Pat Davidson - Fundamental Principles That Govern My Thoughts

Pat Davidson offers his perspectives on the variability model and how it is expressed through the very existence of life today.

Transcript:

Rigidity is something that only functions in one way, it’s a one trick poney. It has no ability to utilize escape plans; it’s essentially stuck. Chaos is something that has no {...} binds that tie everything together; all possibilities are equally available, whereas variability is somewhere between these two extremes.

Variability is the strategy that life on this planet chose, and if I start describing or thinking about how life presents itself on planet earth, it’s a very interesting model. Life chose to neither be chaotic nor rigid. It did this for a couple of specific reasons, but one is by far the most paramount and obvious reason: life chose to be variable and not rigid in particular because if some sort of catastrophic or apocalyptic event were to take place, like a giant meteorite striking earth, it would alter the environment to such an extreme degree that if all of life was exactly like itself, it’s highly likely that everything would be eradicated if it didn’t have the ability to adapt and live on that environment, everything would be wiped out, and then life would cease to exist on this planet, in totality. When you think about an event such as the one that eradicated the dinosaurs, with a meteor hitting the earth, an enormous number of species were eradicated by that event, but, obviously, some things did survive. Because some things survived, life was able to continue on.