Just pointing out that human tribes were not isolated from each other, and there was interbreeding between groups by... various means
A little gene flow goes a long way but accumulating some of the genetic defects hiding in everyone so you've got those double recessives isn't what's going to have lead to the dead end family tree of a group of fewer than 30 people. Even if you isolated 100 people on an island you'd still get the defects piling up if they inbred.
Based on the last hunter gatherers around today we form groups up to 400 large and don't even try unless we've got 50. That's about how many you need to do the whole hunting and gathering thing without severe risk of starving in some harsh season.
A tribes of hunters-gatherers are not a civilization for they have no significal government, large settlements, similar religious beliefs and much less sense of sovereign. While they may compose a nation (even if not united in a single group), they lack the unity to be considered a civilization.
If you're saying they don't have religions...
And sense of sovereign would exclude a lot of people from "first world" areas today...
Civilisation is of pertaining to Citizens. Citizens are people who live in Cities. This shows a fairly strong link between Civilisation and Cities, or Urban Settlements.
That would have a lot to do with early nations making terms for themselves and less to do with anthropologists making terms to describe the social structures or man.
Which is to say
etymology is besides the point here.
Religion, by the way, leads itself to organisation, which leads itself to cities. So it is technically correct to consider Religion a cornerstone of Civilisation,
Going by the more strict definitions here Australian aborigines have some a well shared religious belief but clearly do not qualify as a civilization and were practically wiped out when forced into city life.
Art finds difficulty arising without culture and cities,
You find plenty of "tools" that wouldn't have been functional as tools well before cities or anything of the sort. They're clearly either just for looks or ceremonial purposes.
as in order to truely persue Art you need to have Artists, who are people that naturally contribute little or no physical worth.
Good art has traditionally had some sort of life experience behind it. Have you actually even acquainted yourself with anthropology?
Suggesting that any can exist stand alone is a bit rediculous however. Religious leaders usually fall into the 'nonproducer' category that Artists do (in fact, leaders in general fall into this category),
Yet we practically assume every hunter gatherer group has a shaman, stereotypically the tribe elder. You realize that the elderly are pretty useless for hunting and not all that handy for gathering right? Sure the average lifespan was 30ish but you have to realize infant mortality yanks that number down to the point it doesn't really represent the age people died at. Homo sapiens have had grandparents around to take some of the workload off of child rearing for as long as we have been this species, and probably longer. Though the whole modern society nuclear family thing has broken that up somewhat it's still quite common.
Agriculture is more than just "growing plants", and their hierarchy is relatively simplistic and nonchanging, plus they have no aspects of culture whatsoever. Nor do they have language or, hell, much complex thought at all.
They do communicate face to face. Audio isn't much use to them with that body plan but they touch antennae to say what type of task they're currently working on.
If you think about it human hierarchy was unchanging as well back when being born the son of a shoemaker meant you were going to be a shoemaker.
Ultimately it makes more sense to classify an ant colony as a single organism with the classes of ants being more like tissue types. If not because of the reproduction issue then because of things like how there is no leader or how they can't survive on their own in the "wait for rescue" sort of way.
They absolutely do have language. It's a language based more around scents and body rather than words and noises, but it is most certainly a language.
Also; if you want to argue about 'Civilisation' meaning 'of pertaining to Citizens', argue with the dictionary, not me.
The big distinction in language that most people care about is if a species could create a new one and/or have several languages between different groups.
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Ok. The dictionary is not the be all end all for what words mean, especially for scientific terms where there are entire books for explaining what they are. Worse yet you've gone and used the numeric listing of definitions as some kind of ranking of merit instead of just the frequency of use measurement it's supposed to be. It's still up to us to tell what context a word is being used in and the dictionary can't tell you everything there is to know any more than an encyclopedia can.
and they do more than growing plants, they cut plants and take them to their nest, then they grow fungus! they even produce pesticides to protect their crops...
Just to add to that ants don't just grow one type of fungus. There are a lot of different types and there are plenty of ants with cattle if you know about the various bugs that produce some kind of nectar substance the ants are fond of.
It's not a complex language in the sense that any linguist would care about. Hell, it's arguable they don't even confer information in a way the ant understands; it's all pretty basic physiological reaction. It's "communication" in the same sense as someone "communicating" with you by injecting you with psychoactive drugs.
At any rate, I obviously wasn't talking about simple "individuals can cause other individuals to respond to stimuli in some form or another" "communication". I was referring to complex, abstract language. Ants instinctively leaving behind scent trails that other ants instinctively follow is not the same thing.
Care to give us a way to measure abstraction vs instinct or are we just going to leave it at "Come on. You can just look and know!"?
On a related note, will it be possible to have a race extremely agressive towards you without the [CAN_SPEAK] hack?
Toady has mentioned how he eventually wants those sorts of relations to come from ethics conflicts and such but I don't think it was part of this release.
I've never seen the [CAN_CIV] tag do anything though. Kobolds have [CAN_CIV], but they don't form civilizations as far as I have seen.
About the definition of civilization:
I think it's not so much a question of what is civilized and what not, but rather, how civilized they are.
The same goes for intelligence/sapience and sentience. They're not on/off kinds of things.
I think even the line between living and dead is not quite clear-cut. Long ago I read about a list of criteria that something needs to satisfy to be counted as alive, but then I thought: what if only half the criteria are satisfied? Is it then half-alive, or what?
Right now building just comes in the flavors of dwarf home, human houses, and dark tower (did I miss any? I don't run around in adventure mode that much.) Mod civs can be made to do any of these (and Toady eventually wants elves living in giant trees or something like that,) but we're stuck with those types. If a civ doesn't do one of those it doesn't build anything and just lives in the preferred biome.
Species is another blurry line in a lot of cases but if you're missing any one requirement for life it's not life. It's likely just organic molecules at that point.
Guys, really, I mean I don't mind off topic so much in general, but this constant quarrelling about things totally irrelevant to DF goes a little bit too far. Yes I also participated in the special relativity discussion (with one post), but at least we moved into a dedicated thread at some point.
And the semantics of first the word civilization, then language, and now, I see it coming, life, really don't matter. This whole discussion should be about the CAN_CIV tag and what it means in the game, if anything. Unless you want to have a ten pages discussion with the only possible relevance being a potential need to rename the tag 
.
The game has a lot of procedural generation and if we've got the possibility of ever pcg'ing civilizations (and various aspects of that are definitely planned,) then this is relevant.
We're probably never going to pcg the physics of a world, except maybe if they include the nature of magic but the speed of light is probably not going to have significance of that sort.
G-flex has the right of it, if I can remember from the class I took on the subject. As for language, I believe it differs from communication in that communication has a number of units (displays, noises, whatever) with a set meaning, while language lets you string together a bunch of units to produce arbitrary meaning. This is what humans do, stringing together syllables to make words, and those to make sentences. It's much more versatile than what ants have (which is basically a series of meanings like "come here" "fight" and "run"). Now ant-men would have some sort of scent based actual language, which would smell interesting....
Anyway, that about does it for adding anthropology to our list of off-topic science discussions, along with ecology, physics, and comparative biology. Soooo....who's got something controversial to say about geology?
Naw, with the low scent-resolution in humans it's unlikely that we could tell the scents apart. Typically the molecules for some particular function get reused with some small alteration so it would be probable that all the units were closely related. An added benefit of this is that it makes it harder for other species to figure out the code so thinks like wasp larvae that emit the "stand down" message and raid the colony's pantry are rare.
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:<
Did we go through the evolution stuff already? Not wanting to touch off a firestorm though as its such a volatile topic given the right conditions.
The science-literacy level here seems to be above the threshold for that phenomenal waste of time. I'll still be cautious though.
That would have strange implications for adventurer mode. Would you just assume the adventurer can "speak" pheromones, as the do with current languages, or would you have conversations like this:
<Josef Adventurelad>: You look like a mighty warrior indeed!
<Antman #241>: *begins to smell of peppermint*
Altogether, I don't think a smelanguage would be practical, since words have short duration, and smells don't. Cycling between *peppermint* *pumpkinbread* and *formic acid* could take minutes, and the only other way to mix concepts is to blend the smells. I don't think that would be practical either, because simultaneous smells have no order to convey their information with. It would work for simple concepts, but how the hell do you say "I was a mason for twelve years of my life" in pheromones?
English has very few cases of this but in other languages you modify a word depending on if it's the subject, object, etc of a sentence. When you've got these modifications you can really say the sentence in any order and have it remain clear. With the strict order of English it's not important so who and whom are really interchangeable as there's no ambiguity if you use the wrong form.
I'm not sure how versatile smells are to modification, especially in terms of ant organs, but given the fantasy setting there's definitely a possible system that could do it.
As for the duration of smells you could get around that by having most of the communication require them to be right near each other to get the high potency message rather than the room dilute form (and ant colonies even have ventilation so you could assume it's good enough to keep scents from building up.) And of course this would be much easier for the game someone speaking to you down a tunel and around a few corners would be a pain anyway.
Hmm, that is an interesting question. Without an ability to order your symbols in some way, language would be difficult. What if they dabbed out the scent on the ground in series? Actual ants leave trails, it could be an extension of that. Still kind of ungainly though. Maybe gestures for specifics and scents for emotional overtones?
You could definitely have a mix language but I don't think it would fit for ants.
Really with the way they communicate to each other ant-men communicating might almost seem pornographic. Nothing like coitus of course but it could easily end up looking like they were feeling each other up.
Then seeing as all the workers are genetically female you could see how a lot of adventurers would want to visit the antman hives...
AAARGHHH. my internet connection goes down at random intervals and it cut off two posts I've tried to make in the last week, including one about the ants, but now the topic has moved on, so my post is useless. I HATE VIRGIN.
Funny, as I just described kind of an anti statement of that sort.
-Maybe it will even encourage more people to read into my huge posts that go way beyond the current topic.
Don't know if this has been asked yet (I am not shifting through 700+ pages) but, Will it ever be possible in a future version for a civil war to start during gameplay and the player's fort to be involved, i.e you support the resistance and attack other forts loyal to the crown, or attack rebelling forts, and support the crown, or just refuse to be involved; and if so, can the player start a civil war?
I think that would be an interesting addition to the game. I know I would enjoy it.
I recall one of the talks going on about how dwarves from one location might develop a sense of what was traditional and then they'd move and other dwarves might start to think the new materials and such were traditional and they could get pissed off at people they felt were breaking traditions and then the diplomat might show up and be disgusted by the microcline statues out front and they'd have to smooth talk to keep out of trouble.
Will the elves ever bring anything but useless crap to trade?
You mean like wood that you need to get metal armor for your military?
Elves are possibly the MOST useful trade carrivan for those who don't cheat for magma
After they decide they want to bring big stuffs to your fort it's basically all bins of cloth because it's worth more and apparently they have truckloads of it.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3637447 times)