Thomas Shaddack wrote:
On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, Neil Johnson wrote:
""Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!" -- Ben Franklin
And if they are all armed ? They all starve.
Lambs can eat grass, which is usually unarmed.
It is not. Grass is stuffed full of all sorts of complicated chemicals that can cause confusion to creatures that chomp it. Not to mention nassty little silica crystals. Lambs can eat grass because they are toughened and honed grass-killers, fitted by millions of years of evolution to survive everything the grass can throw at them. And even then they only cope with some kinds of grass. When a cat eats grass it gets sick. It doesn't take much intelligence to sneak up on a leaf, but it takes one hell of a digestive system to eat it. Us mammals are downstream of a 200-million-year evolutionary race between ourselves and green plants - they evolve a new poison, we evolve to tolerate it. Then we put it in hot drinks. Why else do so many plant compounds have such powerful drug effects on animals? At the time of writing there is no winner in sight. It isn't impossible to imagine one side winning in the end though. The plants really did beat the bacteria way back in the Palaeozoic - wood is about the only living tissue that bacteria can't eat. Which is why there is so much coal around. Fungi got the better of them later. Democracy tries to get the majority of participants through to the next round of the game. Natural selection kills nearly everybody, nearly all the time. Which is why it is so effective. But, given the choice, I'll take democracy. Trust me, I'm a botanist.