After diving into the book for a few chapters I have com to the conclusion that Sagarin and Taylor have created a somewhat generic yet individual definition of Evolution. From what I could tell Evolution is the change of something, whether species or actions, that take place in order to respond to a stress or event that causes the survivability or fitness of a population to decrease or have a negative affect.
Once they establish this definition the began to describe the main difference that us as humans have compared to our other organismal counterparts, the main point being that most other organisms respond to their environments with a variation. They stated at one point that "Nature is never static, and organisms and lineages of organisms survive in part by maintaining variation in the face of natures variability" (pg 5). On that same page they explain that the main reason for our struggles with security and finding good strategies to combat these changing environments is "because our security systems, unlike those in nature, did not incorporate variability and unpredictability" (Pg 5). This idea so far seems to be there main claim for their argument of why we need to improve our defenses. The give explicit examples post 9/11 defenses all being the exact same type of "checkpoints" or "security checks", meaning all of the different places, from airports, to parks, to museums were all using similar if not the same exact type of increased security strategies in order to try and combat terrorists from doing anything. The only problem is that this made it predictable and easy for someone to go around these simplistic checks, that could be better improved with a combination of approaches or at least varying the different checking processes. following this idea up Sagarin and Taylor make it clear that "no one natural solution to security problems will work for the diverse and variable society we live in" (pg 10).
The last thing to mention is the reason it is more difficult to change and see the affects of our change. They both mention that in the natural world the organisms don't just change immediately but they have several variations of change that are then acted upon by selection generation after generation.
One other thing I wanted to point out that I did not like is there use of the word or idea of adaptation. feel free to correct me if I am misinterpreting it, but it seems as if they are almost using evolution and adaptation interchangeably?
On the topic of surprising me I would have to say that so far it hasn't completely shocked me with any information that I didn't already know. But, it has made me think deeper into the fact that we truly are not prepared or changing our response tactics enough to combat the ever changing world that we live in. It is helping bring to light the over bearing realization that our defenses are a lot weaker than most of us probably think or know about, and almost frightens you a bit due to this.
Antonio,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that their definition and application of "evolution" is quite generic!
I don't think that the authors are using "evolution" and "adaptation" interchangeably. My interpretation of the text was that authors believed that if our population is attacked or infested by the same threat only once in our lifetime, then that we will develop adaptations, i.e. technology, surveillance systems, weapons, etc., but that this adaptation will be a very basic adaptation that will not protect us if the threat changes. I think the authors were trying to say that for us to effectively and permanently evolve against a threat, the threat must attack us multiple times over a few generations.