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Originally Posted by Orgazmo
Oh, speaking sorta abstractly I guess--that the goal of evolution / natural selection is spreading the seed of a species. By factory farming these animals, we're making them prolific as fuck and spreading the seed far more than they would see via evolution.
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This is what I meant by looking at it from a strictly evolutionary biology sense. While it is good to look at this perspective for one's education, what Dent is talking about totally transcends what biology's "goals" are. 99+% of species have gone extinct since life first arrived on this Earth. So I think that from that perspective, the idea that a species "succeeds" for a time by having large numbers for a while sort of is pointless on the massive scale of time and death. There isn't some ticket-counter at the end of Time that names winners of the population contest.
Humans are still dying of diseases that could be said to be evolution's "goals". To look at existence from a purely evolutionary perspective is to sort of miss the whole human factor entirely (as we clearly are able to do more to help ourselves and the sufferings of beings on this planet than Nature is).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Orgazmo
Basically, if the goal of an entity's life is to make sure its genes are represented in future generations, farmed animals are doing a hell of a lot better than non-farmed animals (speaking generally).
Again, I'm not necessarily making this argument. But I could understand if someone did.
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A person who would make this argument would be making a large assuming that that
is the goal of an entity's life, though. I don't feel like this argument has much validity at all based on the environmental and ecosystem science we've had the past 50 years. At a certain point humanity has to take reigns from blind evolution to steer ourselves and our morality/ethics/meaning of life has to go beyond mere numbers games.
And anyways, evolution is more about harmonizing populations and filling niches in ecosystems than it is about a numbers-game-competition. It's all the same Life, from Nature's perspective. I think it is a very human-centric idea to think that "the more numbers, the more successful the species is, no matter how enslaved they are for our benefit while not living natural lives at all!"
