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Author
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Topic: Evolution and Specialness of Humanity
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nator
Member (Idle past 2199 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: 12-09-2001
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Re: The world "as it is"...
quote:
Through evolution true love simply is non-existant.
How do you tell the difference between "true" love and "fake" love?
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 133 by joshua221, posted 10-13-2005 6:30 PM | | joshua221 has replied |
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joshua221 
Inactive Member
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Message 152 of 316 (251578)
10-13-2005 8:43 PM
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Reply to: Message 151 by nator
10-13-2005 8:41 PM
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Re: The world "as it is"...
I already told you in a recent post.
I am smiling.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 151 by nator, posted 10-13-2005 8:41 PM | | nator has replied |
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 164 by nator, posted 10-14-2005 7:27 AM | | joshua221 has not replied |
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nator
Member (Idle past 2199 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: 12-09-2001
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Re: Uniqueness
Should I stop admiring his ability because he inherited the potential from his ancestors? quote:
He didn't.
Oh? Where did Michael Jordan get his gentic makeup?
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 136 by joshua221, posted 10-13-2005 6:41 PM | | joshua221 has replied |
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nator
Member (Idle past 2199 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: 12-09-2001
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Re: Charlie, why won't you answer this question?
Just a word of advice: If you expect to do well in any decent Philosophy program at University, you really need to step up your logic and argumentation skills. You are in for a rude awakening. quote:
Well now that you bring it up, I was thinking of sticking with my roots, and my Lord, take up some theology instead. Philosophy as a minor most likely.
Yeah, you really should. Philosophy would be too scary and difficult for a true believer to really excel. To many challenges to your dogma.
quote:
I don't know, I think you said that because my idea burns in your mind,
LOL! Not really, dear.
quote:
it shows you that within the idea you choose to argue for and represent there is so much ugliness involved that simply doesn't exist.
There is ugliness in science? In Biology? I suppose that some organisms are not considered attractivwe, like naked mole rats maybe, but hey, whatever. But maybe you mean "ugliness" as in "having an ugly character." The ugliest people I have ever known in that sense have been religious people, Charlie. Kindness is in short supply among the pompous and self-righteous, but they have plenty of judgement and arrogance.
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This, within the interactions supposed by the idea of human evolution.
How do you tell the difference between "real" love and "fake" love?
quote:
About your question regarding genetics, and natural selection, I know that these things exist as part of an imperfect world, but I do not believe that the social implications of evolution exist, therefore evolution does not exist.
That is a stupid statement.
Do you accept the following facts?: 1) Organisms reproduce 2) The offspring are not genetically identical.. 3) Not all offspring survive to reproduce. 4) Offspring who's inherited genetic traits confer an advantage to reproductive success will be more likely to have their own offspring survive to reproduce. quote:
Sure, now pull the trap, or tell me the relevance.
Then you accept the fact of Biological evolution.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 138 by joshua221, posted 10-13-2005 6:52 PM | | joshua221 has replied |
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joshua221
Inactive Member
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Message 155 of 316 (251592)
10-13-2005 9:15 PM
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Reply to: Message 154 by nator
10-13-2005 8:55 PM
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Re: Charlie, why won't you answer this question?
quote:
I don't know, I think you said that because my idea burns in your mind,
lol The way you put it, even I had to laugh. And I was serious when I wrote that hahah.
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There is ugliness in science?
The ugliness exists in the idea's world perpetuated until so many believe it. The world of meaningless and insignificance of the human race.
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Yeah, you really should. Philosophy would be too scary and difficult for a true believer to really excel. To many challenges to your dogma.
Probably not but this is getting funny again. I could handle it, my beliefs would most likely give me the advantage. They have thus far in school, and in life.
quote:
That is a stupid statement.
I meant to say something about the implied results of the world we are in through the theory evolution. These results I do not see in reality. They don't exist, therefore I think this is evidence that evolution exists. The world doesn't behave as evolution puts it, for an example, love is "real" in the sense that it is ALL about the feeling, and serves not an evolutionary mechanism, but the people involved in this love, and the moment.
quote:
Then you accept the fact of Biological evolution.
Well to spring the trap I said yes to the last one, # 4. But I do not accept biological evolution, not for the obvious and physical reasons. But for the insignificance given to me and all humans within the idea.
I am smiling.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 154 by nator, posted 10-13-2005 8:55 PM | | nator has replied |
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joshua221
Inactive Member
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Message 156 of 316 (251594)
10-13-2005 9:20 PM
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Reply to: Message 153 by nator
10-13-2005 8:44 PM
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Re: Uniqueness
Should I stop admiring his ability because he inherited the potential from his ancestors?
quote:
He didn't.
Oh? Where did Michael Jordan get his gentic makeup? Did you edit anything in the first statement? I'm just wondering. I thought I read that he inherited 'it'. As in ability. Sorry about that. But you had the same potential, almost when you were born. Aside from height and gender, you could have become a basketball legend. He did not magically become like that, born with superior genetics. He worked very hard, was cut from his modified basketball team actually. Wait, he worked harder than 'very hard' then.
I am smiling.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 153 by nator, posted 10-13-2005 8:44 PM | | nator has not replied |
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JustinC
Member (Idle past 4873 days) Posts: 624 From: Pittsburgh, PA, USA Joined: 07-21-2003
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Re: Uniqueness
quote:
Love can't evolve.
Clap...Clap...Clap...Bravo. You've demolished my position once again. You must be some sort of a philosophy wizard. Here's my reply: Love can't be created by a magical being. See how easy it is to make bare assertions.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 131 by joshua221, posted 10-13-2005 6:14 PM | | joshua221 has replied |
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joshua221
Inactive Member
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Message 158 of 316 (251598)
10-13-2005 9:33 PM
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Reply to: Message 157 by JustinC
10-13-2005 9:23 PM
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Re: Uniqueness
I didn't have much to say to you, I responded simply to increase my post counter. lol lol just kidding (now they know I think about that.)  No but seriously, you said love evolves, want to substantiate that?
I am smiling.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 157 by JustinC, posted 10-13-2005 9:23 PM | | JustinC has replied |
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 159 by JustinC, posted 10-13-2005 10:05 PM | | joshua221 has not replied |
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JustinC
Member (Idle past 4873 days) Posts: 624 From: Pittsburgh, PA, USA Joined: 07-21-2003
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Message 159 of 316 (251609)
10-13-2005 10:05 PM
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Reply to: Message 158 by joshua221
10-13-2005 9:33 PM
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Re: Uniqueness
I didn't really say I have definitive evidence that love evolves. I would say that since it is clear we are evolved creatures, just like all life, then it is plausible that love (a feeling) evolved also. This is besides the point, though. Your whole argument was that if love is an evolved trait it would be fake compared to if it was created by a magical being. Humans experience a feeling called love. Two explanations are at our disposal: 1.) It evolved just like all of our traits 2.) It was created by a magical being. You initially argued that if (1) was true love would be fake, and if (2) was true love would be real. I asked to substantiate this claim several times, which you seem to be ignoring. Your last post was a bare assertion that love cannot evolve. Your argument seemed to be "(1) cannot be true because love cannot evolve" which amounts to tautology. The previous paragraph summarized what we were discussing.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 158 by joshua221, posted 10-13-2005 9:33 PM | | joshua221 has not replied |
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 160 by Phat, posted 10-14-2005 2:29 AM | | JustinC has replied |
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Phat
Member Posts: 18349 From: Denver,Colorado USA Joined: 12-30-2003 Member Rating: 1.0
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Message 160 of 316 (251646)
10-14-2005 2:29 AM
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Reply to: Message 159 by JustinC
10-13-2005 10:05 PM
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More than one possibility and more than two explanations
JustinC writes: Two explanations are at our disposal: 1.) It evolved just like all of our traits 2.) It was created by a magical being. Depends upon your initial perspective. The way I see it, two explanations are also possible: 1)Love as an emotion was imagined, defined, and quantified through human wisdom and learning. A finite, limited source. 2) Love was initiated and imparted by the Holy God Who created this universe and Who Is the very source of definition for all words, ideas, concepts, and feelings. An infinite, eternal source. You say that human wisdom>created God in our minds. I say that God>created human wisdom or at least initiated the definition of the reality. This message has been edited by Phat, 10-14-2005 12:30 AM
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 159 by JustinC, posted 10-13-2005 10:05 PM | | JustinC has replied |
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 174 by JustinC, posted 10-14-2005 3:08 PM | | Phat has not replied |
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Larni
Member Posts: 4000 From: Liverpool Joined: 09-16-2005
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Re: Uniqueness
"My brother calls this "evidence for an afterlife". The unfortunates that I can't even look at, me part of a disgusting lifestyle, and in fact liking it. Liking the materialism, and greed of the economic system. Without God, even a god there would be no afterlife, and these people born into a world of pain would only know of that, and their dark hole." - Prophex I see what you mean. Your brother being the arguement of authority makes me see what you mean. I shall embrace your god on you brothers say so. Hang on, wait a second, you almost had me there. One question: what the fuck does your brother saying anything about anything have to do with your cock-eyed beliefs? You believe his word? Is that where you get this view that you need guidence to have morals? Did some one tell you: you are incapable of being a good person without out a god? What have they done to you that you can only experience happiness if it comes from the belief in a god. Morality is more pervasive than god. We felt the effects of morality thousands of years before your god was just a two bit sky god with a bunch of genocidal followers in the desert. It sounds like you feel guilt because others are suffering and you want an explanation? "You have misinterpreted the system that you seem to accept as truth. Evolution (the idea) belittles the "emotional features"." - Prophex. As far as I can see you belittle emotional features by saying that they need to be inputted by a god. I believe that they have generated spontaneously, much to the emotional benefit of every human in a position to benefit from them i.e. not being tortured my your god. BTW the evidence for an after life can be summed up in the following sentance:
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 134 by joshua221, posted 10-13-2005 6:37 PM | | joshua221 has not replied |
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Annafan
Member (Idle past 4608 days) Posts: 418 From: Belgium Joined: 08-08-2005
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Message 162 of 316 (251656)
10-14-2005 5:51 AM
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Annafan has left the thread
If any useful progress is made, let me know...
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AdminPhat
Inactive Member
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Message 163 of 316 (251662)
10-14-2005 6:30 AM
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Reply to: Message 161 by Larni
10-14-2005 4:53 AM
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Re: Uniqueness
Larni, there is no reason for your angry rant. God or no God, respect for other posters is a requirement, here at EvC. Perhaps your manners need to evolve! This message has been edited by AdminPhat, 10-14-2005 04:41 AM
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 161 by Larni, posted 10-14-2005 4:53 AM | | Larni has replied |
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 167 by Larni, posted 10-14-2005 7:58 AM | | AdminPhat has not replied |
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nator
Member (Idle past 2199 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: 12-09-2001
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Re: The world "as it is"...
How do you tell the difference between "fake" love and "real" love? quote:
I already told you in a recent post.
You most definitely did not. Two people are sitting in front of you. Both of them report feeling the emotion of love. You are told that one of them believes in God and one of them doesn't. How do you determine which one feels "real" love and whaich one's feelings of love are "fake"?
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 152 by joshua221, posted 10-13-2005 8:43 PM | | joshua221 has not replied |
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Annafan
Member (Idle past 4608 days) Posts: 418 From: Belgium Joined: 08-08-2005
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Message 165 of 316 (251667)
10-14-2005 7:29 AM
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some relevant Steven Pinker
This is a fragment of a debate, which can be found in full here: Page not found | Edge.org
... Clearly there can be reasons that some people feel threatened by the idea that the mind is the activity of the brain, and here are my guesses about what they are.
One is that since natural selection is not a process that is guaranteed to produce niceness, many typical human motives will not necessarily lead to ethically desirable outcomes. Much of the research in evolutionary psychology has shown that many ignoble motives have some basis in natural selection. An example is the desire, most obvious in men, to defend one's honor and reputation, by violence if necessary. Another is the characteristically male motive to seek a variety of sexual partners. It's easy to work out why those motives evolved, and there is by now an enormous body of evidence that they are widespread among humans. But people reject the explanation because of what they think is the subtext. If these motives are part of our nature, if they come from the natural world, well, everyone knows that natural things are good -- natural childbirth, natural yogurt, and so on -- so that would imply that promiscuity and violence aren't so bad after all. And it implies that since they are "in the genes," they are unchangeable, and attempts to improve the human condition are futile. I think both parts are wrong -- the first part is so obviously wrong that it has been given a name, the naturalist fallacy, the idea that what we find in nature is good. What we find in nature is not necessarily good; as Richard has put it, the universe is not good or bad, it's indifferent. Certainly violence and philandering and all of the other sins are immoral whether their cause is the genes, or the wiring of the brain, or social conditioning, or anything else. It behooves us to find the causes, but the causes don't change the moral coloring of those acts. Also, the human mind, I argue, is a complex system of many interacting parts. Even if one motive impels people to do immoral acts, other parts of the mind that can subvert its designs. We can think of the long-term consequences, and we can imagine what society would be like if everyone acted on a particular motive. The part of the mind that has those thoughts can disengage the part of the mind that has less noble motives.
I think a second discomfort with the biological approach to the human mind is the worry that it somehow makes our ideals a sham or less real. Life would be a Potemkin Village, where there's only a facade of value and worth, but really biology is showing that there's nothing behind the facade. For example, if we love our children because the genes for loving children are in the bodies of those children and so the genes are benefiting themselves, doesn't that undermine the purity or the value of that love? If our ethical ideals, our sense of justice and fairness, were selected for because it did our ancestors good in the long run, would that imply that there's no such thing as altruism or justice, that deep down we're really selfish? I think that this reaction is based on a misreading of Richard's metaphor of the selfish gene. It's not because of what Richard actually said in his book The Selfish Gene, which is crystal clear. But here's how it could be misread: the theory says that one can make powerful predictions about the process of natural selection by imagining that the gene has a selfish motive to make copies of itself. Of course no one ever thought that a gene has real motives in the sense that people have motives, but it this is a valuable way to gain insight about the subtleties of natural selection, especially when it comes to social interactions, and it leads to many correct predictions. Here is the distortion. People think that genes are our deepest hidden self, our essence, so if our genes are selfish, that means that deep down we're selfish. It's an unholy hybrid of Freud's idea of unconscious motivation and the straightforward modern theory of the natural selection of replicators. Now, I think I'm safe to say that it was not intended by Richard, and it doesn't follow from the logic of the theory. The metaphorical motives of the genes are not somehow a more fundamental or honest version of the real motives of the entire person. Indeed, sometimes the most "selfish" thing a gene can do, in this metaphorical sense of selfish, is to build a brain that is not selfish -- not selfish at an unconscious level, not selfish at any level -- even if the genes are themselves metaphorically selfish. When we love our children we aren't at any level of the brain calculating that it will increase our inclusive fitness. The love can be pure and in and of itself in terms of what's actually happening in the brain. The selfishness of genes explains why we have that pure emotion. The idea that morality itself would be a fiction if our moral reasoning came out of some evolved moral sense is also a non sequitur. The fear comes from the fact that we know that many aspects of human experience are in some sense figments. The qualitative distinction between red, yellow, green, and blue, for example, is not out in the world; it's just the way our brain imposes arbitrary cuts in the continuous spectrum of the wavelength of light. Well, if the qualitative difference between red and green is a figment -- it's just the way we're built, it doesn't have any external reality -- could right and wrong also be a figment? Would the sense of worth that comes from pursuing justice and fairness be a sham, just a way of tickling our pleasure centers and making us feel good because of the flow of chemicals or the wiring diagram of the brain? Not at all. This supposed devaluation of morality does not follow from the idea that we have an evolved moral sense. Many of our faculties evolved to mesh with real things in the world. We have a complicated system of depth perception and shape recognition that prevents us from bumping into trees and falling off cliffs. The fact that our ability to recognize an object comes from complicated circuitry of the brain does not mean that there aren't real objects out there. Indeed, the brain evolved in order to give us as accurate a representation as possible of what is objectively out in the world. That may also be true, at least according to some philosophical arguments, for morality. Many philosophers believe that some abstract entities, such as numbers, have an existence independent of minds. That is, many philosophers and mathematicians believe that the number three is not just a figment in the way that the color red is, but that it has a real existence, which mathematicians discover and explore with their mathematical faculties; they don't invent it. Similarly, many moral philosophers argue that right and wrong have an existence, and that our moral sense evolved to mesh with them. Even if you don't believe that, there's an alternative that would make the moral sense just as real -- namely, that our universal moral sense is constituted so that it can't work unless we believe that right and wrong have an external reality. So if you want to stop short of saying that moral truths exist outside us, you can say that we can't reason other than by assuming that they do. In that case, when we get down to having a moral debate, we still appeal to external standards of right and wrong; we aren't reduced to comparing idiosyncratic emotional or subjective reactions.
The final disquiet, I think, that is elicited by the naturalist or biological approach to the mind, is that it robs us of responsibility. If we act only because of ricocheting molecules in the brain, shaped by the genes which in turn were shaped by natural selection -- if it's billiard balls all the way down and all the way back -- then how can we hold someone responsible for his actions, given that there is no "he" that caused them? I agree this is a fascinating puzzle, but I don't think it has anything particular to do with cognitive neuroscience or behavioral genetics or evolutionary psychology. It's a problem that is raised by any attempt to explain behavior, regardless of the nature of the explanation. ...
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