http://www.badscience.net/?p=316

Apparently Dr. Curry isn’t exactly a doctor of biology in the sense that “Evolutionary theorist” seems to imply.

Thank God you’ve put that idea out into the aether. I’ll feel better about the end of the human race if the end comes in such a ridiculous manner. I like my catastrophe wrapped in irony. It’s like Mary Poppins’ spoonful of sugar.

i mean, how many millennia have we survived our self-destructive tendencies?
[...]
it’s certainly plausible to wonder if we’ll wipe ourselves out. i just don’t know that there’s any really good reason to conclude that we will in fact do so. the evidence so far suggests we won’t.

Excuse me? Might I remind you of a little thing called the Cold War? Almost immediately after we got weapons that made wiping humanity off the face of the earth a feasable occurance we put ourselves in a position where the actions of a single person could do just that, and you count this as evidence that we’ll be just fine and dandy? What are you smoking? Surviving “self-destructive tendencies” is dead simple when all you have to worry about are pointy sticks. Nuclear powered ducks filled with ebola, however, are another matter…

Why the hell do these idiots continue to believe anyone is interested in what they think about when they masturbate?

You really think they can get it up, at all?

i reckon we’ll all have forgotten about it in a few days . . . and then in 10000 years, he will say, “i toldja so!”

For example, the whole thing could be avoided if we don’t spend enough time divided into dramatic have and have-nots economically, and then spend 10,000 years giving the have nots the short shrift in health care and nutrition which, barring the acension of Big Brother, is probably more the direction we’d all like to head in.

yeah, it’s true that we’ve gotten very dangerous very quickly. and it’s certainly plausible to wonder if we’ll wipe ourselves out. i just don’t know that there’s any really good reason to conclude that we will in fact do so. the evidence so far suggests we won’t. my point is just that if we don’t, it will be because we make a point of not doing so. and that takes people working on it. i’m certainly not advocating some rosy-glasses view of how nuclear war, too, will pass, if we just are patient or something.

as for curry and the eloi-morlock future, i still think it mainly reflects a discredited and slightly bizarre social darwinism (a la spencer) that is way more problematic (and offensive) than simply thinking we won’t destroy ourselves before his science-fiction future can play itself out. that’s in no way to legitimate his, um, “theory”?

i’m a little surprised too that no one has remarked on the illustration that accompanies the story, at least at the beeb version: the exemplar of the superior race is of course male, and the exemplar of the inferior, female.

And we wouldn’t all have to die to throw the Eloi and Morlock future into jeopardy. Large groups of survivors battling for what resources remain will not have the time or liesure to evolve into graceful supermodels.

Kyso sez:
“In all seriousness, though, he also says that after that our crippling dependence on technology will start to work against us. I think Andrew is right, we can totally fuck ourselves with technology or just raw stupidity faster than we can speciate.”

yes, we CAN . . . but will we? i mean, how many millennia have we survived our self-destructive tendencies? the danger is huge, and big brains are doubtless two-edged swords, in this respect. but we haven’t out-clevered ourselves, yet, and i’m not sure there’s any good reason to think we will . . . unless we fail to worry about it and try to prevent it.

the thing that strikes me is that curry’s “analysis” smacks more of herbert spencer than of wells, although wells is the obvious background. has everyone (and i mean perhaps even mainly curry?) forgotten wells’s socialist politics?