Becoming Human
- Thread starter Gonzo
- Start date
LiViNtOoLiVe
The man, thas rite THE MAN!!!!!!!!!
i'm no pro in this (im a ninth grade student in brooklyn tech) but for the person that sed why are apes still aorund i believe you have to understand meiosis and how babies get their genes for traits and how some babies did get traits and how some didn't. the babies that did get certain traits eventually passed on the traits to their children and so on makin the human race, while the babies who didnt get the traits werent able to pass on the traits to the children making those particular apes not evolve.this is why humans are evolvin into different lookin people, if a black person and another black person has a baby they baby will be black now imagine that white ppl and black ppl never had interracial babies, there would be 2 completely diff races, now imagine more changes than just color. hair, nose and eyes. thats how monkeys are still here and humans are too.!!! thas just my 2 cents. by the way that was just an example i dont mean to be racist. but thas the easiest way to explain Peace 
lol
lolLiViNtOoLiVe
The man, thas rite THE MAN!!!!!!!!!
for all of you questioning thas why evryones beliefs are diff and everythin keeps changin. thas why thte old testament needs the new testmant. thas why there are many holy books for every religion not one for every religion!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Let me start off by saying to the fresh meat who haven't yet discoverd my odd sense of humor - THE APE PART WAS A JOKE - there, that's settled
now, WIney or other Christian fundamentalists- IF only people that have accepted Christ as their savior, what of the other 85% of the worlds population???
That doesn't seem very loving to me...
Flavio has all the answers-that's what I was looking for thanks
now, WIney or other Christian fundamentalists- IF only people that have accepted Christ as their savior, what of the other 85% of the worlds population???
That doesn't seem very loving to me...
Flavio has all the answers-that's what I was looking for thanks
a13antichrist
Moderator from Hell
I'm already disgusted enough as it is by some of the things I've read so far that I am still not convinced I want to dignify them with a response, and anyway a lot of you will have read things I've said at OCN on the same topic, but anyway..
I'm with gotfrag in being consistently appalled at the apparent total lack of understanding of the process of evolution. His intitial summary was good but I think it needs to be clarified that the ancestors did not "die out", at least in the geneological sense. Evolution is hardly quantum physics so it's really amazing that so many people get it wrong. In any case there are surely hundreds of websites on it so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail.
A race is. A slight change occurs in the DNA of ONE member of a species. Either this gives him an advantage, or a disadvantage, over the rest of his species. If it's an advantage he'll most likely mate more frequently and pass his genes (and thus his advantage) on to the next generation, who in turn will do better than their peers. After a few generations advantage will be present in a certain percentage of the population and you could argue that they are a "different race". In the meantime, other members have had other "advantages", which they have also mixed with the rest of the group. So we may have three or 20 slightly different groups of creatures - the "original" race has not died out, but rather "diverged".
Of course the slight changes may be bad, in which case the animal is more likely to die earlier and not mate as often. That change gets rejected and does not influence the rest of the gene pool.
Remembering also that at each point, the generation has the advantages passed onto it from its parents, and its own unique little change. Now multiply that by 100,000 generations and you end up with differences such as monkeys and humans; multiply it by 100,000,000 generations and you get differences such as fish elephants and sea lions.
We never "came down out of the trees". Our mutations caused us to diverge in different directions, and one of those directions was life in the tree-tops. Another was life in Sky-scrapers.
Anyway the point is, over thousands of generations, tiny changes at each link in the chain (i.e, at each generation level) modify the members until they may end up as totally different species. The old race has diverged into two, or 10, or whatever.
How about this: You start with 1,000 cyclists riding as a group. Every 10km or so there's a fork in the road and 1/3 of the cyclists split off and follow that fork instead. Each fork behaves exactly the same way so that after 100,000 km there isn't really muh of a group left on any of the forks - and the riders are all in totally different places. Whatsmore, they're all in different places from where they started, as well. The road is the process of evolution, and the riders are different species evolving out of a single race.
That's a rather course summary but I hope it helps somewhat.
Now here's the problem that Man has.
We're so mind-fucked on equality and all this other fucking shit that we've created a society where even our most fucked-up, ignorant, idiotic, grotesque, obese, and generally all-round useless specimens can still pass their polluted genes onto another generation. So we never get rid of the "bad egg". Thankfully some people actually have standards so a bad gene will never take over, but in nature it almost never has a chance to begin with.
Now I'm sure that that's actually confused more than it's helped, but whatever..
I have resolved this argument in my own mind too and I now I just try to share not having to believe in some desparate no-hoper's last fantasy. Religion is a fantasy constructed for people who can't handle life on their own; who need a "big brother" to hang onto when the going gets rough. Sure it's a nice idea; it'd be a nice idea for me to find Rachel Leigh Cook in my bed tonight but taht doesn't make it any more likely to happen.
"Oh but how can you explain where the universe came from then?" Who said I needed to? Just accept it as one of the things that we're not yet advanced enough to know. As flavio pointed out, lightning used to come from Zeus; now we've figured out what actually happens. Given time, we'll figure out how the universe got here and then we won't have to bother with any of this nonsense about God anymore.
That is also the reason that he makes such a convenient answer. By completely eliminating anything that could possibly challenge His credibility, you make a nice big deep patch of sand for you to stick your head into so you never have to worry about what the truth may actually be. Infallibility is God's main weakness. If he was really as perfect as He needs to be, he would have created a universe that didn't need a creator to account for it.
And another thing. As LivingtooLive (nice spelling btw
) pointed out, God also likes to change the rules of the game so that he can remain infallible. It used to be that there was never any chance of life on other planets, but now that it's become much more likely, suddenly the Church is okay with the idea (although Jehovah's Witness still aren't). Same with homosexuals - God loves them too now, I believe - correct me if I'm wrong. Point is, at each poin where evidence may challenge the existence of God, the rules are changed and suddenly God's okay again.
The good thing about this though is that eventaully He'll get modifed out of existence...
How many of you remember the episode of "Lois & Clark" which had H. G. Wells come bacl from the future? Of course by then they all knew that Clark was Superman; H. G. Wells made the point that they had figured everything out, except for one question: "how on Earth could she have been so STOOPID???" That's about how I feel towards Christianity.
I'm with gotfrag in being consistently appalled at the apparent total lack of understanding of the process of evolution. His intitial summary was good but I think it needs to be clarified that the ancestors did not "die out", at least in the geneological sense. Evolution is hardly quantum physics so it's really amazing that so many people get it wrong. In any case there are surely hundreds of websites on it so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail.
A race is. A slight change occurs in the DNA of ONE member of a species. Either this gives him an advantage, or a disadvantage, over the rest of his species. If it's an advantage he'll most likely mate more frequently and pass his genes (and thus his advantage) on to the next generation, who in turn will do better than their peers. After a few generations advantage will be present in a certain percentage of the population and you could argue that they are a "different race". In the meantime, other members have had other "advantages", which they have also mixed with the rest of the group. So we may have three or 20 slightly different groups of creatures - the "original" race has not died out, but rather "diverged".
Of course the slight changes may be bad, in which case the animal is more likely to die earlier and not mate as often. That change gets rejected and does not influence the rest of the gene pool.
Remembering also that at each point, the generation has the advantages passed onto it from its parents, and its own unique little change. Now multiply that by 100,000 generations and you end up with differences such as monkeys and humans; multiply it by 100,000,000 generations and you get differences such as fish elephants and sea lions.
We never "came down out of the trees". Our mutations caused us to diverge in different directions, and one of those directions was life in the tree-tops. Another was life in Sky-scrapers.
Anyway the point is, over thousands of generations, tiny changes at each link in the chain (i.e, at each generation level) modify the members until they may end up as totally different species. The old race has diverged into two, or 10, or whatever.
How about this: You start with 1,000 cyclists riding as a group. Every 10km or so there's a fork in the road and 1/3 of the cyclists split off and follow that fork instead. Each fork behaves exactly the same way so that after 100,000 km there isn't really muh of a group left on any of the forks - and the riders are all in totally different places. Whatsmore, they're all in different places from where they started, as well. The road is the process of evolution, and the riders are different species evolving out of a single race.
That's a rather course summary but I hope it helps somewhat.
Now here's the problem that Man has.
We're so mind-fucked on equality and all this other fucking shit that we've created a society where even our most fucked-up, ignorant, idiotic, grotesque, obese, and generally all-round useless specimens can still pass their polluted genes onto another generation. So we never get rid of the "bad egg". Thankfully some people actually have standards so a bad gene will never take over, but in nature it almost never has a chance to begin with.
Now I'm sure that that's actually confused more than it's helped, but whatever..
wine4all said:
I have resolved this argument in my own mind too and I now I just try to share not having to believe in some desparate no-hoper's last fantasy. Religion is a fantasy constructed for people who can't handle life on their own; who need a "big brother" to hang onto when the going gets rough. Sure it's a nice idea; it'd be a nice idea for me to find Rachel Leigh Cook in my bed tonight but taht doesn't make it any more likely to happen.
"Oh but how can you explain where the universe came from then?" Who said I needed to? Just accept it as one of the things that we're not yet advanced enough to know. As flavio pointed out, lightning used to come from Zeus; now we've figured out what actually happens. Given time, we'll figure out how the universe got here and then we won't have to bother with any of this nonsense about God anymore.
wine4all said:
That is also the reason that he makes such a convenient answer. By completely eliminating anything that could possibly challenge His credibility, you make a nice big deep patch of sand for you to stick your head into so you never have to worry about what the truth may actually be. Infallibility is God's main weakness. If he was really as perfect as He needs to be, he would have created a universe that didn't need a creator to account for it.
And another thing. As LivingtooLive (nice spelling btw
) pointed out, God also likes to change the rules of the game so that he can remain infallible. It used to be that there was never any chance of life on other planets, but now that it's become much more likely, suddenly the Church is okay with the idea (although Jehovah's Witness still aren't). Same with homosexuals - God loves them too now, I believe - correct me if I'm wrong. Point is, at each poin where evidence may challenge the existence of God, the rules are changed and suddenly God's okay again. The good thing about this though is that eventaully He'll get modifed out of existence...
How many of you remember the episode of "Lois & Clark" which had H. G. Wells come bacl from the future? Of course by then they all knew that Clark was Superman; H. G. Wells made the point that they had figured everything out, except for one question: "how on Earth could she have been so STOOPID???" That's about how I feel towards Christianity.
a13antichrist
Moderator from Hell
Incidentally, try this for a theory of the Universe. It's called the Finite but Boundless" hypothesis.
What happens when you jump in your hovercraft, and take off in one direction, never touching the steering wheel, just letting yourself go & go & go? Well yeah eventually you run into a tree or a building or something but shut up. Provided nothing gets in your way, you'll go right around the earth & come back to exactly where you started from. The surface of the earth is a 2-D surface in 3D space - finite but boundless. There's no "edge" for you to get to or fall off.
Now, do the same thing for the universe. A 3D surface in 4-D space-time. Now obivously we're not advanced enough as a species to visualise what 4D looks like, but that's beside the point. Mathematics can handle as many dimensions as you care to throw at it.
A finite but boundless universe means that given the right equipment (such as Warp ^5 billion) you can head off in any direction you choose (this time the choice is 3D rather than 2D as it was on earth) and provided you don't run into a thermonuclear furnace or a black hole somewhere along the way, eventually you (well, your spacecraft at lest) will ebnd up right back where you started from. Again, it's impossible for our brains to visualise how this works but it's an intriguing theory, nonetheless.
It also fits with an expading universe. Just as you could increase [or decrease even] the radius of the Earth without changing the "finite but boundless" property (you'd still end up back at the same point; it would just take longer), we can extend that to the 4D case of the universe as well.
Cool, huh?
What happens when you jump in your hovercraft, and take off in one direction, never touching the steering wheel, just letting yourself go & go & go? Well yeah eventually you run into a tree or a building or something but shut up. Provided nothing gets in your way, you'll go right around the earth & come back to exactly where you started from. The surface of the earth is a 2-D surface in 3D space - finite but boundless. There's no "edge" for you to get to or fall off.
Now, do the same thing for the universe. A 3D surface in 4-D space-time. Now obivously we're not advanced enough as a species to visualise what 4D looks like, but that's beside the point. Mathematics can handle as many dimensions as you care to throw at it.
A finite but boundless universe means that given the right equipment (such as Warp ^5 billion) you can head off in any direction you choose (this time the choice is 3D rather than 2D as it was on earth) and provided you don't run into a thermonuclear furnace or a black hole somewhere along the way, eventually you (well, your spacecraft at lest) will ebnd up right back where you started from. Again, it's impossible for our brains to visualise how this works but it's an intriguing theory, nonetheless.
It also fits with an expading universe. Just as you could increase [or decrease even] the radius of the Earth without changing the "finite but boundless" property (you'd still end up back at the same point; it would just take longer), we can extend that to the 4D case of the universe as well.
Cool, huh?
LiViNtOoLiVe
The man, thas rite THE MAN!!!!!!!!!
whoa this hread has been goin on for much longer than it should have.. just drop it thas why there are people out there tryin to figure it out, there is no answer yet. and as for antichrist thanks fer the mention but i dont remember sayin or implyin that. maybe i just dont remember.
peacE!
peacE!
I have to say, d00d, that really made my thinker go. Quite an intriguing theory indeed. Except, I still don't think time is a constant. The time that we perceive here on earth is different than the time perceived on Mars or on Jupiter or on Pluto. There's no big ticking clock embedded in the sun to guide us on how to tell time. It's just something we invented to keep track of the day. Who is to say whether time is even the 4th dimension like most people would like to believe?
Just a thought....
Just a thought....
a13antichrist
Moderator from Hell
Well that's just the point.. we can't say for sure so we have to make do with what we can figure out. Time may very well not be the fourth dimension, but at this point, space-time is looking mightily credible indeed.
As for time being subjective, that's true also, but not quite in the maner you are suggesting. Perception of "time" varies with absolute velocity. For someone travelling near the speed of light, time passes much more slowly than for someone travelling at only a fraction of light speed (i.e., us). There's a whole lot of physics which explains why this is so but it has a lot to do with space-time and general relativity. If you pick up "A Brief History of Time" it gives you an idea, but you have to go to more hard-core texts to really get what it's going on about.
Another fascinating proposition is string theory. Now I can't tell you much about that because I only briefly glanced over it at the time and didn't get what it was talking about, so hence it must be fascinating. It's somewhat related to multiple "realities" if you like but look into it. It's currently a big thing in Quantum Physics.
As for time being subjective, that's true also, but not quite in the maner you are suggesting. Perception of "time" varies with absolute velocity. For someone travelling near the speed of light, time passes much more slowly than for someone travelling at only a fraction of light speed (i.e., us). There's a whole lot of physics which explains why this is so but it has a lot to do with space-time and general relativity. If you pick up "A Brief History of Time" it gives you an idea, but you have to go to more hard-core texts to really get what it's going on about.
Another fascinating proposition is string theory. Now I can't tell you much about that because I only briefly glanced over it at the time and didn't get what it was talking about, so hence it must be fascinating
. It's somewhat related to multiple "realities" if you like but look into it. It's currently a big thing in Quantum Physics.
a13antichrist
Moderator from Hell
Did you read my post Gonzo?
And in any case, "generally understandable to the layman" means leaving out all the things that stopped stupid people figuring it out sooner - and most of what makes it interesting. It's like a dummy's guide to PCs that tells you you can watch TV and pay your bills online.
And in any case, "generally understandable to the layman" means leaving out all the things that stopped stupid people figuring it out sooner - and most of what makes it interesting. It's like a dummy's guide to PCs that tells you you can watch TV and pay your bills online.
a13antichrist
Moderator from Hell
Gonzo said:
What's intriguing about that is that in 300 years' time, we may well have figured evreything out and then it WILL be a universe where we don't need a creator...