Aphor 2021/06/26 – Quintilian 24. Nature tends toward equilibrium and harmony but permits anything that can happen to happen.

Yesterday’s post, Respect for authority, was about my problems with official authority figures going back to my first hour of academic instruction in Homedale, Idaho, grade school. Nowadays, and perhaps even back then as a child, my deepest respect lies with nature and its demands. My Aphor above derived from Quintilian is central to my worldview. As I write this it becomes obvious that it is very similar, perhaps even derivative of, Steven J. Gould’s famous theory published in 1972 known as punctuated equilibrium. In that Wikipedia article the concluding paragraph is about Gould’s idea being applied to languages and mythology, and their splitting geographically and then linguistically.

Once a living organism or a system has a built-in reproductive quality with errors and variable environmental factors influencing transmission, there will be an evolution, and over time those evolutions will have the qualities of punctuated equilibrium. Orally transmitted stories have those qualities, and until the printing-press style of mass publication, written documents also displayed those sudden shift qualities.

Evolution has proceeded from survival of what survived in an environment, to sexual selection based on markers of health which was itself based on adaptation to the local environment, to Evish selection based on gossiping women selecting the best men, to artificial selection by humans selecting the species members most beneficial to them for food etc., to CRISPR which permits intentional modification of genes for as yet to be explored morphological changes.

The whole of the Aphor game strategy I have been creating is to seek out and explore and evolve more quickly the examples of both phyletic gradualism and punctuated evolution. Phyletic gradualism moves in graphic diagrams via small and Y shaped intellectually obvious gradual adaptations to existing ideas, but punctuational ideas are distinct H shaped jumps followed by stasis. The Aphor game offers both the Y and H intellectual evolutions by clashing distinct ideas and generating monsters and chimeras as well as gradual changes. Some of these weird ideas will be obviously useful once stated clearly.

We will discover even stranger beings than this with Aphor games and CRISPR.