The Problem With Intelligence?

Okay, this is just a bit idle and random, and might not fit the criteria for a new topic very well. It is also long and rambly. Sorry...I was just reading one of the threads here, and a contribution by Darth Mal interested me. He talked about a selective pressure that has been affecting rattlesnake populations, saying that because humans have been seeking out and killing audible rattlesnakes for at least 200 years, rattlesnakes are generally much quieter now.I have recently been thinking about the dire warnings that doctors give about the over consumption of antibiotics, and in this country (UK) at least, the severe problems caused by hospital-bred "superbugs" like MRSA.I imagine there are many other instances of common-sense human interventions in the natural world that have provoked the exact opposite reaction from what they were intended to do (in these examples, totally reasonable attempts to protect people from rattlesnakes or bacteria made deadlier rattlesnakes and bacteria invulnerable to antibiotics).So, my point is, is this a serious evolutionary disadvantage, that might make an intelligence like ours - one capable of moulding an environment - a liability in the long term? Unless there is a magic button you can press that wipes out ALL malaria or whatever instantly, aren't your efforts to control it simply going to breed a disease that is beyond the means of your current technology to control, however advanced?Couple this with the fact that it is very unlikely that technology and civilisation will keep improving forever, and that there might be some global disaster sometime in the next few hundred thousand years (if we're lucky!) that would severely hit social and healthcare structures, aren't we making loads of problems - potentially insurmountable problems - for people at that time? Its just a thought.Obviously, if a whole society understands the danger of excerting such selective pressures on living things, and can find a way around them, there isn't a problem. Or there might be a technology that would somehow make this techonology reduntant.But is there a way around them? Could there be such a technology?

Hmmm.. I'm not sure if I'm understanding some of these posts.Yes, I think human inginuity has cooked up all kinds of problems that are more immediate than any notional problem caused by the effect of our intelligence as a selective pressure.We're doomed, I tell you!I guess what I was clumsily trying to focus on in my opening post was the strange effects that will be produced when a fantastically unlikely thing happens: an intelligence, like human intelligence, is introduced into the usually "blind" process of natural selection, as it was on this planet at some time in our prehistory.Now, a system that's been going quite happily for aeons is for a while tweaked in contrary and bizarre directions by human attempts to mould the world around it. I'm not saying we are doing it on purpose, but the effects of our ansestors and our choices are having an effect on loads of organisms.I have already talked about the self-defeating problems that arise when we attempt to intervene with other organisms, like superbugs and silent rattlesnakes, but of course there are other effects, notably of technology and medical care on humans ourselves. As more hereditable diseases become curable, or their effects are mitigated, then our populations will become reservoirs for genetic problems in a way simply impossible in a population without intelligence. Of course I'm not a social Darwinist, or proposing that eugenics is a good thing. I'm just saying that intelligence and natural selection work in such utterly different ways.Probably the most obvious example of this is the "Unnatural" selection that our domestic animals and plants have been subjected to. Dogs are so weird. Thoroughbred dogs (like my mum and dad's wheezy, cross-eyed siamese cats,) are walking reservoirs of genetic oddness. It always strikes me as funny when you see someone saying that there can't be macroevolution because "you can only push dogs so far" but that seems utter nonsense, because human selective breeding, with its tendency to accrue all kinds of genetic problems seems to be the exact opposite of NATURAL selection.All that stuff I started with, that "is Intelligence a Problem?" was a bit flippant. I guess what I'm trying to get at in a really roundabout way is to talk about UNnatural selection, brought about through human interventions, guided by our inteligence (I'm sorry I keep going on about intelligence, but I can't think of a better way to put it. Maybe I mean our common-sense interventions in the world rather than intelligence).Our effect seems to be to impact on natural selection, and bend it in our image. Is that what's happening? What are unnatural selection's limitations? What's it all about?

This topic is so badly defined I'm kind of regretting starting it! I think I should have thought about it more before I just blurted it out. I really appreciate your responses, because they have helped me.Just to try to clarify my thinking angain.I don't think that we are putting the biological world in danger. Our interventions just demonstrate that common sense (lets kill those noisy snakes/breed fat sheep), technology (lets find ways to mitigate the effects of genetic and infectious diseases), and cultural desires (lets breed dogs that are really great at killing badgers) produce organisms and effects that wouldn't ever have been possible without intelligence.Our ability to unnaturally select - and I'm not saying that we really have an understanding of the outcomes of our selections, just that we can push life in directs that it wouldn't ever go down without us - is pretty unique, isn't it?We are populating the world with a menagery of oddities, and we are diligently maintaining and even adding to that collection. Of course, if we were to all disappear, then natural selection would kick in again. It just seems our effect, as a species, on the living things of this planet (hell, even those brown/white arboreal moths we all know and love!) is kind of trippy. Any thoughts?If not, then I'm sorry I mentioned it really. This Phi thing is interesting me though. I'm going to look into this.

Okay, ramble warning. I hope this post makes some sense.Before I start though, I'd like to say sorry for not responding, Brad. I was a bit scared by that first link you gave because I didn't understand it, I admit shamefacedly. If you wouldn't mind explaining what you meant for a simpleton like me, I'd love to hear what you have to say.Yes, I am just talking about the difference between natural and artificial selection I guess. It seems really incredible to me that we have stumbled across ways of influencing the patterns of life so profoundly. But I'm not just talking about the conscious decisions, modern fruit and vegetables, and "achievements" like the establishment of the Cornish Rex as a breed, but also the unforseen, counter-intuitive effects of our decisions: the super bacteria we make through having antiseptic conditions, the changes that we effect but don't understand. But with this post I'd like to focus on our conscious efforts to selectively breed. In a kind of roundabout way, I think that rather than demarcating the limits of species change and undermining the idea of macroevolution as some people suggest, the limits of selective breeding seem to sit alongside natural selection quite comfortably with me.In some ways the destinction between natural and artificial selection seems itself artificial, because its all just selection. But the products of artificial selection seem to me to be totally different from natural selection.I wonder what a creationist take on this difference is? It seems like most creationists tenitavely accept that there can be some degree of NATURAL selection, and of course everyone can see the products of artificial selection all around them. I guess you might say that humans aren't as good as designing as God because of genetic weaknesses that crop up the further we push an animal. I think humans over the millenia have demonstrated a great deal of ingenuity with very limited ends. The fact that artificial selection can produce such radically different results as the malmute and the chiwahwah(I dunno how to spell that), with all the limitations of artificial selection, is quite an impressive endorsement of the more powerful, though slower moving tool, natural selection.I need to clarify that slightly. By "the limits" of artificial selection, I mean that we don't select for the best chance of survival, but instead for various visible advantages (bigger, stronger, smarter) that may be twinned with invisible genetic disadvantages that nature would have unsentimentally weeded away. So it isn't as powerful as natural selection, because we tend to overvalue measurable physical advantages and undervalue invisible problems. Thats my understanding anyway.Thoughts?