Sin 2 :)

[Darkness_Falls]

Wrong. It could also be a place where things do not require time to happen, they simply happen wthout any time having to pass. IN this universe, time is just the result if a photon tavels from point A to point B, but in another universe that photon could travel from one point to any other point instantaniously, and therefore time would not be necessary. IT could also be a universe where time happens in random pockets, or loops back on itself so there is no begining or end.

Your original point is that there cannot have been a creator, but there could easily have been a creator of this universe

Time: "A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future."

 

By our definition of time, it just exists. It's part of a continuum that keeps progressing through the future forever. I kinda don't think it would be possible for time to loop back on itself or only exist in pockets. It's everywhere at once and it doesn't give preference to distance or space.

 

I'm open-minded though and think anything is possible. Maybe we just haven't discovered everything there is to know about time yet.

[oDDity]

Well that's what I've been saying in this thread. Don't make up our mind one way or the other, because we simply don't have all the facts, or even 1% of all the facts.

That's what religious people do, they make up their minds 100% - which is a risible position, and that's why I despise them and everything they stand for.

Agnosticism is the only logical position.

[sparhawk]

Of course we are better than all other species on the planett, and for one very simple reason - we can choose our own fate, where every other species has its fate choosen by nature.

 

Well. That shows how ignorant you are concerning nature. We may have more influence than other species, but we ar edefinitely not independent from nature, and we never will, because we are always part of nature.

 

We are no longer fully part of natural evolution, since we're now tampering with our own genes and using our intelligence and logic to make deliberate decision about our own future, so for us evolution is no longer random, and we very much have goals and purpose of our own.

 

That doesn't change evolution. There are enough examples, even in our own body, which manipulates genes. We are on a higher order, but we will never be outside.

 

And don't say 'but we're a product of evolution, so it's still working through us and anything we do still conforms to the wishes of evolution'

 

There is no such thing as "wishes of evoluiton".

 

We are not the physical enbodiment of nature, and we are not here to carry out its work.

 

LOL

 

We happily contradict natural laws and go against nature, we can truly choose to do anything that's possible to do, and if it's impossible we'll set up computer simulations of it or dream about it while asleep and experience it that way.

 

Where exactly do we contradict natural laws? Care to show some examples?

 

We're the result of one or more freak mutations, and as you say yourself, nature has no way of predicting what evolution will throw up, and so we are an entirely unexpected phenomenon and could well be unique in the universe,  depending on how small the probability of intelligent life evolving is.

 

I doubt that evolution of life in general and intelligence especially is so uncommon. We already have two species which are extremly intelligent on our own planet. We were lucky that we evolved faster, so the other species will sooner or later die out. Luckily it doesn't die because of us, but because of the way the evolved.

 

It could be so staggeringly small for such a series of random events to happen in the correct order, that it's only happened this once.

 

On the contrary, the basics of life, as we are built upon, seem to have quite a good chance to occur in space.

 

On the other hand, it could be the inevitable outcome of almost any ecosystem on any planet that has one.

 

I don't think on any planet, but personally I think that life is much more available than we may think.

[sparhawk]

Don't be ridiculous, they have absolutely no control of anything, all it takes is one metor impact that destroys the Earth and they're all dead, whereas we could stop that meteor before it hits*,

 

You shouldn't get your education from bad movies. It's fun to watch Bruce Willies to save earth (or usually the americans in general), but that wouldn't work. A meteor the size which impacted on Venus a few years ago, would wreak havoc on earth, and all we could do, would be to hide in caves. You don't really think that we have the nucelar power to destroy such a meteor, much less put this power into space. The rockets that we have can carry a few missiles, but they wont even scratch such a thing.

 

All other species will die along with the Earth, but we are not limited in that way, in fact, the only other creatures that survive will be the ones that we decide should live.

 

Sure. I remember an experiment, where scientists tried to set up an totally independent ecosystem, and they failed miserably, because they are just scratching on the surface of what is really needed to survive in outer space. And don't count our spacestations, because they are not autark.

[sparhawk]

The extent of global warming and over-use of pollution and such doesn't exactly make a strong case for human intelligence.

 

Well, at least we are not alone in that respect.

 

As to the global warming. Somehow I doubt that we are really the bad guys who did this. After all it is not the first time in earths history that the planet was warm, and 50Mio years ago, it was MUCH warmer than it is now.

[Maximius]

But Oddity life only cares about one thing, that survival. The fact we can do all the admittedly unique things we can do doesnt mean they are going to necessarily lend themselves to long term survival for the species. I agree our intelligence does give us a **degree** of freedom in the world and over our immediate surroundings but its far from absolute. And that freedom may be our downfall as has been pointed out. Nothing is assured.

 

According to one biologist, it is jellyfish which have the honor of being the most successful lifeforms on Earth, as they are found everywhere and in the highest numbers. I guess insects would win on land. Oh and by the way when the next impact event takes place, like a comet or asteroid, which we are overdue for by about 15 million years, it wont be us left standing.

[Maximius]

Well, at least we are not alone in that respect.

 

As to the global warming. Somehow I doubt that we are really the bad guys who did this. After all it is not the first time in earths history that the planet was warm, and 50Mio years ago, it was MUCH warmer than it is now.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

There is strong evidence to indicate that past global warmings were the result of natural processes like vulcanism, the sun being in a much more energetic state (known as the T Tauri phase), different atmospheric chemistry.

 

There is a preponderance of evidence that the current warming is caused by us. No other factors can account for the rate and severity. Perhaps the greatest evidence of all is the fact that oil companies and coal companies are finally beginning to admit somethings up. Of course, W the Clown and his energy cronies are still in denial, but receding glaciers and rising ocean levels dont lie.

[sparhawk]

The warming itself is not really a prove. As I said, there were times (I think in Pleistocene(?)) where it was MUCH warmer than any temperature we have now. The speed is another issue, of course, but then again, what we know about such old times has a resolution of many thousand years, so we can not really say, that we are speeding the temperature up much more than ever before, because this may even itself out after some time as well. And if you look at a statistics for a few thousand years, our current peak would be very tiny.

As for the oil. I guess this is sorted out in a few years by itself.

[oDDity]

Well. That shows how ignorant you are concerning nature. We may have more influence than other species, but we ar edefinitely not independent from nature, and we never will, because we are always part of nature.

 

What kind of a pointless reply is that to make? WHy even bother replying just to say that crap? I didn't even make that statement.

I said 'we are no longer fully part of natural evolution, unlike all like all other species, we have started to direct our own affairs, but of course we will still be naturally evolving at the same time. The difference is that we will soon have the imformation and technolgy available to direct our own evolution through DNA manipulation.

Once you introduce intelligent and logical decison making to a random system, the system is no longer random

We are no longer random.

That doesn't change evolution. There are enough examples, even in our own body, which manipulates genes. We are on a higher order, but we will never be outside.

There is no such thing as "wishes of evoluiton".

THat's exactly what I was pointing out, I was telling people not to try and make that argument. I think you need to go brush up on you English a little more. Either that or use a english-german online translator before you try and get involved in complex arguments, I think you'd make more sense that way

 

Where exactly do we contradict natural laws? Care to show some examples?

Ok, I didn't think it was necessary to give examples, but for the benefit of the drooling idiots among us, I'll point some out.

Humans can condradict the first law of nature, which is survival. We can choose to take our own lives, and regularly do so.

We can abstain from food and drink, people have killed themselves that way, we can abstain from sex, which is the second law of natiure- to procreate, many people make a decision and remain celebate their entire lives.

Take any natural law, and we can choose to ignore it or do the exact opposite. We weren't born with wings, but we fly in the sky, we fly to the moon , we explore the bottom of the oceans...

All other species can only do what they've been programmed to do by nature. We have complete free will, and can do anything we wish, even if it directly contradicts nature

I doubt that evolution of life in general and intelligence especially is so uncommon. We already have two species which are extremly intelligent on our own planet. We were lucky that we evolved faster, so the other species will sooner or later die out. Luckily it doesn't die because of us, but because of the way the evolved.

On the contrary, the basics of life, as we are built upon, seem to have quite a good chance to occur in space.

Basics of life does not equal intelligent and sentient life. It took 5 billion years and many, many different species and a lot of random events like mass extictions for us to eventually appear. It's by no means a certainty that any planet with life per se will go on to develop sentient life. We have no idea what the chances of it are, so you can do nothing but guess.

IF we were to find another planet with sentient life, it would instantly make the probablity very high, since 2 out of 2 means a lot, but at the moment all we have is 1 out of 1, and that means absolutely nothing, apart from the fact that it is actually possible, even if the chances are so small that it would only happen once in a billion universes.

I hope you're not counting whales as intelligent. Whales swim around the fucking sea all day with their mouth open, sucking plankton down, and they can't even breathe under water - that's the equilvilent of a land animal having to carry a bucket of water around everwhere in order to tka e a breath. I don't care what size their brains are.

There is no indication that they will ever amount to anything other than huge blue turds floating around the oceans.

 

 

You shouldn't get your education from bad movies.  It's fun to watch Bruce Willies to save earth (or usually the americans in general), but that wouldn't work. A meteor the size which impacted on Venus a few years ago, would wreak havoc on earth, and all we could do, would be to hide in caves. You don't really think that we have the nucelar power to destroy such a meteor, much less put this power into space. The rockets that we have can carry a few missiles, but they wont even scratch such a thing.

Like I said in my post, we don't currently have the technolgy to do it, but we soon will have.

And it wouldn't be done by blowing it up, dumbass, that would just make thousands of smaller asteroid which would still hit us, it would be done by either attaching large solar sails to divert the object with the force of the solar wind, installing mass drivers powered by photovoltaics or nuclear power, detonating nuclear explosives near the surface of the object to change its course or firing powerful laser pulses at the object from a moon base to ablate spots on its surface and change its course., and since large impacts nly happen on average once every 100,000 years, there's virtually no chance of it happening befpre we have the technology to stop it.

There are already massive programs underway dealing with detecting and tagging NEOs.

 

Sure. I remember an experiment, where scientists tried to set up an totally independent ecosystem, and they failed miserably, because they are just scratching on the surface of what is really needed to survive in outer space. And don't count our spacestations, because they are not autark.

 

Well that's hardly a problem well have to worry about for another 5 billion years.

The sun isn't going to burn out next week.

I'll stick my neck out and say that by the time we need it in 5 billion years time, we have the technology to do it.

[oDDity]

But Oddity life only cares about one thing, that survival. The fact we can do all the admittedly unique things we can do doesnt mean they are going to necessarily lend themselves to long term survival for the species. I agree our intelligence does give us a **degree** of freedom in the world and over our immediate surroundings but its far from absolute. And that freedom may be our downfall as has been pointed out. Nothing is assured.

 

According to one biologist, it is jellyfish which have the honor of being the most successful lifeforms on Earth, as they are found everywhere and in the highest numbers. I guess insects would win on land. Oh and by the way when the next impact event takes place, like a comet or asteroid, which we are overdue for by about 15 million years, it wont be us left standing.

Distribution means nothing. That is not a measure o success, nor is diversity, or bacteria would win.

There's not much point in being diverse or successful, if you're just a floating piece of mindless shit.

Expansion is the measure of success and humans do that more than any other creature. We will expand out to the stars eventually. No other species can even hope to leave the habitat they evolved in, nevermind leave Earth.

I dont' see any point in predicting that we might all kill each other becasue we're too smart for our own good. Yes, we might, but then again we might outlive the universe itself. (if it keeps expanding rather than contracts again)

I'm sure by that time we'll have artificial power sources to live off, after all other motion in the universe stops and reaches absolute zero.

[sparhawk]

That's exactly what I was pointing out, I was telling people not to try and make that argument. I think you need to go brush up on you English a little more. Either that or use a english-german online translator before you try and get involved in complex arguments, I think you'd make more sense that way

 

I will as soon as you promise to get educated on evolution.

 

Humans can condradict the first law of nature, which is survival. We can choose to take our own lives, and regularly do so.

 

Oh! You mean like certain cells, which also can take their live under proper conditions. I see. So we and certain cells are violating law of the nature (whatever that's supposed to be) because we can choose to suicide.

 

We can abstain from food and drink, people have killed themselves that way,

 

You mean like other animals as well, which also can show such behaviour. Especially when some close relationship has gone. Yes. There are other animals as well, who can do this.

 

we can abstain from sex, which is the second law of natiure- to procreate, many people make a decision and remain celebate their entire lives.

 

Don't an an example right, now, but I wouldn't be surprised, if there is one. After all, we are just animals as well, and we ar enot THAt different from other social animals, even though we think we are far superior because we can talk and read.

 

BTW: What you mentioned above are not "laws".

 

Take any natural law, and we can choose to ignore it or do the exact opposite. We weren't born with wings, but we fly in the sky, we fly to the moon , we explore the bottom of the oceans...

 

Which of course is also not a "law". There are other animals as well using tools. Because this is what we are doing. We are not violating any "laws" we are using tools. Of course we are the fastest species on our planet to do so, so we have an advantage there.

 

All other species can only do what they've been programmed to do by nature.

 

Which of course is wrong. Either that, or we are doing the same.

 

We have complete free will, and can do anything we wish, even if it directly contradicts nature

 

I would like to see a prove of this free will. There is no such thing. We can assume that we have a free will, but a dog has also a free will in it's own environment.

 

Basics of life does not equal intelligent and sentient life. It took 5 billion years and many, many different species and a lot of random events like mass extictions for us to eventually appear. It's by no means a certainty that any planet with life per se will go on to develop sentient life. We have no idea what the chances of it are, so you can do nothing but guess.

 

Of course we can only guess. BUt we can do educated guesses. Considering how evolution works, I wouldn't be surprised to see other sentient live as well. And considering that we already have two highly evolved species, and many others capable of abstract thinking, I don't think that this is SUCH a rare occurence anyway. We were happen to be the first and fastest evolver, so we won the race on this planet (for now). But evoluiton does not work randomly. At least not on such a scale as you imply.

 

IF we were to find another planet with sentient life, it would instantly make the probablity very high, since 2 out of 2 means a lot, but at the moment all we have is 1 out of 1, and that means absolutely nothing, apart from the fact that it is actually possible, even if the chances are so small that it would only happen once in a billion universes.

 

How do you know that the chances are so small? I think that the chances are much higher than you think. Simply because evolution is more or less an arms race, so IMO this is bound to happen.

 

I hope you're not counting whales as intelligent.

 

I was not thinking of whales. Even so, in terms of evolution, intelligence is not what WE make it, intelligence is how you can adapt to an environment or situation. This means that there is no dumb animal, because they managed to adapt to their respective environment.

 

And it wouldn't be done by blowing it up, dumbass, that would just make thousands of smaller asteroid which would still hit us, it would be done by either attaching large solar sails to divert the object with the force of the solar wind, installing mass drivers powered by photovoltaics or nuclear power, detonating nuclear explosives near the surface of the object to change its course or firing powerful laser pulses at the object from a moon base to ablate spots on its surface and change its course., and since large impacts nly happen on average once every 100,000 years, there's virtually no chance of it happening befpre we have the technology to stop it.

There are already massive programs underway dealing with detecting and tagging NEOs.

 

Well, at least you made me laugh a lot today. Thanks.

 

Well that's hardly a problem well have to worry about for another 5 billion years.

The sun isn't going to burn out next week.

I'll stick my neck out and say that by the time we need it in 5 billion years time, we have the technology to do it.

 

I assume so.

[obscurus]

Humans can condradict the first law of nature, which is survival. We can choose to take our own lives, and regularly do so.

We can abstain from food and drink, people have killed themselves that way, we can abstain from sex, which is the second law of natiure- to procreate, many people make a decision and remain celebate their entire lives.

Take any natural law, and we can choose to ignore it or do the exact opposite. We weren't born with wings, but we fly in the sky, we fly to the moon , we explore the bottom of the oceans...

All other species can only do what they've been programmed to do by nature. We have complete free will, and can do anything we wish, even if it directly contradicts nature

 

I am a Biologist by training and trade, and a lot of the preceding posts have given me cause to LOL especially this one... There are no "Laws" of nature other than the laws of physics. I can think of several examples of organisms killing themselves, eg bees defending the hive, whales beaching...

Captive whales and dolphins have been known to get very depressed and to simply stop breathing, thereby killing themselves....

Actually, all organisms are programmed to die - the ageing process is deliberately triggered so that organisms make way for their offspring. Example: mice in the wild have an almost certain chance of being eaten before they reach one year of age. The chance of a wild mouse living to be over one year is something like 1 in 100000000. Repairing oxidative cellular damage takes a lot of metabolic energy, and if you have almost no chance of living beyond a year of age anyway, it makes more sense to put all of your energy into producing as many offspring as you can before an owl or a cat gets you. So the natural life of a mouse is limited. They can live for up to 3 years in a laboratory, but that is a controlled environment with a constant supply of food, no predators and an optimum climate. Death is certain, life is not.

 

Nature is full of examples of animals doing things that contradict their normal instincts for no apparent reason. I recently watched a documentary about a wild lioness who protected and nursed a baby antelope, even though it was her natural prey, and she had nothing else to eat (in the end another lion ate the antelope, and the lioness was quite undernourished by this stage). Humans choosing not to procreate are doing the species removing their defective genes from the genepool, but they are not contradicting any natural law. Humans have evolved to adapt to their environment by modifying their environment, so our instincts are to tinker with things. Our brains have been given a long leash by our instincts, but the price we pay for that is that our brains sometimes bite us in the arse.

 

Whales swim around the fucking sea all day with their mouth open, sucking plankton down, and they can't even breathe under water - that's the equilvilent of a land animal having to carry a bucket of water around everwhere in order to tka e a breath. I don't care what size their brains are.

Not all whales eat plankton - you are thinking only of the rorqual whales, not the toothed whales, which are much more sophisticated predators. Dolphins have been documented using tools (male dolphins especially - they have a prehensile penis, and they use it for all kinds of things). Actually, dophins and whales breathe air for a very good reason - there is not enough oxygen dissolved in water to maintain a mammalian metabolism, so to have all the advantages of being a mammal they need to breathe air.

...and since large impacts nly happen on average once every 100,000 years, there's virtually no chance of it happening befpre we have the technology to stop it.

 

You are forgetting one thing... we are statistically "overdue" for one of those one in 100 000 year impacts, so it could happen any day... the chances of spotting an object before it is too late are slim. Here in Australia, the government has scrapped all plans to track NEOs and this means that combined with the similar lack of effort in South America and Africa, the Southern Hemisphere is not being screened at all. Anything coming in below the equator will be missed, but don't think that makes the Northern hemisphere safe - a big asteroid will fuck everything up with a huge amount of dust blocking out the sun globally, and if it hits the Pacific ocean, the US, Canada, South America, and Asia will be swamped with massive Tsunamis... same deal for the Atlantic or Indian oceans. Ther could be a massive asteroid headed right for us and we could have no idea - no-one is looking for them in over half of the world.

 

Well that's hardly a problem well have to worry about for another 5 billion years.

The sun isn't going to burn out next week.

I'll stick my neck out and say that by the time we need it in 5 billion years time, we have the technology to do it.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

The sun has five billion years, but it will only be a billion before the sun has expanded to a size that makes life on earth impossible, and dries up the oceans. But we have problems before then: the Earth's magnetic field has at most another 100 000 to 100 million years before it becomes too weak to hold onto the Earth's atmosphere and block out a large chunk of solar radiation. But no-one really knows if it will go sooner than that (it could go next week). And there are a number of other processes, some natural, some human induced that could potentially make Earth uninhabitable to all life except bacteria within decades (like super-volcanism). It is a matter of chance, and the odds are not in our favour, this planet is getting old. If it were a person, the Earth is the equivalent of being about 65 - ready for retirement, but it still has a few good years left if it is treated nicely and looked after. But if you think we have time to be complacent about things, you are wrong, we need to start building a serious space travel program soon if we want our species to persist beyond a few million years at most. Our only chance is to spread out across the universe, so that anytime a planet bites the big one, there are several more populated with humans and other life to keep on going...

 

But it is all moot anyway since the universe will eventually become uninhabitable...

[Springheel]

if we want our species to persist beyond a few million years at most.

 

The speed of technological process is faster today than could be imagined a century ago. It would take quite a long list to cover the things we can do today that would have been considered impossible, or magical, a hundred years ago. We can barely comprehend what our species could be capable of in another hundred years. Trying to imagine even a thousand years ahead is completely impossible. Talking about a million years from now is meaningless.

[obscurus]

Well, quite. I don't think there is much point in speculating as to what the world will be like in 100 years let alone a million, other than to say that we shouldn't assume this planet is safe, or that it will go on sustaining our species in spite of our abuse towards it. So, as a precaution, we should start settling other planets in whatever way possible as soon as we can, so we haven't got all our eggs in one basket. And we should take care of this planet in case it is the only basket around we can put our eggs in...

 

BTW, a lot of people are confused about the word "sentient". Sentient means the ability to perceive through the senses, and just about every organism from bacteria to pine trees to blue whales and even humans are sentient. What people usually mean by sentient is "sapient", which means thinking. Even so, prety much all vertebrates and cephalopods have demosntrated sapience to at least a basic degree, and a wide range of animals (dolphins, elephants, pigs, parrots, apes etc) have demonstated a capcity for sophisticated high order abstract thinking. In fact there is no single characteristic of human beings that makes us special or unique with regards to intelligence. Humans excel at a few specific aspects of that vague thing people refer to as "intelligence", but we have exagerated the importance of them to make ourselves feel special.

[oDDity]

Obscurus Wrote -

 

"I am a Biologist by training and trade, and a lot of the preceding posts have given me cause to LOL especially this one... There are no "Laws" of nature other than the laws of physics. "

 

I was refering to the laws of evolution, which, fair enough, aren't technically laws since they can't be proven, but they are the accetped theory. There's no point in being pedantic about it.

 

  I can think of several examples of organisms killing themselves, eg bees defending the hive

That's programmed behaviour, they have no chocie in the matter. It's not suicide.

 

whales beaching...

Captive whales and dolphins have been known to get very depressed and to simply stop breathing, thereby killing themselves....

It's not known if there is a physical of a psychological effect though, or if it's a natural reaction. You cannot say it's a deliberate decision they make to kill themselves. And are you suggesting that whales deliberately beach themselves in order to commit suicide?

Actually, all organisms are programmed to die - the ageing process is deliberately triggered so that organisms make way for their offspring.  Example:  mice in the wild have an almost certain chance of being eaten before they reach one year of age.  The chance of a wild mouse living to be over one year is something like 1 in 100000000.  Repairing oxidative cellular damage takes a lot of metabolic energy, and if you have almost no chance of living beyond a year of age anyway, it makes more sense to put all of your energy into producing as many offspring as you can before an owl or a cat gets you.  So the natural life of a mouse is limited.  They can live for up to 3 years in a laboratory, but that is a controlled environment with a constant supply of food, no predators and an optimum climate.  Death is certain, life is not.

THat's all irrelivant to the discussion, I don't know why you brought it up. It's all programmed behaviour. My very point is that we are not programmed - unless we are programmed to be able to do *anything* we want in any possible situation..in which case my point stands that we are no longer fully part of evolution, since conscious decision making overrides and distorts the randomness of evolution, in which all other species are trapped.

 

 

Nature is full of examples of animals doing things that contradict their normal instincts for no apparent reason.  I recently watched a documentary about a wild lioness who protected and nursed a baby antelope, even though it was her natural prey, and she had nothing else to eat (in the end another lion ate the antelope, and the lioness was quite undernourished by this stage).

THat's not going against the grain of her instinct. All females have a very stong instinct to raise young. THis lioness for some reason has latched onto this young animal as she would a lion cub, she did not recognise it as food and then *decide* not to eat it and nurture it instead - there's a very big difference between the two implications. Babies of all species will latch onto any animal as their mother in the absence of their real parent, and this is just that process in reverse. It's an individual flaw in that particular lioness, not inherent to the species, and therefore irrelivant. It's an amusing anecdote, something cute to show on television, nothing more. It could have been set up for all you know.

 

Humans choosing not to procreate are doing the species removing their defective genes from the genepool,

 

That's nonsense. If that was the case, then there would be none left, the gene would have been bred out long ago, unless you're saying that the same mutasnt gene which cause people not to want to breed keeps randomly appearing in every generation. People who choose not to procreate are not some sort of weird mutants, they make the decison for psycholocical or philosophical reasons. Sir Issac Newton was most proud of the fact that he remained a virgin throughout his life, and he's one of the most important figures in scientific histoiry, hardly someone who deserved to be removed from the gene pool.

 

but they are not contradicting any natural law.  Humans have evolved to adapt to their environment by modifying their environment, so our instincts are to tinker with things.  Our brains have been given a long leash by our instincts, but the price we pay for that is that our brains sometimes bite us in the arse

We havent been given 'a long leash', we have the abiliity to completely override our instincts and do the exact opposite in any situation. THere's bit of a difference.

 

 

Not all whales eat plankton - you are thinking only of the rorqual whales, not the toothed whales, which are much more sophisticated predators. Dolphins have been documented using tools (male dolphins especially - they have a prehensile penis, and they use it for all kinds of things).  Actually, dophins and whales breathe air for a very good reason - there is not enough oxygen dissolved in water to maintain a mammalian metabolism, so to have all the advantages of being a mammal they need to breathe air.

It doesn't matter what they eat, their lives still consist entirely of floating around the sea eating and shitting. You say they have intelligence, but what do they use it for? You don't need intelligence to catch fish, and even less to catch plankton.

I can see how dolphins could have developed higher brain functionality, they probably had to adapt a lot to incorporate sonar, but the only thing I can think of for whales is that thier brains are just so damn big they'd automatical;ly have some intelligence.

It's actually one of the oddest parts of evolution for me, why these once land animals would have regressed back to living the existence of a fish. IT took us long enough to crawl out of the oceans in the first place, and mammals are clearly a higher order.

 

You are forgetting one thing... we are statistically "overdue" for one of those one in 100 000 year impacts, so it could happen any day... the chances of spotting an object before it is too late are slim.  Here in Australia, the government has scrapped all plans to track NEOs and this means that combined with the similar lack of effort in South America and Africa, the Southern Hemisphere is not being screened at all.  Anything coming in below the equator will be missed, but don't think that makes the Northern hemisphere safe - a big asteroid will fuck everything up with a huge amount of dust blocking out the sun globally, and if it hits the Pacific ocean, the US, Canada, South America, and Asia will be swamped with massive Tsunamis... same deal for the Atlantic or Indian oceans.  Ther could be a massive asteroid headed right for us and we could have no idea - no-one is looking for them in over half of the world.

 

Well, the dopey Aussie government may be lounging around beside the barbecue, but your somewhat moe intelliegent Kiwi cousins have got an NEO observation program. And *you* forget the thoushands of amatuer astronomers, many of which have quite sophisicated equipment and can't even be called amateur. THe skies are being well watched, dont' worry about hat.

Let's face it. not too many people would be bothered if the meteor wiped out Australia anyway...

Even if a major hit did occur, I doubt that every single human would die, we're rather more rescouful than those poor dinosaurs. Most of our knowledge would remain intact, so it's not as if we'd have to start from scratch, we'd come back quite quicky.

BTW, a lot of people are confused about the word "sentient". Sentient means the ability to perceive through the senses, and just about every organism from bacteria to pine trees to blue whales and even humans are sentient.

 

Again your misplaced pedancy is annoying. Sentient, like a lot of English words has several meanings, one of which is the ability to react to stimuli, and the other is consciousness, self awareness, comphrehension, cognizance. They obviosuly don't have dictionaries in biology classes.

 

Humans excel at a few specific aspects of that vague thing people refer to as "intelligence", but we have exagerated the importance of them to make ourselves feel special.

Lol - we are at the top of the food chain, you can't get any more superior than that in an ecosystem.

Damn. Biologists aren't trained very well these days, are they?

 

THe whole point I'm trying to get acroos, is that nature didn't make us top of the food chain, many animals would slaughter and eat us if we fought them bare handed, but we have invented ways of *making ourselves* top of the food chain.

[Gildoran]

That's nonsense. If that was the case, then there would be none left, the gene would have been bred out long ago, unless you're saying that the same mutasnt gene which cause people not to want to breed keeps randomly appearing in every generation.  People who choose not to procreate are not some sort of  weird mutants, they make the decison for psycholocical or philosophical reasons. Sir Issac Newton was most proud of the fact that he remained a virgin throughout his life, and he's one of the most important figures in scientific histoiry, hardly someone who deserved to be removed from the gene pool.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Not true. Often times genes that appear purely negative have positive side effects that keep them in a population. For example, take sickle-cell anemia... It's a very debilitating disease and you would expect it to have been bred out a long time ago, and yet it still persists in tropical developing nations. Why? Because it's recessive and if only one of your parents had the genes for sickle-cell anemia you're immune to malaria. Thus the genes that cause it are very useful to the population in general, and only occasionally combine to harm a specific individual.

 

Is it so hard to imagine a similar style of genes that make one smarter, more industrious or some such, but decrease the chances of wanting to reproduce? Most of the time people with the genes would have an evolutionary advantage, but sometimes they combine to form a person who weeds themself out of the genepool.

 

An example of something sort of similar to that would be manic-depressive people. Many great artists and entrepreneurs are so successful because of being manic depressive, but they're also more prone to suicide.

 

It's actually one of the oddest parts of evolution for me, why these once land animals would have regressed back to living the existence of a fish. IT took us long enough to crawl out of the oceans in the first place, and mammals are clearly a higher order.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

A common misconception about evolution is that it's some kind of ladder with species evolving up to the top, from worm to fish to reptile to mammal. And humans naturally love to put themselves at the top of that ladder. Rather, a much more accurate way to think of evolution is like a top-down cross-section of a bush, with species diverging and heading out from the center as time passes. All surviving species at a given time are equally evolved.

 

There is nothing that makes land creatures inherently superior to sea creatures. That's patently stupid. It's like saying "creatures that live in conifer forests are more evolved than creatures that live in deciduous forests". The ocean is just another place to live. If there's more food or less predators there than on land, it makes perfect sense for a land creature to evolve into a sea creature.

[oDDity]

I will as soon as you promise to get educated on evolution.

Oh! You mean like certain cells, which also can take their live under proper conditions. I see. So we and certain cells are violating law of the nature (whatever that's supposed to be) because we can choose to suicide.

Death *happens to* certain cells automatically under certain conditions. We do not do it automatically, we make a concious decision to do it. If you can't see the difference, then there's no hope for you.

 

After all, we are just animals as well, and we ar enot THAt different from other social animals, even though we think we are far superior because we can talk and read.

Our ability to communicate abstract information and passs it on to the next generation is a large part of what has made us advance so quickly. It'd an essential skill for any advanced species.

 

BTW: What you mentioned above are not "laws".

Which of course is also not a "law". There are other animals as well using tools. Because this is what we are doing. We are not violating any "laws" we are using tools. Of course we are the fastest species on our planet to do so, so we have an advantage there.

I'm refering to the laws of evoluiton, which aren't actually laws, no, but they are the widely accepted theory.

Other animals use tools, but that does not automatically indicate sentience, only a degree of intelligence. Sophisticated tool use requires a specialized way to manipulate the tool, and no other animal has that. THe species would also require a way to communicate abstract ideas and pass them on to future generations, if it want's to reach our level

Which of course is wrong. Either that, or we are doing the same.

We *are* doing the same. The diofference is that our 'programming' gives us the complete free will to do literally anything. THat's what makes us so superior.

I would like to see a prove of this free will. There is no such thing. We can assume that we have a free will, but a dog has also a free will in it's own environment.

It has only free will within the range of behavioural traits and instincts given to it by nature. We have limitless free will. There is literally nothing that we can't choose to do.if we want to.

 

Of course we can only guess. BUt we can do educated guesses. Considering how evolution works, I wouldn't be surprised to see other sentient live as well. And considering that we already have two highly evolved species, and many others capable of abstract thinking, I don't think that this is SUCH a rare occurence anyway. We were happen to be the first and fastest evolver, so we won the race on this planet (for now). But evoluiton does not work randomly. At least not on such a scale as you imply.

 

Of course it does. It is driven by random mutation. That is how speices change, evolve and adapt. Random mutation is the essential drving force.

We no longer only evolve and adapt by random mutation, we discover knowlegde, build machines to help us, and invent new techology to extend our lifespans, and improve our chances of survival.

The other speices with a chance of developing sentience is perhaps chimpanzees, but we share a common ancestor anyway, and they live lives very similar to that of early sentience humanoids, so that would not be so much of a surprise. Other branches of hominid had sentience.

How do you know that the chances are so small? I think that the chances are much higher than you think. Simply because evolution is more or less an arms race, so IMO this is bound to happen.

 

You think, I think, it doesn't matter. Their is no evidence to point either way. Like I say, one example is meaningless.

I was not thinking of whales. Even so, in terms of evolution, intelligence is not what WE make it, intelligence is how you can adapt to an environment or situation. This means that there is no dumb animal, because they managed to adapt to their respective environment.

We adapt using deliberate decision making, not by natural selection and survival of the fittest. That means we can adapt very quicky where other advanced species take thousands of years. Bacteria adapt more quickly than us simply because of their sheer numbers and rate of reproduciton cycle, one of the mutations is bound to be the right one.

Once we achived sentience we forever broke away from pure natiral evoluiton, nature did not make us what we are in the 21st cebntury, we did it ourselves.

We are the dominant species, at the top of the food chain, and that automatcally means that we are superior to every other species. THere is no argument to be had.

Well, at least you made me laugh a lot today. Thanks.

Little amuses the simple. ignorance is bliss, etc. I'm sure you're *very* happy.

[Gildoran]

BTW, given your opinions on whales and dolphins and such, I thought this quote from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy seemed fitting:

 

On the planet earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

 

Am I saying dolphins are smarter than us? No, but I think this quote is still an interesting and humorous way to look at things.

[oDDity]

Not true. Often times genes that appear purely negative have positive side effects that keep them in a population. For example, take sickle-cell anemia... It's a very debilitating disease and you would expect it to have been bred out a long time ago, and yet it still persists in tropical developing nations. Why? Because it's recessive and if only one of your parents had the genes for sickle-cell anemia you're immune to malaria. Thus the genes that cause it are very useful to the population in general, and only occasionally combine to harm a specific individual.

That's hardly the same thing. Siclke cell anemia does does not stop people from breeding. A gene that stopped people from wanting to breed would have a hard time surviving.

Anyway, I'm saying that it isn't a gene at all, it's the decision of a normal person who has no genetic deficency at all. It was obscurus who brougth up the gene argument.

 

A common misconception about evolution is that it's some kind of ladder with species evolving up to the top, from worm to fish to reptile to mammal. And humans naturally love to put themselves at the top of that ladder. Rather, a much more accurate way to think of evolution is like a top-down cross-section of a bush, with species diverging and heading out from the center as time passes. All surviving species at a given time are equally evolved.

 

Nonsense. Evoluiton is clearly creating more advanced species now than in the past. To take an extreme example - humans are more evolved and complex than the invertebrates that were the only life on eath in the past. Evolution has been producing more and more complex creatures since then, and we are the latest and most complex of all. You only have to look at our achievements to see that.

Put humans at any point in the past ans we wuld still have been at the top of the fod chain, and able to destory any other species.

We are the most complex species that has ever lived and would have dominated any other species from the past. THat tells me that species *are* getting more complex as time passes.

There is nothing that makes land creatures inherently superior to sea creatures.

 

Apart from the fact that the dominant species at the top of the food chain evolved on land and not in the sea, despite the fact that sea creatures had hundreds of millions of years more evolution that land animals.

 

On the planet earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

Yeah, I suppose that's why dolphins would do anythig you want them to if you thow them a fish - becasue they're so damn clever. They're no better than dogs that'll endlesly fetch a stick for you in return for a reward or becasue of training.

[Maximius]

The warming itself is not really a prove. As I said, there were times (I think in Pleistocene(?)) where it was MUCH warmer than any temperature we have now. The speed is another issue, of course, but then again, what we know about such old times has a resolution of many thousand years, so we can not really say, that we are speeding the temperature up much more than ever before, because this may even itself out after some time as well. And if you look at a statistics for a few thousand years, our current peak would be very tiny.

As for the oil. I guess this is sorted out in a few years by itself.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

Right, the Pleistocene was a lot warmer, for a lot of pretty well known reasons, including the fact that our Sun was in its T Tauri phase, MUCH more engergetic than today, the chemistry of the atmosphere was Green House Plus Plus, and there was about a zillion times the volcanic activity that you see today. Plus all those big ass dinosaurs farting around........

 

The warming is happening, there is no doubt. Thus my point about the petroleum and coal industries who have even admitted this to some degree. Jeepers, even that pile of shit newspaper USA TOday, or USELESS TODAY, has admitted it, though their editorial board attempted to retract the story.

 

The warming is attributable to our actions, this too is clear as there are no other symptoms like the ones mentioned above to assign the blame too. We know that our civilization produces wastes that increase the thermal retention of the atmosphere, and we know there are no other reasonble culprits to point the finger at. We know the Earths average temperature is rising. We know that sea levels are rising, that glaciers are receding. We know this is happening at an ever increasing rate of speed, from one year to the next. The Sun has not suddenly become wildly more energetic, despite the 11 year flare cycle, vulcanism is not widespread and continuous as it once was, and the chemicals we find in the air are clearly OUR chemicals, put there by combustion engines and mass industry/energy production.

 

That being said, any of that "knowledge" could be questioned and should. But the truth is the warming is happening and we are the most likely suspects. The *vast* majority of researchers believe this to be true, from all around the world.

So whatever the "actual" truth is, our leaders should be taking action to curb our impact, bottom line. This is slowly starting to happen but we cannot tell what the final impact on our environment will be. And we have to fight the parasites who control the oil, coal, and chemical industries as well, those who believe smokestack scrubbers are too much of an impediment to efficient production, those who replace one form of filth with another to make a quick buck while looking like heroes.

[obscurus]

I was refering to the laws of evolution, which, fair enough,  aren't technically laws since they can't be proven, but they are the accetped theory. There's no point in being pedantic about it.

 

You obviously have no understanding of evolutionary theory... Natural selection, genetic drift, sexual selection etc are not laws as such, they are the underlying mechanism which drives evolution along. But individual organisms will have varying capacities to ignore their genetic programing (and human beings are far from being alone in that regard).

 

It's not known if there is a physical of a psychological effect though, or if it's a natural reaction. You cannot say it's a deliberate decision they make to kill themselves. And are you suggesting that whales deliberately beach themselves in order to commit suicide?

 

The fact that dolphins and orcas will deliberately beach themselves to catch a prey item on the beach indicates they have full concious control of that activity. It is an entirely learned behaviour, and requires a high order of thought and planning to be able to beach and still get back in the water with the next wave. When healthy whales with no evidence of disease or stress beach themselves, and then beach themselves again when humans try to rescue them, making no attempt to rescue themselves, the logical conclusion is that they are deliberately committing suicide. Captive dolphins and killer whales do this often enough, there is no reason to assume wild whales would not do the same.

 

THat's all irrelivant to the discussion, I don't  know why you brought it up. It's all programmed behaviour. My very point is that we are not programmed - unless we are programmed to be able to do *anything* we want in any possible situation..in which case my point stands that we are no longer fully part of evolution, since conscious decision making overrides and distorts the randomness of evolution,  in which all other species are trapped.

 

If you think human beings in general are not slaves to their instincts, you are seriously deluded. We cannot do "anything" we want, we are constrained by our biology and the laws of physics as much as any other creature. We are very much a part of evolution, and by acting as though we are not, we are almost certainly consinging ourselves to the massive graveyard of failed evolutionary experiements.

The fact that a few isolated human individuals have defective instincts, or choose to override their instincts does not make us even slightly unique in the animal kingdom. Take just about any mammalian species, and you will be able to find an individual that does not follow the normal patterns of beaviour for that species. Humans are no different.

 

THat's not going against the grain of her instinct. All females have a very stong instinct to raise young. THis lioness for some reason has latched onto this young animal as she would a lion cub, she did not recognise it as food and then *decide* not to eat it and nurture it instead - there's a very big difference between the two implications. Babies of all species will latch onto any animal as their mother in the absence of their real parent, and this is just that process in reverse. It's an individual flaw in that particular lioness, not inherent to the species, and therefore irrelivant. It's an amusing anecdote, something cute to show on television, nothing more. It could have been set up for all you know.

 

And humans ignoring their own instincts are exhibiting a similar individual flaw, the human species demonstrates very clearly that we are as bound by our instincts as any other animal - just because a few individuals here and there choose something else does not change this.

 

 

 

  That's nonsense. If that was the case, then there would be none left, the gene would have been bred out long ago, unless you're saying that the same mutasnt gene which cause people not to want to breed keeps randomly appearing in every generation.  People who choose not to procreate are not some sort of  weird mutants, they make the decison for psycholocical or philosophical reasons. Sir Issac Newton was most proud of the fact that he remained a virgin throughout his life, and he's one of the most important figures in scientific histoiry, hardly someone who deserved to be removed from the gene pool.

We havent been given 'a long leash', we  have the abiliity to completely override our instincts and do the exact opposite in any situation. THere's bit of a difference.

 

You seem to be profoundly ignorant of the mechanisms of evolution and the genetics that underly the process. There are any number of random mutations that can affect human behaviour, and they can occur just about anywhere in the genome. And genes can persist in a population if having one copy is advantageous. Sickle cell anaemia is a good example - if you have one copy of the gene you will be resistant to malaria, if you have two you will die at a very young age, if you have none you will be normal but non-resistant to malaria.

 

Issaac Newton might have had a congenital defect not caused by any underlying gene, he could have had a random mutation that affected testosterone receptors, or he could have been an uncle, and chose to help out raising his siblings offspring. There are any number of possibilities.

 

It doesn't matter what they eat, their lives still consist entirely of floating around the sea eating and shitting. You say they have intelligence, but what do they use it for? You don't need intelligence to catch fish, and even less to catch plankton.

I can see how dolphins could have developed higher brain functionality, they probably had to adapt a lot to incorporate sonar, but the only thing I can think of for whales is that thier brains are just so damn big they'd automatical;ly have some intelligence.

It's actually one of the oddest parts of evolution for me, why these once land animals would have regressed back to living the existence of a fish. IT took us long enough to crawl out of the oceans in the first place, and mammals are clearly a higher order.

 

And what does your life consist of? Wandering around the land and shitting. Big difference. I don't know what whales use their brains for, I doubt it is all sonar processing, since bats do that with a much smaller brain, but they are highly social creatures with complex communication that resembles language. Maybe they discuss philosophy, who knows...

 

You are again displaying your ignorance of evolution... it is not a linear thing, with humans at the top. Evolutionary success can be measured by how succesful a species has been and for how long. Crocodilians are a great evolutionary success story, they have been around for over 200 million years barely changed. Bacteria have been around for 4+ Billion years, and will be around for billions of years longer than humans ever will. Humans have been around for a million years, and it looks very likely that we will make ourselves extinct in the next 100 years or so, so I would hardly call us an evolutionary success yet... We have been great for rats, pigeons, cockroaches, eagulls and bacteria though.

 

Well, the dopey Aussie government may be lounging around beside the barbecue, but your somewhat moe intelliegent Kiwi cousins  have got an NEO observation program. And *you* forget the thoushands of amatuer astronomers, many of which have quite sophisicated equipment and can't even be called amateur. THe skies are being well watched, dont' worry about hat.

Let's face it. not too many people would be bothered if the meteor wiped out Australia anyway...

Even if a major hit did occur, I doubt that every single human would die, we're rather more rescouful than those poor dinosaurs. Most of our knowledge would remain intact, so it's not as if we'd have to start from scratch, we'd come back quite quicky.

 

You obviously have no idea how hard it is to spot an asteroid. It is like looking for a needle in a haystack the size of mount everest. In case you didn't know, a tenth planet was recently added to the solar system. If we can miss aplanet after all this time, imagine how hard it is to spot an abject 1000th the size. The chance of an amateur astronomer spotting an asteroid/meteor before it is too late is virtually zero. We might survive, depending on the size of the impact, but human beings have generally discarded the low level survival skills in favour of buiding better televisions etc, so it remains to be seen how well we would cope.

 

Again your misplaced pedancy is annoying. Sentient, like a lot of English words has several meanings, one of which is the ability to react to stimuli, and the other is consciousness, self awareness,  comphrehension, cognizance. They obviosuly don't have dictionaries in biology classes.

Unfortunately, new meanings will often replace old ones, rendering the word useless for its original intended purpose. For a scientist, rigidly defined meanings of words are very important, and it has nothing to do with pedancy.

 

 

Lol - we are at the top of the food chain, you can't get any more superior than that in an ecosystem.

Damn. Biologists aren't trained very well these days, are they?

 

We are not at the top of the food chain, bacteria are. And being near the top of the food chain doesn't make you superior, in fact it is a very precarious place to be, as you are the first species to go if there is an ecological disaster. We have already overshot our carrying capacity, and we are going to go down a few rungs on the food chain over the next few decades. And I am a very well trained Biologist, and you should stick to talking about computer modelling, you really sound like a fool when you stray out of your box...

[obscurus]

That's hardly the same thing. Siclke cell anemia does  does not stop people from breeding. A gene that stopped people from wanting to breed would have a hard time surviving.

Anyway, I'm saying that it isn't a gene at all, it's the decision of a normal person who has no genetic deficency at all. It was obscurus who brougth up the gene argument.

 

A gene can persist if if give a person with one copy a reproductive advantage, even if it means a person with two copies cannot reproduce (because they have no desire to or whatever). And malaria does affect your ability to breed - if you catch malaria and die before you have a chance to reproduce, you are obviously at adisadvantage to a carrier of sickle cell who is immune.

 

Nonsense. Evoluiton is clearly creating more advanced species now than in the past. To take an extreme example - humans are more evolved and complex than the invertebrates that were the only life on eath in the past. Evolution has been producing more and more complex creatures since then, and we are the latest and most complex of all.

This comment displays such a laughable ignorance of evolution and biology that I don't know where to begin pointing out how wrong it is.

Humans are not more complex than any other multicellular lifeform, humans generally are no more or less complex than any other vertebrate, mollusc or arthropod. This is a very common and ignorant misconception. A human being has no more complexity than a mouse or a cockroach. We have a complex brain, but not the most complex (sperm whales have the largest and most complex brain known - it is six times the size of the human brain, and contains 9 times the number of nurones, and has more complex sulci and gyri), and that is just one facet of our biology. Elephants have a much more complex nose than humans do, but overall, there is no general difference in complexity. There are plenty of organisms that have some facet of their biology that is vastly more complex thatn the equivalent facet in humans, and that includes organisms that date back from the Cambrian explosion.

 

You only have to look at our achievements to see that.

Put humans at any point in the past ans we wuld still have been at the top of the fod chain, and able to destory any other species.

Any point in the past? Until a few hundred years ago, humans were very much NOT at the top of the food chan, and in many places in the world we still aren't. Go for a swim in the amazon and an anaconda might make you think differently about the food chain. Go for a walk in alaska and a ploar bear might give you other ideas. You are kidding yourself kif you think humans hold some special position fo superiority, it is an illusion. Humans have not achieved anything that has any real relevance to anything than ourselves. Being able to create helicopters and concertos and sculptures does not make our achievments any more special than those of a bower bird or an ant.

 

We are the most complex species that has ever lived and would have dominated any other species from the past. THat tells me that species *are* getting more complex as time passes.

 

That is the most laughably ignorant rubbish I have seen you come up with oDD... Ants had air conditioned skyscrapers (relatively speaking), agriculture (they grow and harvest fungi) and animal husbandry (farming aphids for their sugary excressence) 100 million years before we cottoned on to it. Whether or not we do it using conciousness or inate programming is utterly irrelevant. As stated before, humans are not much more complex than a trilobite or a horseshoe crab, and the most successful creatures are always the simpler ones - bacteria, fungi, algae. Destroying other species is not a good thing - it throws ecological systems out of balance, and when that happens, high level predators like humans are the first to suffer the effects, while simple bacteria and fungi thrive on the chaos.

 

Apart from the fact that the dominant species at the top of the food chain evolved on land and not in the sea, despite the fact that sea creatures had hundreds of millions of years more evolution that land animals. 

 

WTF? What a load of rubbish. I am not even going to bother with this one, other than to say that in terms of biomass alone, bacteria are clearly dominant - they make up something like 90% of the earth's biomass. They make up 70% of the cells in your body in terms of numbers of cells. Without them you would die. Bacteria dominate you.

 

Yeah, I suppose that's why dolphins would do anythig you want them to if you thow them a fish - becasue they're so damn clever. They're no better than dogs that'll endlesly fetch a stick for you in return for a reward or becasue of training.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Most human beings will do whatever you want if you give them a reward (sex, food, money (which = sex and food in the end), or threaten them. We are no different to dogs in that regard. Cats on the other hand, are able to manipulate humans into thinking they are worth having around, and completely dominate their human owners for no apparent reason, and certainly don't take kindly to humans telling them what to do. By your logic, cats are superior to humans.

 

Dolphins actually don't do anything you want, they do what they want. You only ever see the trained dolphins doing performances, most dolphins are not so compliant, and are just as likely to rape you as frolick with you. Dolphins like having fun, and like eating fish, so it often works out nicely for a dolphin that perfroms, but they still do what they feel like, and they execute their tricks in their own way. Thay won't do things that they don't want to do no matter how many fish you offer them.

 

An interesting experiment done on rats: Rats were fitted with electrodes to the areas of their brains that handle inputs from their whiskers, and one in the pleasure centre of the brain. These electrodes were connected to a remote control device operated by the researcher, who could make the mouse walk in any direction he wanted by stimulating the whisker electrodes, and stimulating the pleasure centre when the rat responded correctly. But no matter how hard they tried, they could not get the rat to do anything that would risk its life, such as jumping from a great height. The rat was able to overide the feelings of pleasure it would receive if it followed the commands to jump, because it knew it was not safe.

 

oDDity, the central core of your argument, if it can be called that, is that humans are superior because of what we do with our brains. This is an entirely arbitrary suggestion, and certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with evolutionary success, or complexity etc. I could just as easily state that whales are superior because they can manipulate objects with their prehensile genitals, or that dogs are superior because they have such an acute sense of smell, or that termites are superior because of their perfect social order and finely tuned cities, or that the walrus is superior because of its tusks, or that blue whales are superior because of their size. Being capable of complex abstract thought and transmitting learned knowledge across generations has advantages, but it also has disadvantages, otherwise more species would have evolved this ability a long time ago. Being smart is fine, being too smart is a risky venture that can easily come to naught, and is just a feature, like having fins or fur.

 

Humans are smart enough to build nuclear weapons, not smart enough to know not to build them. And we are smart enough to build robots that might well become our rivals one day, not smart enough to realise we are dooming ourselves to obsolesence to our own creations.

 

The only way humans can possibly assure their success form an evolutionary perspective is to spread out and proliferate across the galaxy, thereby increasing the longevity of our species. The average time it takes for a species of mammal to go extinct is about 8 million years. I doubt very much that humans will make it even that far with attitudes like yours floating around.

Edited August 2, 2005 by obscurus

[Maximius]

obscurus: Maybe they discuss philosophy, who knows...

 

Dont start with me! And we wont be colonizing the galaxy anytime soon, lets try to get out into our solar system first, its a bit closer.

 

Oddity, Ill leave the lesson in biology/evolution to obscurus, let me tell you a little about astronomical impacts. There are two groups of objects we have to worry about, asteroids and comets. Asteroids are especially tough to see because the vast majority of them are pretty dark, meaning their albedo or degree of light reflection is low. Its hard as hell to spot em, unless you are a dedicated asteroid hunter who spends a lot of time watching for them. Assuming you do see them, and one appears to be headed our way, you have no way of knowing if its going to be a near miss or a dead hit until its almost upon us. And if you do see it, what are you going to do about it? Try hitting a rock hurtling towards you at thousands of feet a second with ....what? A missile? Cant hit our own missiles with our missles, I was an air defense soldier years ago and I assure you our missile tracking abilities are less than optimal.(THis is why the US military has had to repeatedly lie about the efficacy of its missile defense shield program, an enormous boondoggle.)

 

The second group are even scarier, comets. Asteroids are generally grouped into belts, the big one between mars and jupiter, two recently discovered smaller ones between earth and the sun, see how hard they are to find!, and finally the Oort cloud at the edge of the solar system. Rouge asteroids undoubtably exist but its seems most are clustered in these regions.

 

Comets are another matter. They are the nomads of the solar system, wandering here and there. Some have pretty fixed paths, i.e. Halleys, some were fixed but then cross paths with other bodies, witness the Shoemaker-Levy impact on Jupiter about 10 years ago, and others are purely random. Now out in the Oort cloud, its thought that comets originate here, when gravitational pulls from the sun tip a chunk of primeaval ice and rock our way, it is estimated there are THOUSANDS of these bastards floating around.

 

Some comets are around *2* miles in diameter, no weapon we possess could scratch it. If a lunker like that hit the Earth, there would be no hiding in caves, no underground bunkers, it would quite possibly mean extinction for us and definitely extinction for something like 90 percent of all lifeforms more complex than an amoeba. We are talking mile high tsunamis, vulcanism like the good old days of Earths youth, boiling steam clouds racing at hundreds of miles an hour across the land. Real Bible thumping End o' Times stuff.

 

This is one of the reasons I am all for colonization of Mars, and expansion into outer space, though not on the fantasy timeline of two years that CoCo the Ape-President blurted out a few months back. We have GOT to get off this rock if we wish to survive as a species, there is no question that eventually there will be an impact that could threaten our existence, hell will ENd our existence. No doubt at all, statistically its a sure thing.

 

Oh, one interesting side note, a few years back, when India and Pakistan were about to nuke each other, what is believed to be a small asteroid impacted the atmosphere right above the two nations and flashed across radar screens in the region as a nuke air burst. If it had not been for astronomical organizations tracking the beast, and alerting the Paki and Indian governments, it may have been the start of the first nuclear exchange in history.

 

Sleep tight!

Edited August 2, 2005 by Maximius

[sparhawk]

That's nonsense. If that was the case, then there would be none left, the gene would have been bred out long ago, unless you're saying that the same mutasnt gene which cause people not to want to breed keeps randomly appearing in every generation.  People who choose not to procreate are not some sort of  weird mutants, they make the decison for psycholocical or philosophical reasons.

 

There are examples that show that to NOT recreate is not neccessarily a consciousness decision. It can be mathematically shown that you can further your genes that way as well as recreating yourself, depending on the circumstances. In fact there are other species who do this as well. They are not procreating as indivuduals but as a whole.

Same applies for other "weird" behaviour like homosexuallity. Evolutionary it should be expected that homosexuality should have been weeded out long ago. The fact that it persists so long not only shows that there is more to it then just procreation. Homosexuality is also widely found in "nature" as well.

[sparhawk]

Death *happens to* certain cells  automatically under certain conditions. We do not do it automatically, we make a concious decision to do it. If you can't see the difference, then there's no hope for you.

 

How do you know that we are making a conscious decision? Because you think so? There is no proof for or against it. When you wrote that posting you think you could have decided to not write it as well. But you wrote it, and that can not be reversed. So you never will know that you could reall have decided to NOT write it. You can just hink that you could have not written it.

 

Our ability to communicate abstract information and passs it on to the next generation is a large part of what has made us advance so quickly. It'd an essential skill for any advanced species.

 

Yes. That's why talking and writing is so important. Probably writing more then talking.

 

Other animals use tools, but that does not automatically indicate sentience, only a degree of intelligence.

 

So at what point would you concede this? Did you know that Orang Utans are capable of abstract thinking and logical planning ahead? Something that we think are only we capable of.

 

Sophisticated tool use requires a specialized way to manipulate the tool, and no other animal has that.

 

Using tools requires a way of abstraction. And many animals can do this up to some point. We happened to win the race so far, but that doesn't mean that we are the only ones capable of this.

 

We *are* doing the same. The diofference is that our 'programming' gives us the complete free will to do literally anything. THat's what makes us so superior.

 

I'm not really convinced of that free will.

 

It has only free will within the range of behavioural traits and instincts given to it by nature. We have limitless free will. There is literally nothing that we can't choose to do.if we want to.

 

We are also limited by our behavioural traits and instincts. Try to jump down the Empire State Building without any tools and you will see how limited we are.

 

 

We no longer only evolve and adapt by random mutation, we discover knowlegde, build machines to help us, and invent new techology to extend our lifespans, and improve our chances of survival.

 

Bascially we are doing the same thing that evolution did all the time, only that we are doing it more directed and thus speeding it up a bit.

 

We adapt using deliberate decision making, not by natural selection and survival of the fittest.

 

We are not outisde natural selection. Just because the rules are changing, doesn't mean we are outisde it. Natural selection happens all the time. A black man born in the slums of New York behaves differently then when he would have been born in Austria. Guess what this is. This IS natural selection, because NS includes your environment as well. You can't escape this, unless you create an environment which is 100% equal for everbody in there, and even then the experiences would still provide different bases.

 

That means we can adapt very quicky where other advanced species take thousands of years.

 

It's the other way around. We are currently at the end of a long chain of selection and IMO it is to be expected that the pace picks up. The time it took to creaet the first amoeba was a very long time, but the time it took to go from ape to human was much shorter. But this is simply a logical consequence. And guess how long WE took to become what we are.

 

Once we achived sentience we forever broke away from pure natiral evoluiton, nature did not make us what we are in the 21st cebntury, we did it ourselves.

 

You should get it out of your head that we are somehow independent of nature. We are not.