because nothing kept the freak-mice from having a few freak-babies - they don't need to birth more, they just need to birth. In zoos devoted completely to elephants, there are more mice than elephants.
Evolution is a tautology.
Ecologists and a certain breed of Environmentalist seem fond of scary warnings that Homo sapiens and their various amusements have overshot the carrying capacity of the planet, that the species is in danger of a catastrophic correction in numbers because the world just can't produce the requisite mass of food for us all much longer.
And population is still rising!
blah, blah, blah - not important.
Why? because carrying capacity is not about food. These are Ecologists, do you know what ecologists study? Animals - plants - ecosystems of same. Do you know what ecologists don't study?
Nuclear reactors.
All the energy an animal gets, it gets as food. The energy ecologists are used to dealing with is in kilocalories - not kilojoules.
Carrying capacity is about how much energy you can harness and how much you need to keep going, and for most of our history all that energy was delivered by way of the grocer.
Now it's not.
Can a human survive on a diet of electrons? No.
Can a human increase the number of kilocalories a given hectare can produce by building a hundred story vertical farm on top of a slow wave reactor?
Why yes... yes she can.
There is no biotech revolution.
There's a ton of buzz around the idea that the last century was host to (early on) the industrial revolution and (later) the information revolution, and that now the age of a new revolution is dawning: biotechnology. This is all predicated on the idea that natural things are somehow different from manufactured things.
Wrong.
Carbon is Carbon is Carbon. An iron atom doesn't care if it's part of a shotgun or hemoglobin - it's still the same atom.
The biotech revolution is in reality, just part of a bigger revolution - the nanotech revolution (which itself is a continuation of the industrial revolution) the trick is we're cribbing off a non-sentient nanotech self-perpetuating algorithm that's been iterating for the last few billion years - we've been calling it life.
Desires and intuitions that were adaptive in prior generations, but have become maladaptive in the present.
Examples:
- Basic human affection for cheesecake (and other fatty/salty/sugary foods)
- Tribalism
- The foundations of all modern marketing
