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[Max White]

Little theory that Charles Darwin came up with, I think he called it evolution.
Contrary to what political correctness may say, smart people are more likely to have smarter kids.

This was the original quote. Highlighted is the exact mistake.What I should have said was natural selection.

Followed by this.

Darwin came up with Natural Selection, not Evolution. And Evolution has absolutely nothing to say about culling species.

Try again.

This was were I was proven wrong, by nothing you said. It was at this quote I realized my mistake and planned to repent.

Granted. I mean if you like splitting hairs for no particular reason, I shall admit defeat on that detail.

And here it is! Highlighted is me saying I admit defeat. I had accepted the loss before you came into the debate. Anything on your behalf was just vindictively attacking a single argument in an entire debate that had already been addressed.

[Jackrabbit]

I have no doubt.

Also, I guess I'm rather having fun now.

[Max White]

Happy?

[Jackrabbit]

Yeah, I saw that and refuted the point you're trying to make. I think you missed a vital step here. It's called "reading Jackrabbit's post so you don't end up looking silly".

You know what? Go back, read my entire post again and tell me what mistake I'm correcting.

Go on, tell me. Tell me specifically what mistake it was that I claim to have been correcting. It shouldn't be to hard. You just need to read my goddamn post.

It's actually all in there.

I'm having trouble accepting that you're being serious now.

[Max White]

[Evolution] has everything to do with culling the species. Not always through strategic means, but the idea that the 'weak' die out through any means is what natural selection is based on. When some giraffe have short necks, they couldn't reach the higher branches of trees to feed and starved to death, thus the 'weaker' of the species were culled and now they have longer necks.

Okay. See this? This was your mistake, a post made after Neruz argued against your point. Your mistake was claiming that evolution is about culling species, whereas it's actually natural selection. I believe this point has been made abundantly clear.

You will notice you put evolution as the context, but this is wrong. I had already admitted I was wrong on evolution, and thus I meant natural selection. You trying to 'correct' me was a mistake. Try using the propper context or you just look silly.

I like how you tried to make it out like it's some pointless nitpick. It's an important distinction. For starters, natural selection is in fact about culling species, not evolution. They're sort of hand in hand in that manner. A giraffe with a short neck would die because of natural selection. Giraffes as a species get progressively longer necks because of evolution.

See that there? That was where I corrected your mistake. A mistake you did not admit as being a mistake until AFTER I corrected it. And you spoke to me directly when you did it. Why should I not assume you are accepting the fact that I corrected your mistake and are moving on with good grace? Well, that's what I did assume. This was not to be.
[/quote]
No...I There is no mistake. Girraffs get longer necks becuase of natural selection. Like I have already said, I adressed the mistake before you showed up.


Hold on, I lost track of were I was up to, you nested your quote so horrible it has become impossible to follow, would you segragate it a little?

[Neruz]

That's why prisons exist.

Are you saying there should be a law against stupidity?

No; i believe i have already said that stupid people are not useless.

Although there are some extreme forms of stupidity that perhaps could do with some regulation against them.

[Max White]

No; i believe i have already said that stupid people are not useless.

Although there are some extreme forms of stupidity that perhaps could do with some regulation against them.

What? Oh that's right, something about god, cool! I forgot about this...

Well without jail, how else do you propose we select who is dumb enough to have action taken against them? I mean surly anybody dumb enough to go for medical trials on there own free will is a prime candidate to be taken from the race.

[Max White]

Sorry to leave you all hanging, but its starting to get late here.

Normally this wouldn't be an issue, but like everybody with a computer I have a mild sleeping disorder and have been known to go days without sleep, so I should get it in while I think I can.
Night folks!

[Neruz]

No; i believe i have already said that stupid people are not useless.

Although there are some extreme forms of stupidity that perhaps could do with some regulation against them.

What? Oh that's right, something about god, cool! I forgot about this...

Well without jail, how else do you propose we select who is dumb enough to have action taken against them? I mean surly anybody dumb enough to go for medical trials on there own free will is a prime candidate to be taken from the race.

Not really; people are also influenced by emotion. Somone in huge emotional stress, perhaps from having too much debt, may well submit himself for an extremely dangerous medical trial in exchange for money despite normally being a perfectly intelligent individual.

This is part of the same reason why Suicide is illegal; because people change their minds. Somone who makes decision A now make make decision B tomorrow, when he's feeling happier. The problem is, if decision A leads to his death, he'll never get a chance to make decision be.

Sorry to leave you all hanging, but its starting to get late here.

Normally this wouldn't be an issue, but like everybody with a computer I have a mild sleeping disorder and have been known to go days without sleep, so I should get it in while I think I can.
Night folks!

The disorder is called "Somebody is wrong on the Internet."

[RAM]

Because humans are stupid...

And I assume you think that you, and people like minded to you, are an exception?

Not that much of an exception, lots of people aren't human...

No, I am not an exception, but I am aware of the problem and trying to manage it...

The idea of a thousand rats dying in the place of one human doesn't sit well with me, now sure, if I was the one human I wouldn't much care for the implications, but then again, what if I was one of the thousand rats? At least in the case of a human you can offset the negatives, do something for their family, let them do something they always wanted to, something like that, instead of "Hey, you get to be trapped in your house for your entire life with an ear growing out of your back so that I can get published in Nature"... I mean, it isn't as though humans can't justify killing each other for fun, profit, curiosity, or emotional satisfaction...
<insert rest of post>

[Neruz]

If you were the one thousand rats, you'd spend alot of your time thinking life is awesome with all this food and no predators to worry about, and then a very short amount of time dying painfully, but probably not a whole lot more painfully than you could expect to die as a wild rat anyway.

[Starver]

Contrary to what political correctness may say, smart people are more likely to have smarter kids.

Although I (who at least I consider to be smart) am rapidly aging and as yet do not have any offspring, while I know of people who are at least educationally non-smart[1] and who rapidly beget large broods of children from an early age.

In this particular comparison I can't see any mechanism 'cutting the fat' in favour of keeping (my kind of) intelligence.  Of course, we could be looking at a social selection that's selective more for 'street smarts' than the kind of problem analysing that I'd like to think I'm a good representative of.

Or maybe some form of Eloi and Morlock differentiation:  I don't run in the same circles as the aforementioned breeders.  I'm an only child of one only-child and a one youngest child of three[2].  When I entered the world, my Dad was in his 45th year, my mother in her 34th and I'm now in-between those ages, whereas the counter-example families are starting their production of the next generation as early as their mid-teens with barely a comment from their own society (although even the newspapers that represent 'them' tend to pick up on those that are reproducing even younger, male and female).  When (if?) I stumble upon a partner and begetting a new generation, I would hope I'd be able to raise my kid(s) the way I was, whereas some might say (uncharitably) that the problem with 'the other lot' is that they're doing that already...

This is a somewhat contrived example.  I'm not actually attempting to look down upon my counter-example culture[3], nor appoint myself as a height of perfection in humanity (those probably non-existent gods know that I'm far from perfect).  I'm not even sure if you could definitively define which of our (hypothetical) germ-lines is going to end up producing the Morlocks and which the Eloi...  But it is a useful analogy, even without nailing that detail down.



[1] Which may or may not be anything to do with actual intelligence, I will allow...
[2] Not exceptional, back in that day.  Quite restrained, compared with some of the 'other type' I'm using here as a counter-example.

[3] I'm hardly an expert in child-rearing, and certainly can't see into the future to see what kind of society natural selection would prefer to work with...  Maybe these lot get to be the populators of space, once the current crop of Astronauts, Cosmonauts and similar have done the expeditionary work, proven the technology, built the space-elevator and allowed the untold millions of people in community accomodation elevate themselves out into geostationary and beyond to be slung out towards space-borne or extra-planetary colonies of the same high-density, and thus sidestep the next Big One disaster that strikes the Earth by an accident of stellar cartography...

[Micro102]

Because humans are stupid...

And I assume you think that you, and people like minded to you, are an exception?

Not that much of an exception, lots of people aren't human...

No, I am not an exception, but I am aware of the problem and trying to manage it...

The idea of a thousand rats dying in the place of one human doesn't sit well with me, now sure, if I was the one human I wouldn't much care for the implications, but then again, what if I was one of the thousand rats? At least in the case of a human you can offset the negatives, do something for their family, let them do something they always wanted to, something like that, instead of "Hey, you get to be trapped in your house for your entire life with an ear growing out of your back so that I can get published in Nature"... I mean, it isn't as though humans can't justify killing each other for fun, profit, curiosity, or emotional satisfaction...
<insert rest of post>

Humans wouldn't kill other intellegent lifeforms. Rats basically want to survive, and they are doing better then they would out in the wild. It's not like they get some sort of pleasure running out in the feilds trying not to be mualed and eaten by owls. If you were one of those rats noone would experiment on you because you have the mind of a human.

[Bauglir]

Well, I've missed a lot. First off, human trials actually ARE done, but you have to get animal testing done first to make sure it isn't toxic to mammals in general. That's actually a sensible precaution. Once you demonstrate that, say, rats don't get cancer and die from taking sensible doses of the stuff, you move up to limited human trials before it's released on the market. IIRC, most drugs tend to spend a decade or two in testing before they're released for general consumption, so there's plenty of time. So it's a pretty silly example you've brought up.

Secondly, there's possibly some argument that, in the absence of significant population pressure or exterior competition, a lot of (generally highly developed, economically speaking) human populations aren't experiencing natural selection. But I don't want to argue about that; neither of us has the data to back that up, and the Idiocracy argument is pretty damn stupid, if you're trying to go down that road. More importantly, natural selection is a horribly unethical way to run society. If you want natural selection to operate the way you're expecting it to, then you basically have to stop people from sharing knowledge. If you can't figure out antibiotics on your own, sucks to be you. Don't know how to farm? Hope you're a good scavenger! Knowledge isn't genetic on any level, but intelligence is, but knowledge is what provides the selective advantage, so you have to force everyone who wants high knowledge to be highly intelligent, which means removing easy ways for stupid people to benefit.

This is especially ridiculous at a point in time where humanity is approaching the ability to modify itself. Evolution is slow, inefficient, and incapable of producing certain results. Just go straight to genetic engineering, etc., if you think that natural selection is necessary to produce a better humanity. You'll get better results, faster, and there's no significant difference, morally speaking.

[Siquo]

@Starver (&Max): Funny thing is, evolution is a lot slower than the slowest human. Stupid people beget smart ones, and vice-versa. The largest increases in IQ that we've had in the world were through education, not breeding. The correlation between smart parents and smart kids was proven to be upbringing, for the most part (no time to google the research there). So the world getting more stupid isn't really going to happen for a long time... Be glad the ones who do have intelligence don't waste it on raising children, and leave that to others who are better equipped to that task...

Also, before worst comes to worst, what Bauglir said last: we're rapidly approaching the escape velocity for natural selection for individuals.

Feel free to replace 'good' and 'bad' with 'positive' and 'negative' if you like. I'm using that definition, not the emotionally charged ones like Good and Evil.

You... dislike having too many electrons?