From: xtifr@netcom.com (Chris Waters)
Subject: Re: Heinlein and "wimmin"
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 10:47:25 GMT

In <11DEC92.18114973.0038@UNBVM1.CSD.UNB.CA> O2NY000 <O2NY@UNB.CA> writes:

>In article <1992Dec11.195651.24178@julian.uwo.ca> jdnicoll@prism.ccs.uwo.ca (James Davis Nicoll) writes:
>>In article <11DEC92.15625014.0172@UNBVM1.CSD.UNB.CA> O2NY <O2NY@UNB.CA> writes:

[...]
>>>what is wrong with that. If there is any greater contribution to
>>>humankind than procreating, I would really like to know what it is.
>>
>> Technological  innovation is one obvious example.  [...]
[example elided]

>I don't really see how this is an obvious example. If perhaps this
>engineer did not develope the advances of which you speak, is it not
>probable that someone else would make these advances eventually?

Contrariwise, if the engineer didn't make any babies, is it not probable
that someone else would?  And, in fact, only a few people have the
knowledge, the training, and the ability to be a first class engineer.
Just about everyone has the ability to engender offsquirts.  :-)

>The only reason that some-one else would not make the discovery is
>if there were no reproduction.

Or no one else had the proper combination of insight and training in the
appropriate field.  Or the dedication (or fanaticism, or even simple
craziness) to explore a particular line of thought to a given
conclusion.

The idea that "when it's steam-train time, we'll start making
steam-trains", is a well honored one, but it's not a universal
principle.  It may be true in some cases, but it may not in others. 
There may be cases where one individual's insight proves crucial.  (We
still haven't figured out Fermat's Last Theorem, for example.)  There
are probably tons of wonderful inventions that have *almost* been made
throughout human history...  :-)

>Then in about one hundred years
>everyone would be dead, and there would be no progress.

Contrariwise, if everyone spent all their time making babies, within
about 100 years, everyone would be starving, because the technology
would no longer be sufficient to feed everyone.  :-)

> Progress,
>regardless of type of progress, is inevitable given the fact that we
>reproduce. It becomes merely a curiosity who invented something, the
>invention would have happened eventually anyway.

This is a highly debatable thesis, but it's unprovable one way or the
other.  It's partly based on a contrafactual idea:  if X hadn't invented
thingie, someone else would have.  But X did invent thingie. There's no
way to prove or disprove a contrafactual statement.  And then it
extrapolates: for all thingies, if some X hadn't invented that thingie,
someone ele would have.  There's no basis for this extrapolation--we
don't know that the class of all inventions is one that can be analyzed
in this manner.

But hell, I don't care, I still like Heinlein, and I still think that
people who think him sexist are silly.  :-)
-- 
Chris Waters    | the insane don't | "Imaginary guitar notes [...] exist only
xtifr@netcom.COM| need disclaimers |  in the imagination of the imaginer" --FZ
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written