willil8+Comments+week+8+Deacon+Interview

All semester long I have tried to make connections between the three courses that I am taking as a first year student. This evening, a connection smacked me upside the head. Just last week, in Ron Eglash's Self-Organization class, we were discussing human evolution. In particular how nature tends towards more and more complexity over a millennia of evolving organisms. How this complexity is positive because it allows for more interconnectedness, which in turn increases the chances of survival of the individual species. The variety that evolves is sometimes perverted, e.g. hermaphroditic barnacles with male barnacle parasites (Wilson), or, stupid but beautiful, e.g. shells spiraled so tightly the valve(s) can barely open for access to food (Kelly), but remains extremely diverse, a function of whatever lives long enough to have children will continue to adapt and evolve. If all of nature is self-organized to evolve with more complexity, what separates humans (with their large brains) from rhinos (with their massive brains)? An idea that Eglash defended in his master's thesis was that the repetitive act of engaging the environment with multiple senses is a requirement for "intelligence" (i.e. humans and monkeys have thumbs and can make and use tools, dolphins have ultrasound and their understanding of envrironment is well-defined). This is essentially the same argument that Terrence Deacon makes in why the human brain is more evolved than the monkey brain. What greater tool to use in exploring and understanding the surrounding environment than language? Deacon posits that the physical capacity for language in the brain and the act of creating and speaking language co-evolved with humans in a bottom-up fashion. This ties neatly back into the idea that nature tends towards evolving more complex organisms. So what is the "inhuman force" that drives nature towards complexity? It is Life, and, if you subscribe to Darwin's theory of evolution, its purpose is to seek "its own expansion in its own way and time; but this inevitably places [lifes] in relations of hostility and competition with each other, where [they] seek to subdue each other, to subvert or convert each, where the stronger seeks to overcome the weaker." (Grosz 188) Life is the force binding nature to complexity because if you don't adapt you die.

Kevin Kelly //Out of Control// Elizabeth Wilson "Biologically Inspired Feminism: Response to Helen Keane and Marsha Rosengarten, ‘On the Biology of Sexed Subjects’ "//Austalian Feminist Studies, Vol. 17, No. 39, 2002// Elizabeth Grosz //Time Travels Feminism, Nature, Power//