>>10941790More complexity, more entropy. Just as a great library can't be accumulated without great cost, development is dissipative, such that the information in genes makes its way to the future through the path of lowest possible resistance in the thermodynamic sense. The only thing that "counts" to natural selection is long-term success at copying. The process hoards only data, not the raw materials for reproducing it. It ceaselessly and immediately squanders that in the course of reproduction. This may seem otherwise to us, since consciousness, and play, and accumulating wealth to heighten and prolong pleasure, run counter to breeding, which is also why intelligent kinds of fun are the most sustainable on the time-scale of a human generation, but least so on geological scales of time. The logic of civilization implies its own ending, either in aesthetic dalliance or military catastrophe or some grotesque combination of both, for which I leave to someone else to coin a term with more technical precision than "tragedy". It's certainly fair to say that comic insight is the soundest at its least explicable--which is to say accountable to any motive for action but instant release from the prevailing grind, where we are caught between obedience to idiotic dogma, and comparably blind yielding to primordial impulses.
