Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[roguester]

There's a biological component to it too. Since we started using tools, our brains have gotten larger, probably at some cost to our physical strength. We have evolved to make better tools and to use them more effectively, while at the same time becoming more dependent on them.

Same with clothes. Few people today have enough hair on their bodies to keep themselves warm outside of the tropics. We don't need it, we've been wearing the skins of other creatures almost as long as we've had tools. Clothing has several evolutionary advantages. It is more adaptable, allowing us to live in a wide variety of climates. You can take it off if you get hot. You can take it off to clean it, reducing disease and parasites. In addition it is useful for many many social purposes.

[Foa]

And these people want to get rid our humans rights to save the most abundant resource of foodstuffs.

These morons should save the whales and the salmon and the fish that they use a pig feed ( over fishing, hooray! ) .
What is SO good about the shiny things, if someone put glitter on a turd, I'd think they'd buy it.

[numerobis]

There's a biological component to it too. Since we started using tools, our brains have gotten larger, probably at some cost to our physical strength. We have evolved to make better tools and to use them more effectively, while at the same time becoming more dependent on them.

We started using tools, and our brains got bigger.  But other species also use tools, and their brains haven't expanded so much.  So, be careful about imputing causality to this correlation.

The main evidence of recent selection is indeed for things that aren't too surprising: bigger brains, disease resistance, and lactase production.  Recent here means the past few thousand years -- since agriculture.  There is unlikely to be detectable signal for anything more recent than that because it takes generations for anything to happen.  In a thousand years, we'll be able to look back and check what is getting selected for right now.  If we still exist.

[Areyar]

right now there is selection towards lazyness resistance, stupidity and ruthlessness if you ask me.

Only the ability to fill in taxforms and clear the hurdles to avoid them form a selective pressure on growing brain size. Unfortunately being smart and successfull seems to be a negative modifier on reproductive prowess than being less successful from being uneducated or just less intelligent.
(Seems like those that fail socially, intellectually or financially make up for it by being successful biologically)
elitist view, I know. In less affluent societies this has a function: the less fortunate are less likely to survive so high childnumber compensates. In the west however, all are provided at least the minimum to survive (though not thrive).

[Kogan Loloklam]

I once had someone argue that humans are biologically best geared to eating raw grains and fruits, just like gorillas, our closest relatives.

It was hard to be nice while correcting this person.

Good on you. Nice to someone who thought they knew what they were talking about when it came to a balanced, human diet. I can't ever acomplish the same thing.

(For the record, I choose not to eat meat, because I don't need to, and I don't like the taste.  But I don't claim I'm doing something natural.)

I do. I chose to eat the food, the food goes into my stomach, it digests, comes out the other end. Most children don't even associate the McDonalds hamburger they eat with the cow too stupid to get out of the road on those long roadtrips. Believe it or not, eating meat, just like eating any other particular kind of food, is a learned human behavior. We aren't like lions, where we see a creature and our hunger response kicks in. we are experimenters, so sooner or later we'd figure out to eat the meats and plant matter that we come across (and to avoid those deadly kinds too) but eating meat is no more or less natural than eating vegetables, and the other way around as well. As long as what we eat has the nutrients our bodies need, nothing else matters. And nobody understands them to the degree that modern medicine and nutritionists pretend they do. Right now a nutritionist is no better than a doctor that used to proscribe bleeding to cure ills. Sometimes they are right, often times they don't do harm, a great majority of the times the harm they do isn't recognizable, and very rarely is their incompetence brought into question in the time that they practice their art, but in a few centuaries, everyone realizes exactly how foolish the practices they used were.

Yes, you punk nutritionists. I am talking to you. Think you know something about my diet and what my body needs, can't even find your own damn butt with both hands and a map...

Obviously I've had a recent encounter with a Nutritionist. I think I better go off before I go Keel-haul the lot of 'em!

(Edit: Forgot to put this in.

Same for lactose intolerance: we are still adapting to it. 

For anyone curious, the Human ability to drink milk as an adult is a evolutionary fairly recent development, and the tolerance for the stuff isn't very common outside of the "Europeanized" world. (Today's special word... "Neoteny"))

[numerobis]

Lactose tolerance is common in (descendents of) at least Europe, India, and parts of Africa -- basically, any population that has practiced cattle herding for a thousand or two years.

Humans are really good at digesting almost anything cooked, and a lot that's raw.  What's natural is to eat what's available, as much of it as possible, leaving us fat in good times so that we can survive a terrible season or an entire bad year.  And we're much more closely related to chimps (who eat mostly fruits and vegetable matter, but also insects, and meat that they hunt or scavenge -- a lot like us!) than to gorillas (who, by the way, eat insects).

The whole thing with kittens of the sea will stop mattering within a couple decades, when the last tuna is taken out of the ocean.

[Yanlin]

I declare this thread derailed.

[Rockphed]

The whole thing with kittens of the sea will stop mattering within a couple decades, when the last tuna is taken out of the ocean.

I suspect that the biology wars will end fishing, but only because we kill all the fish.

[LegoLord]

It's highly unlikely all the fish will be killed off; they're an important food source.

[Strife26]

I feel a strange need to put a schlock mercenary reference here.

About how, even when humanity trys to teraform a world to exact specs, it all gos awry.

Help the world, feed youself to fish today!


Here a question though, am I being moral or immoral by keeping tropical fish? I'm removing them from their families, but letting them live longer and happier. How does that work?

[LegoLord]

All they care about is passing on their genes.  You're doing them a kindness, assuming you have a breeding pair.

[RAM]

All they care about is passing on their genes.

I believe this to be false, this behaviour can be seen in humans, the sexual drive is a powerful motivator that 'can' overpower all others and can leave people with regret and a sense that they 'just don't know why they did that'. All entities, humans included, can be observed behaving in a purposeful manner even when all mechanisms of reproduction are permanently disabled, and there have been many instances of breeding programs failing, apparently due to a lack of mental stimulation.

By stating with such confidence that you completely understand another entity you are justifying absolute authority over all aspects of their existence. When this is done to humans it is either horrific or righteous.

The Romans thought they were better than the barbarians, the crusaders thought they were better than the heathens, and slave owners have always thought that they were better than slaves. If you find yourself thinking that you are better than something else, please try to be cautious...

While we do not have the luxury of being able to persist without causing destruction, I believe that it is virtuous to attempt to preserve what we can. While we cannot preserve the substance of the world, we should attempt to preserve the information. I feel that we should not deplete a system to the point that it cannot function(be it ecological or otherwise), we should preserve diversity in all the forms we can, we should not use all the oil, or all the coal, or all of anything, and we should attempt to find the limits of this world before they find us...

P.S.
 Don't worry, I usually get over the rant phase pretty quickly, there is just something about newly finding a forum makes me want to commit social suicide...

[Jackrabbit]

If someone put glitter on a turd, I'd think they'd buy it.

And promptly euthanize it.

[pokute]

All they care about is passing on their genes.

I believe this to be false, this behaviour can be seen in humans, the sexual drive is a powerful motivator that 'can' overpower all others and can leave people with regret and a sense that they 'just don't know why they did that'. All entities, humans included, can be observed behaving in a purposeful manner even when all mechanisms of reproduction are permanently disabled, and there have been many instances of breeding programs failing, apparently due to a lack of mental stimulation.

By stating with such confidence that you completely understand another entity you are justifying absolute authority over all aspects of their existence. When this is done to humans it is either horrific or righteous.

The Romans thought they were better than the barbarians, the crusaders thought they were better than the heathens, and slave owners have always thought that they were better than slaves. If you find yourself thinking that you are better than something else, please try to be cautious...

While we do not have the luxury of being able to persist without causing destruction, I believe that it is virtuous to attempt to preserve what we can. While we cannot preserve the substance of the world, we should attempt to preserve the information. I feel that we should not deplete a system to the point that it cannot function(be it ecological or otherwise), we should preserve diversity in all the forms we can, we should not use all the oil, or all the coal, or all of anything, and we should attempt to find the limits of this world before they find us...

P.S.
 Don't worry, I usually get over the rant phase pretty quickly, there is just something about newly finding a forum makes me want to commit social suicide...

What is mankind's modern evolutionary legacy?  For the past ten thousand years, we've ruthlessly exploited the environment.  Those who can do that the best have come out on top thanks to the nature of exponential growth.  This was all fine and good when the human population was comparatively small, dispersed, and had plenty of room to grow.  But now as we approach the depletion of all vital natural resources (again, thanks to the nature of exponential growth), I don't think there's any humane way of stopping it.  I wish you good luck if you seriously think you can humanely alter the emergent property of a species without killing them outright.

[SirHoneyBadger]

In defense of humanity:

Humans find new applications and create complex systems, where they did not exist before. This is in defiance of entropy.

We also have the ability to create ideas that "live" long after the individual that gave birth to them is dust.

Ideas, in the form of memes, have some of the properties of lifeforms. They multiply, they evolve, they *can* die--although they have the potential for immortality.

Yes, humans destroy and userp, exploit and corrupt, Nature, but consider that we were created *by* Nature. We didn't create ourselves, spontaneously, or maliciously. And while we may act in malicious ways at times, we also act in noble ways, create beauty, preserve life (some of it, anyway), and are responsible for quite a lot of good.

Sure, we're not a mature species. We make mistakes and gross errors, and at times act irresponsibly, but we're learning. And we're doing it on our own, without anyone wiser than us, to show us a better way. I think that's pretty magnificent.

We have every bit the right to survive and prosper as any other species on this planet. Considering that we're the dominant life-form, and the most intelligent species that we're aware of, in the whole of the Universe, I'd say we have more right to survive than any other species.

And again-given that we have the power to exterminate every other form of life on Earth, and that we haven't done that-the fact that we have these kinds of moral dilemmas, and actually *care* about the fate of other species, and our planet as a whole, supports that we're stumbling in the best direction available to us.