Evolution

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by garbonzo, Feb 20, 2015.

  1. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    I still can't follow your arithmetic. Even today, there are places where it's not uncommon for a woman to have a baby every year. If she reaches menarche at 16 and menopause at 40, even if she spaces them two years apart she can still give birth to twelve children.
     
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  3. brokenbutnotbeat Registered Member

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    not really. Could be gods
     
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  5. Kajalamorth The Doctor Registered Senior Member

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    That by no mean defines intelligence. One could argue that the worship of "gods" to be a delusional feature opposed to an intelligent one. Furthermore religion can be said to be by-product of human curiosity. And many animals exhibit behaviours analogous to curiosity.

    And again advancement and intelligence aren't even related concepts.
     
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  7. garbonzo Registered Senior Member

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    Unless a quote has your name in it my post is a reply to everyone not just one member.
     
  8. garbonzo Registered Senior Member

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    Can animals one day start advancing like us at their current intelligence levels?
     
  9. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    I don't care. Include the member's name every time you change who you're responding to.
     
  10. brokenbutnotbeat Registered Member

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    you could tell me why you think so,

    Not all animals take the same route in evolution I guess, but intelligence must be related to advancement, we have hands that are dexterous and a mind that is creative, allowing us to build tools that other animals can't, yet at the same time there are other animals which have similarly dexterous hands, build tools and don't quite have the intelligence we have, yet, like chimps, and they don't yet know how to build rockets, not saying that one day they must advance just like us humans, but intelligence must have a say in the way we have evolved don't you think? The ability to make up theories, and then find proof for it later, can less intelligent creatures do that? I don't think so, they may learn, but not like us.
     
  11. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Are the most "advanced and intelligent creatures" those that are making new or modified environment for themselves to live in?
    Or those, like wolves, which can gain more information that is useful to their existence / survival via their senses? Humans are very visually dominated creatures with almost useless sense of smell compared to wolves and many other animals. Now days, many humans spend many hours each day looking at their iPod / cell phone etc. Some so detatched from their immediate environment that they walk into swimming pools or step in front of buses, have car accidents while using their electronics, etc. No wolf is dumb enough to do that. They are very aware of their environment - can even start to follow a rabbit that hopped past where they are an hour earlier. No human can do that.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Mar 21, 2015
  12. brokenbutnotbeat Registered Member

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    I love animals as much as you do (if you don't, then as much as most animal loving people), but intelligence doesn't mean we're better, what I mean is animals are completely oblivious of what's happening outside their immediate environments, we know what the moon looks like, we know what kind of atmosphere it has, when other animals don't even think about stuff like that, that is intelligence to me. I'm not saying animals don't do the best with what they have at their disposal, they are smart too.

    Yes, we are destructive, we kill a lot, yet there are some human beings, that care for animals out of genuine concern, you never forget those even if they are a minority, if there was an meteor hitting a certain part of earth, killing everything, there'd be at least a few humans who'd relocate animals because they care , or at least give a thought. That's what being human is all about.

    but evolution is about losing things and gaining things. The path human beings took meant they lost their sense of smell (I'm no expert on evolution, so I don't know if our sense of smell was better at some point during our evolution), they lost their claws, in favor of hands with dexterity to build tools, meaning they no longer needed claws, and claws don't help in tool building, and we have replaced it with weapons. So, human beings don't need to have heightened sense of smell because wolves do. You see, we have built tools that detect traces of poisionous gases, and we have binoculars to overcome our limited field of vision.

    I'm not saying we're awesome, I'm just stating we're at least a different.

    when you look at the kardashev scale, there are three types, we're not even type 1 yet, I know the scale has to do with technology, but can there be technology without intelligence? and the moment any animal takes an evolutionary route to become smarter, it seems to lose it's apparent 'savageness', loses what it has and instead develops new, efficient stuff using things we find in our environment. we use nuclear energy, that's just leaps and bounds ahead of what wolves are capable of.
     
    Last edited: Mar 21, 2015
  13. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Humans ARE animals. Specifically, we are Great Apes, a clade that also includes orangutans, the two species of gorillas, and the two species of chimpanzees, our closest relatives.

    The most intelligent mammals, besides Homo sapiens, are the other five species of Great Apes: individual gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans have learned to "speak" in American Sign Language. Last I heard, one of them had a vocabulary of 2,000 words.

    Of course the cetaceans are highly intelligent. It's difficult for us to study them since they live in an environment that's not comfortable for humans. It's highly possible that many species have developed language. At the very least, members of some species seem to have individual names, and groups of some species seem to have a unique call they produce together which may be an identifier: perhaps a "national anthem," or simply a cadence count like, "I don't know but I been told/Orca ass is mighty cold/Sound off one-two/Sound off three-four..."

    Many birds are also highly intelligent. Alex the African Grey parrot developed an impressive vocabulary of English words. He never learned to create sentences (unfortunately he died young at age 35) but he was able to put together accurate phrases like "long red key." Crows have learned to use sticks as tools, and some have learned to run out into a street while the red light protects them, lay a large nut down exactly where a car's wheels will run over it, then come back to eat it after it's smashed.

    Apes have prehensile thumbs (although they can only touch two fingers, not all four like humans), which makes it easier for them to do the kinds of constructive things we do. Psittacines (parrots, macaws, cockatoos, etc.) have two pairs of opposable digits on each foot, in addition to a beak that is quite maneuverable. These are their "hands" and they can do amazing things with them.

    Any of these animals might eventually develop human-level intelligence.
     
  14. brokenbutnotbeat Registered Member

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    Yes,
    just to add
    I wonder if environment and survival must have something to do with how individual species evolve, cockroaches and ants are highly successful as they are, so their paths will be very different from ours and other mammals. Evolution is pretty interesting, and I see why everything didn't evolve the same way.
     
  15. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Highly unlikely as Earth will probably be devoid of life first due to man's stupidity / lack of wisdom and continued burning of fossil fuels.

    The half life of CO2 is at least 1000 years. Already the release rate has made CH4 release rate much greater than the harsh solar UV can produce OH- radical. So now CH4 concentration is several times greater than any time in last 800,000 years (long before too but no data available to prove that.) and rapidly increasing with no significant limit known. CH4's half life is now increasing at 0.3 year each year as there is less OH- every year to destroy it.

    As a specie, "intelligent" man most likely will have the briefest period of existence of all the creatures evolution has produced. "Intelligent" perhaps, depending on how that is defined, but "wise" man is not. Most animals do not shit in their own nest. Earth is man's nest. Green House Gases are his shit.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Mar 21, 2015
  16. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    As will be nuclear waste when we finally use up all of the fossil fuel that took more than half a billion years to deposit. (Of which there will never be very much more since mushrooms evolved the enzyme to digest dead trees.)

    And of course our shit itself is our shit. There are still many places on earth where the water table is poisonous because of Paleolithic-era waste disposal customs.
     
  17. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    23,198
    No problem with nuclear waste:

    After 10 or so years in "swimming pool" storage, as now, "glassify" the waste in disks about two feet in diameter and inch or two thick. (A surface to volume ratio high enough so self heating does not soften glass, or quartz if need be. Disk can have thin pure glass outer layer to stop non-gamma radiation. Water cooling could continue if needed during transport)

    Then with automatic handling (avoiding gamma rays injury to people) load onto special boat with Aegis ships as escort for trip to deep ocean trench. The subduction zone just North of Puerto Rico is more than 8 miles deep. Automatic "hurler" like large version of the "clay pigeon" hurler used for shot gun practices, slings disk over the ship's stern to start their 100 or so million year trip deeper into the earth. Their shape will assure they rest initially in the bottom mud well separated from each other in a swath several miles wide even with launch rate of 1 per second.
     
  18. garbonzo Registered Senior Member

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    Why do I have to obey your command? That's unnecessary. There's nothing to be gained by doing that.
     
  19. garbonzo Registered Senior Member

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    See The Planet of the Apes.
     
  20. garbonzo Registered Senior Member

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    How long do you figure we have on this Earth?
     
  21. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    There are a number of things "to be gained": a more polite discussion; the most minimal of contributions to a clear and organised debate; the respect of those you claim to respect in turn. It is a necessary element that allows each individual involved in a debate to see who it is that you are addressing. You might think that all evolutionists are the same person, but this is not so.

    Moreover, while I don't recall any particular rule against it on SF, I do expect it falls into the more general requirements of a disciplined format that are, indeed, required on the forums and that it could be called misrepresentation if you begin a response with "[qu ote=X]" and then include a post later from Y without noting the source of their comment. If you don't start arranging your responses so that the various people involved in the debate can see who you're responding to, I will launch a complaint, as I shouldn't be expected to sift through your posts to see what it is I've written and haven't written, because my time is of value also. I don't know how much longer we have on this Earth, but if you don't start using proper address forms I could hazard some guesses as to how much longer you have on this site.

    Or, is it rather that you hope to gain from the confusion? Are you here in the cause of honesty, or not? I would hope for the former.
     
  22. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Not on average. There is no place on earth, and never has been, where the average woman has a live birth every year.
    Maximum. You need average.

    The basic problem is that the low end extremes - 0 live births ever despite reaching adulthood, injury or death in the first few pregnancies and none from then one - are fairly common in all human societies, but the outliers one would need to average them (20 - 24 live births, say) are not.
     
  23. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    22,087
    It's obviously conceivable that human breeding rate could be high enough to form a strong left-skew producing a birth every two years... but the mathematical considerations would be profound. Individual leveraging of breeding rate would be almost unheard of, since no individual female could counter non-reproductives with a freaking herd of children following her and her mate around. So by individual, there would be a moving ceiling of maybe 2-4 offspring at a given time. And there are risks associated with that, and so forth. A female could easily go one a year - old farming communities used to do this, and it also represents the ecological behaviour of yuppies. That said... maybe there'd be a burst of several in a few years, but not continuously over larger scales. Also, that burst would be limited itself by resources. A human population that stumbled on Shag-ri-La with plentiful resources might pull off something like the rate Frag's suggesting, but then again, there wouldn't be much mortality in such a situation anyway. You could have time-effective short bursts of children so that each female might support 4-5, but not against massive mortality.

    Anyway, it's just an off-the-cuff comment. Who cares, really?
     

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