I saw this story today (ht Annie) about a tragic death that could have been prevented. The story is reported in the Indy Star news roundup here. It is about half way down the page.
Month: October 2007
Ideology and Adaptation
I’ve never been one for ideological purity.
For one thing, ideologies represents only imperfect models for how reality works and no real-world model will ever cover all contingencies. So always, in the back of my mind, I look at any given ideology and wonder, “What circumstances will this ideology not account for? When will it work best and when will it not?”
More importantly, though, the science of biology influences all my thinking. In biology, a strategy succeeds based on how well it adapts (from the latin for “to fit”) to the immediate environment. What works for a penguin in the Antarctic won’t work for a camel in the Sahara.
Of course, we don’t like to think of our ideologies as specific adaptations to specific environments. We prefer to think of them as eternal truths that remain the best choices in all times, places and circumstances. We look at solutions that worked in the past and think they will work now. We look at solutions that work now and think they would have worked at some arbitrary point in the past.