Humans killed Darwin (prepare for a long read).

[Lbm]

Now, that is something very interesting. Believe it or not i am exactly the same. I seem to react differently than other people to most situations.

 

I never understood the "love" thing, hard to explain really. My wife thinks i have a heart of stone. A few girlfriends have actually said to me "would you even care if i left", i said yes but i always doubted i would lol.

 

Always assumed everyone else was just over emphisizing their thoughts, feelings. Least i'm not the only one now lol.

 

Yep, the *love* thing is pehaps not real love but some people getting deperately attached to the image of their lovers/friends/family and so suffering ensues when their image fractures one day.

Perhaps being detached in a sense gives a truer perspective, rather than heartless.

[Scott]

I would like to try an experiment. I have a scientific theory on how it would go:

 

Take 1000 babies, raise them without ever knowing what religion or god is. Give them a good life and allow natural development. Ask them if they think there is a being looking after them.

 

Take 1000 babies, raise them without ever knowing what religion or god is. Give them a poor upbringing (as in money, not beating them lol) with next to nothing. Ask them if they think there is a being looking after them.

 

 

My theory is the 1000 babies raised in poverty would have faith in something. They would have to for their own sake. Most poor people are religious, they need to think there is a better life waiting for them.

 

Thats my theory and my reason for thinking religion groups are just power hungry thugs exploiting people's innocence and desperation. This is another reason i don't believe in God. If there was a "God" he would do something about the attrocity that is "religion".

 

Fact, the Catholic Church has enough money to wipe out 3rd world debt single handedly. Why doesn't it?

[Firestorm]

Yep, the *love* thing is pehaps not real love but some people getting deperately attached to the image of their lovers/friends/family and so suffering ensues when their image fractures one day.

Perhaps being detached in a sense gives a truer perspective, rather than heartless.

 

yeh perphaps. i think that im a lot tougher now through breakups. i know that i can exist on my own.. but then i do love my gf alot. maybe its not heartless... maybes its being defensive.

[Firestorm]

Greed. Hearts of man are dark dude. real dark.

 

I beleive that God wont stop what happens ( ive said this b4 on here too lol dejavous) cos of freewill. to stop that wouldnt be freewill woudlnt it.

 

mind u this can be related to Islam. etc

[Scott]

Greed. Hearts of man are dark dude. real dark.

 

I beleive that God wont stop what happens ( ive said this b4 on here too lol dejavous) cos of freewill. to stop that wouldnt be freewill woudlnt it.

 

mind u this can be related to Islam. etc

 

 

There is no freewill with any religion. U know one good thing i think comes out of religion. Most of the followers are generally good people. My wifes family are really really really religious and they honestly have hearts of gold, same goes for anyone else i have met. The trouble is there is always an awkwardness with "bible bashers". I don't have it as i understand it, but i do notice other people acting differently around certain folks because they know they are really religious.

[Max Headroom]

1. Evolution. We as a human race have not evolved really one iota, the technology around us has. Take away the technology and we revert to our basic state.

 

2. The Bible. A whole load of hogwash. A collection of "stories",nothing more nothing less. And depending on which religion you are, christian-wise, the books of the bible vary. How can it be the word of god when it was decided which parts of the bible we would see by men of the cloth in the 11th century.

 

3. The continued development of mankind. Because of greater technology, those babies who would have perished at birth, because of some disease or physical or mental trauma are "saved" by technological advances in medicine to live a life full of pain and suffering.

 

4. Religion. A waste of time. Churches full of those who want to believe, yet take for example the Catholic church. In Africa women are dying of aids because the Catholic missionaries refuse to support contraception, thereby allowing thousands to die a slow and painful death.

[Tannhauser]

I think I'll stay out of the religion stuff. I've got a science background, and I'm an atheist, but it always seems to me that people have an incredibly negative and one-sided view of the Christian teachings.

 

Anyway, to get back to Trev's original point:

 

So, in my head Darwin is correct, I can see how it all could happen the way he thought, and it seems the most plausible explanation, but this got me thinking about humans. We are the only species (I think) who don't choose a mate by their strengths, ie: using instinct. In other species it's always the strongest or fastest or best looking partner that gets chosen, so the genes are always getting better and evolving, but humans don't choose a (long term) mate for their natural strengths, we go on personality and 'love', so essentially the human species is getting weaker all the time because the weak genes are being passed on as well as the strong. We also have offspring with people who aren't our long term mate, which is even worse, because at some levels in society there is pretty much NO selection process at all!! That's pretty scary

 

The phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ causes all sorts of problems, because we use 'fittest' in two distinct ways. ‘Fitness’ tends to conjure up images of running faster, fighting harder and so on. But ‘fitness’ to a biologist means ‘ability to pass on genes to the next generation’., i.e. “reproductive fitness”.

 

Fitness, then, means “ability to produce many copies of yourself in the current conditions”. In a society where mortality rates are really low, if a gene ‘programmed’ us to have loads of kids for example, then yes, that gene will be successful and will gradually change behaviour. Which is what ‘Idiocracy’ posits.

 

The idea of ‘weak genes’ is therefore confusing two different things: (1) weak in the sense of undesirable and (2) weak in the sense of reproductively unsuccessful. Number (1) is a value judgement built up from the culture we live in. It means nothing to 'nature'. As far as nature is concerned, a combination of Bear Grylls, Einstein and Martin Luther King has weaker genes than Sean McChav the pasty-faced car TWOCer with an IQ of 80, if the former has less children that survive to pass on their genes than the latter.

[Scoboblio]

Do your bit for evolution today guys. Go out and get an intelligent girl knocked up.

 

I've often thought about human evolution, and the only conclusion I can come to is that it's not something that ever stops - take the example of natural blondes, can't remember where I read it but apparantly due to hair dye being used so much nowadays, guys who prefer blondes were more likely to go after a 'fake' one (airplane blonde ) since the trend was for dark haired girls to dye their hair blonde.... the result was that if current trends continued, natural blondes would be 'extinct' in a few hundred years.

 

But apparantly the trends (especially in the US) changed, and the fake blondes are going back to brunnette, turning the whole thing on it's head.

[Tannhauser]

Could evolution make us physically weaker? Absolutely, if there was a selection pressure to get rid of it. For example, if we entered a phase in which women only went for spindly types for partners. But physical robustness won’t disappear without a good reason. We have retained many features that are of no damn use to us in the modern world, but without a good reason to go, they are still with us.

 

As for the role of love and attraction, there’s an immense body of work that has looked at the guiding hand of evolution in determining mate choice. Evolutionary psychologists argue that you can see sexual selection processes written all over personal ads. Men tend to sell themselves more on status and earnings (=ability to provide), women tend to focus on personality traits, youth and looks(=ability to nurture, ability to bear healthy offspring). Personally, I don’t buy most of it, but it is possible that what lies behind attraction and love are the same gene-driven instincts that operate lower down the ladder.

 

So is it intelligence that causes this? Mother Nature has tried all kinds of things as weapons for her children; most notably large claws and sharp teeth are still the winners 'out in the wild', her next attempt was intelligence. Dolphins, apes, humans, etc. We obviously use intelligence to make us the strongest species, we make tools and weapons of our own (so does that mean shooting a Tiger is natural selection?), and we rely more and more on our inventions to keep us above the other things in nature.

 

There could be trouble ahead, if we're becoming weaker in terms of survival in the wild, we'll eventually rely completely on technology, what happens if it goes away? On the other side it could mean that technological advancement IS the next evolutionary step, and we are becoming stronger and evolving by adding technology to ourselves. What if that was the only way nature could get to the next level; by using humans as a stepping stone to technology and robots!!

 

I had to think about this. The problem is that we use the word evolution to mean two different things:

 

1)the behavioural and physical changes in a biological organism in reponse to a change in its environment

2)a general word for anything that is changing over time.

 

In a sense, you could say technology is a product of intelligence and cooperative behaviour, so it’s a means of propagating genes that itself has been produced by those genes. What complicates the situation is that you can’t simply reduce technology to genetics. Technology is a product of culture, and while the factors that helped develop culture are undoubtedly genetic, culture has emergent properties that go way beyond genetics.

 

All you need is love; the lower species have a higher ratio of instinct:intelligence, and they don't love. The more intelligent species such as apes, chimps, certain large pets etc do show love but still have strong instincts, then there's humans who have a high ratio of intelligence:instinct, and we are controlled by love, so what is love? Again, maybe nature knows that love is an unfortunate bi-product of intelligence, so robots are the way to go; loveless machines with ultimate intelligence to rule the world.

 

But Mother Nature is deaf and blind, and don’t know nuffin. In a sense , you could say that we already ARE robots, programmed by our genes to make copies of themselves. This is the analogy that the tiresome proselityzer Richard Dawkins makes in The Selfish Gene (his finest hour: it was all down hill from there).

 

There’s no reason for love to disappear when the genes that programme for this are doing so well for themselves.

[Snooze]

U know one good thing i think comes out of religion. Most of the followers are generally good people. My wifes family are really really really religious and they honestly have hearts of gold, same goes for anyone else i have met.

 

Spot on. Much as I dislike the concept of organised religion, I think it's fair to say that it has contributed vastly to the quality of society today (which may be lower than you'd like, but is much, MUCH higher than it could be).

 

I think that it's significantly due to the decline in organised religion in the UK that we are seeing a rapid decline in the quality of society.

[Ewen]

Little toes will go first. Maybe another thousand years, but they will be gone soon enough...we dont need them anymore, our hi-tech footware providing far more support and balance than the little toe ever could.

Teeth....who needs teeth in the future, future-food being processed mush, pre-packed, pre-cooked and probably pre-chewed mechanically. There will come a time in our future when a child will be born whos teeth will never grow. He wont need them as his daily intake can be drunk through a straw.

Testicles would go next. Women wouldnt need them...pregnancy being available on page six of a home and garden magazine. Get one quick before the fad dies out and childbirth becomes the sole duty of those not intelligent enough to run a conglomerate. Men wouldnt need them as sex would be illegal on overpopulation grounds first, then legalised again after it was proved that active sperm was in fact the subject of history. Evolution will eventually absorb the two bags of wasted skin to help the body grow breasts... after all, male genes would be almost female by then so why go half way, just get it over with completely.

Hair would follow soon after...it used to fall out far too early as it was, nature would just tidy things up and not give us the hassle in future.

Our immune systems would be almost non existent by then, but then we wouldnt need one as the outside atmosphere never gets into our sealed city domes, the air being scrubbed by the last word (literally) in germ killing antibiotics.

As has been said on here already, we will get to a state of cushioned, sanitised and impotent evolution that will kill us dead should our technology eventually fail.

[Scott]

Bored?

[Ewen]

Bored?

Pretty much.

[JustGav]

Little toes will go first. ....blah..blah eventually fail.

 

[Scott]

Pretty much.

 

Have u seen wall-E?

 

The writer had pretty much the same idea as yourself regarding food.

[Ewen]

Have u seen wall-E?

The writer had pretty much the same idea as yourself regarding food.

No, not yet although I'm looking forward to it. I was just regurgitating thoughts previously made by others over the years.

[Lbm]

Little toes will go first. Maybe another thousand years, but they will be gone soon enough...we dont need them anymore, our hi-tech footware providing far more support and balance than the little toe ever could.

Teeth....who needs teeth in the future, future-food being processed mush, pre-packed, pre-cooked and probably pre-chewed mechanically. There will come a time in our future when a child will be born whos teeth will never grow. He wont need them as his daily intake can be drunk through a straw.

Testicles would go next. Women wouldnt need them...pregnancy being available on page six of a home and garden magazine. Get one quick before the fad dies out and childbirth becomes the sole duty of those not intelligent enough to run a conglomerate. Men wouldnt need them as sex would be illegal on overpopulation grounds first, then legalised again after it was proved that active sperm was in fact the subject of history. Evolution will eventually absorb the two bags of wasted skin to help the body grow breasts... after all, male genes would be almost female by then so why go half way, just get it over with completely.

Hair would follow soon after...it used to fall out far too early as it was, nature would just tidy things up and not give us the hassle in future.

Our immune systems would be almost non existent by then, but then we wouldnt need one as the outside atmosphere never gets into our sealed city domes, the air being scrubbed by the last word (literally) in germ killing antibiotics.

As has been said on here already, we will get to a state of cushioned, sanitised and impotent evolution that will kill us dead should our technology eventually fail.

 

In short-reverting back to a fish.

[penguin]

not another one.

[penguin]

I think that it's significantly due to the decline in organised religion in the UK that we are seeing a rapid decline in the quality of society.

 

hit the nail on the head!

[Scott]

hit the nail on the head!

 

Not necessarily, I don't think it’s specifically down to religion. It’s down to a lack of fear. Religion used to distil an inherent fear of judgement and judgement day in people, it doesn't work anymore so another fear stirrer is required.

I say bring on chavhunting as a sport! I think that just might work, and if it doesn't who cares? It's fun anyway.

[Snooze]

True, true - fear of real repercussions from a law-figure (Judge Dredd, anyone?) could be a satisfactory replacement for religious fairytale goblins as a social control.

The difference is that religion used to be the law. Now it isn't, something else is needed - and it's not our current law system.

[tbourner]

Prune bump.

 

Also, anyone see Horizon? The idea that we evolved into homo-erectus (titter) because of eating meat and/or cooked food is quite interesting. Maybe it happened so fast that it explains the lack of a missing link!

[AndrewOW]

And from Homo-Erectus (titter) to Homo-Sapiens, and with our modern lazy lifestyles, Homo-Slobbus, very probably

[imi]

Quite an interesting read there.

 

I think you may only be looking at evolution one sided though.... Take the word "Evolution"....

 

 

 

Now, in my opinion we have grown past the need to depend on the strongest or the fastest to evolve. That in itself is evolution. The ever evolving intelligence that you describe is, in my opinion, now the greatest evolution of mankind. Take man, before setting something on fire and wondering what a sabre tooth would taste like bbq'd, we were basically advanced apes; now our brains grow larger everyday as does the % of the brain we use.

 

I think i read somewhere that over the next century most of us will be using around 10% of our brain. Thats a big jump as i think its regarded as 7% just now. The big issue with measuring evolution over the past centuries is that it was always physical attributes that were measured. It has always been difficult to measure mental attributes as we didn't, and still don't, understand most of them. New theory's are coming out all the time, take autism for example.

 

To summarise I don't think our evolution has anything to do with the evolution of technology. However, the evolution of technology has everything to do with our evolution of intelligence. Evolution, for mankind, for the next while will be devolution of the physical aspects and growth of the mind/spirit/soul.

 

Agree with the above in principal

 

We need to realise that:

2B people still dont have access to electricity

Approx 7B in the world today,

- 60% are in Asia

- 30% are below the age of 15 (next gen)

- Access to drinking water per person will half in the next 20 years (expect wars over clean water being the next push from the superpowers)

 

so when we talk about dependance on technology, etc - which societies are we talking about? clearly not everyone is taking advantage of what technology can offer cause a significant proportion dont even have access to electricity.