Paradox and Perfection

Paradoxes are problematic logical phenomena. For me they seem to signal a flaw in conceptualizing something. Hence, they beg to be solved. I think people intuitively view paradoxes as problematic. However things may seem, though, I'm not convinced paradoxes are necessarily a bad sign. Some how, I don't remember what led me to the subject, but I was thinking about the development of complex organisms. The issue I was rolling over in my mind was the idea that evolution leads to some species that are much better adapted to their environment than their predecessors. This isn't all evolution is, I realize, but a particular consequence of the evolutionary process in that given enough time complexity in species builds upon itself.

The problem is that evolution can accidentally be interpreted as a process bound for perfection. I think this very problem is another part of the intuitive misconception, however. The reason that evolution never aims for perfection is because evolution isn't a conscious entity It is merely a name given to a process conceptualized by organisms who suspect to have derived from the very process. Furthermore, and vital to understanding all life is that perfection isn't necessary. All that is necessary is "good enough". An organism doesn't need to function perfectly within it's environment to flourish, it very simply needs to function at a sufficient level that is conducive to its reproduction in the environment in which it inhabits.

The reason that an organism, a being so said to be "alive", only needs to be good enough means that paradoxes can arise within the system. Even complex organisms, the organisms that have developed through a long chain of evolutionary processes can inherit and even develop paradoxes within their existence. In fact, I would argue strongly that all life, in any case so based upon the idea of evolution, would ALWAYS contain paradoxes in accordance to its existence. Human beings are an obvious example, and actually the point of this discussion.

Human beings, I think, are rather arrogant by nature. We tend to think we are the cream of the evolutionary crop, that we are perhaps the pinnacle of evolutionary processes. Though we are members of the animal kingdom, according to very well developed and highly scrutinized models of biology, we tend to view ourselves as separate from other animals. We really are the most complex organisms that we yet know of, even as far as we know about the universe (which is actually immeasurably small). So, who's left to judge our arrogance but our own consciences? Still, to say that someone was "treated like an animal" is to say that someone was treated very poorly. To say that someone's behavior is "animalistic" is to say that someone is behaving very terribly - unhumanly. Yet we cannot escape the fact that we are animals and that we are not perfect individually nor are we perfect as a species, we simply got lucky in the evolutionary lottery and ended up as a dominant species on planet Earth.

So that we are imperfect inhabitants of the universe we live within the realm of paradoxes. I'm sure there are many many paradoxes in human life and there is still the potential for more to develop, however, some that have become evident to me, which serve as examples to my post, can be listed as follows: the futility of life, social individuals, justice/fairness, and consciousness.