Completely imaginary flowers
Uncommon Descent has another ridiculous post. It claims that capitalism and business neither use evolutionary principles nor work the same way. The guts of the post is the claim that “[t]he fundamental basis of prosperous societies is co-operation, not competition.”
Now, I have covered previously how evolution and capitalism operate on the same principles, and hence show that conservatives who reject evolution cannot simultaneously accept capitalism, and I won’t repeat that post here. The key point is that cooperation, as well as competition, drives evolution. The process is called mutualism and is directly analogous to some relationships between entities in an economy, especially comparative advantage. Yet, O’Leary, the poster at UD, seems to be completely unaware of, or in denial about, mutualism. With the knowledge that mutualism does not exist, let’s see what the world is really like.
Human gut flora, which reside in our intestines where they help to digest food and synthesize vitamin K in a mutualistic relationship, don’t actually exist. This must be why everyone on the planet is half–starved due to bad digestion and nearly bleeding to death because of vitamin K deficiency.
And let’s not forget about the Great Orchid Hoax, perpetrated by botanists and taxonomists for centuries. As orchid seeds do not have endosperm, they are dependent on fungi to germinate, which eventually becomes a mutualistic relationship. However, as mutualism apparently does not exist, orchids do not exist. That’s why all of the 22,000–odd Orchidaceae species are not real, and those gorgeous monocots in the photograph above are just an illusion.
Photograph via the Wikimedia Commons.
