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A: I love these flowers because they never die

6/13/2003 8:55 PM

Kursad

A: I love these flowers because they never die B: But they are ugly.     A. They never die, that's why they are so ugly. Death has gave birth to something and we call it beauty.     B: What do you mean?     A: Have a look at the photo of my girl friend. She's really beautiful, isn't she?     B: Hmm yes     A: Because she's a mortal.     B: You are a psychopath.     A: No I'm just a conscious being.     B: Conscious of what?     A: That things are beautiful because they die.     B: What's the relationship between these two?     A: The selfish gene     B: What's that?     A: A sequence of molecules that were the ancestor of DNA and loves to create copies of itself.     B: So in what way that is supposed to be a missing link between death and beauty?     A: It created beautiful survival machines for itself.     B: Why has it done so?     A: To be able to make better survival machines it needed to alter itself instead of just making exact copies of itself. Beucase its molecule sequence is a code that describes how to build a survival machine. You and I are survival machines.     B: How has it done so?     A: I am bored of these questions. Go get a playboy magazine the answer is somewhere there if you look careful enough.     B: Hmm that you mean because of sex?     A: Yeah. It creates variation in the code.     B: So that was the reason death has gave birth to beauty? For the selfish gene to mutate itself and thus try new ideas to create better survival machines?     A: Yep.     B: But most of these "ideas" are random and therefore would be fatal. Isn't that a fatal lottery?     A: So what? The gene pool is full of billons of genes, what if allmost all of them die? You made a billon bad experiments and if one is successful and creates a better (more stable) survival machine, the whole test is successful.       ----------------------------------------------   My sister's budgerigar has died today for no apparent reason and seems like there's still some room for improvement in the design of that beautiful survival machine. But the process doesn't seem to aim perfection does it? If it were to survive long enough to gave birth to a child that would be considered successful, at least as long as the original purpose of creating a survival machine is concerned.     She's sad and so I am.     Kursad