The Ancient Greeks
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Law Bringer
Member # 6785
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written Monday, February 19 2007 22:08
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Modern medicine allows people to survive that normally would die. Whether this will result in more lethal genes being passed on or saving genes that might be useful later on is still debateable. One example is increases in allergies in the Southwest United States. It was believed that allergy sufferers were moving there and marrying so they produced more genetically prone sufferers. An alternative theory is that these people were planting gardens with the same pollen producing plants that they had moved away from. They were bringing the cause with them. Enviroment versus heredity. In Africa the runners on the east and west coasts seem to favor different types. The east side was more long distance runners and the west were sprinters. This is after dozens of generations. Posts: 4643 | Registered: Friday, February 10 2006 08:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, February 20 2007 01:39
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Interesting as evolution itself is, I find it even more interesting to think about the basic concept of the mechanism. Darwinian evolution is an extremely robust concept, because it is only an iota away from tautology. As creationist preachers love to point out, Darwinian 'fitness' means nothing more than 'ability to survive' (or, more strictly, to proliferate). So 'survival of the fittest' means only 'survival of the survivors', and that doesn't sound so profound. But evolution is not actually a tautology at all. Fitness can indeed be anything that enhances survival, but the key point is that it has to be something in particular. And then the point of evolution is that whatever that something is, longer horns or frizzier whiskers or anything else, will tend to proliferate as a trait. But because evolution is so close to tautology, it can be lifted out of its original context of competition among biological organisms, and applied successfully to a very wide range of other things. Even within biology, modern genetics has added a huge new wrinkle to Darwin's theory, by revealing how much evolution seems to operate at the molecular level, and to what an extent this molecular evolution is independent of what happens on the level of organisms. For most of history, the definition of biology has very obviously been that it is the study of biological organisms. Today it is not so crazy to ask, What is the role of organisms in biology? And now we can ask whether evolutionary mechanisms may explain much of sociology. Following Dawkins we can ask whether Mormon fundamentalism should be considered as a package of memes, analogous to genes. It probably goes a long way. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Off With Their Heads
Member # 4045
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written Tuesday, February 20 2007 07:28
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We also have to remember that "fittest" doesn't necessarily mean "best" and that evolution may produce things that are very good at surviving but not necessarily situations that are ideal for everyone involved. People who have followed SoT's reasoning in the past have forgotten this, with rather dire consequences. -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Smoo: Get ready to face the walls! Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00 |
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By Committee
Member # 4233
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written Tuesday, February 20 2007 11:21
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quote:For a wonderfully horrendous vision of this, I recommend Netflixing "Idiocracy." Definitely a disturbing vision of what "the fittest" within humanity really could be. Posts: 2242 | Registered: Saturday, April 10 2004 07:00 |
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Canned
Member # 7704
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written Wednesday, February 21 2007 12:19
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Look men why don't you reply to me ? I am not on a different planet: i am upon this earth. I wasn't spamming, i was telling the truth. Can't you just say that your understanding fails you when you read my posts? i am not going to eat you am i ? Look if you compare the force of a chimp compared to a human being the chimp is going to smash a human being to pieces. Australopithecus where climbers so they must have been strong and over millions of years of evolution when trees started to disappear did we need all this extra strength and muscle ? You need more than billions of years to breed out one gene out of a species. So the "extra strength" gene became "weaker" and "weaker" over millions of generations. Therefore ancient greeks where stronger than us. To a stone age farmer when his crops fail do you think that using an extra strength and an extra intelligence bonus is going to make him figure out how to resolve his problems? of course it will. For example would it be cleaver to use dung to enrich the soil ? Today we don't need to bee extremely cleaver and strong do we? We are not going to be killed at any moment by a huge feline or predatory animal or going to starve to death are we? Know do you see where i am going or not? [ Wednesday, February 21, 2007 12:33: Message edited by: upon mars ] -------------------- You can jump off a bridge, fire a gun in your mouth, drink poison,or going in to the tiger's pit but you will still end up dead it's a mater of time and how . Posts: 312 | Registered: Sunday, November 26 2006 08:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, February 21 2007 13:30
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It doesn't take billions of years to lose a gene. The exact length depends on how common the gene is and how large the breeding population is, but it can be anywhere from forever (genes for absolutely essential proteins, say) to a few years (losing a recessive instant death gene in a tiny population). Genes changed a fair amount between Australopithecus and "modern" humans, but not very much between ancient modern humans and us. Strength and endurance have been essential for millenia. They've arguably become less so now, but there's no selective pressure against them either, so they're at worst neutral traits. There's no reason to expect strength to breed out of humanity, let alone for it to have been slowing disappearing for thousands of years. We may not have selective pressure for intelligence, but we also don't have selective pressure against it. —Alorael, who admits the often raised point that education and possibly intelligence correlate with fewer children, which means that they are in fact losing ground in the gene pool. There's certainly no imminent risk of stupidity, though. Or no imminent risk of stupidity worse than the present, anyway. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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Canned
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written Wednesday, February 21 2007 13:51
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Then why are people are getting so stupid? -------------------- You can jump off a bridge, fire a gun in your mouth, drink poison,or going in to the tiger's pit but you will still end up dead it's a mater of time and how . Posts: 312 | Registered: Sunday, November 26 2006 08:00 |
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Councilor
Member # 6600
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written Wednesday, February 21 2007 14:00
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They're not getting any stupider. You're just getting smart enough to realize how stupid they've been all along. :P Dikiyoba. Posts: 4346 | Registered: Friday, December 23 2005 08:00 |
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Canned
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written Friday, February 23 2007 09:30
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OH but i thought that cave man where smatter how come they where advanced in building stone hedge? I'd say stupidity come from random humor. Or stone hedge was builted by aliens so that we can revere them as gods. I rather think that nature push the limits out of us i rather think that jean batiste le chevalier de Lamarck and Charles Darwin where wrong and right . I think that an organism will go to it's very one limit's to survive in times of crisis and will go in any direction (Lamarck's theory) it has to go then random selection come in (Darwin's theory) and through random mutation life adapt to the climate. So a body will adapt to the pressure of the environment so Spartans where very strong because of the to factors since those blood thirsty monsters would rather kill a weak child than helping him to survive making a population "purged from the weak" so greeks where strong since Spartans, persians and barbarians where around conflicts where often under the form of wars. As a result people where strong. Or am i just insane? [ Friday, February 23, 2007 09:40: Message edited by: upon mars ] -------------------- You can jump off a bridge, fire a gun in your mouth, drink poison,or going in to the tiger's pit but you will still end up dead it's a mater of time and how . Posts: 312 | Registered: Sunday, November 26 2006 08:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Friday, February 23 2007 10:48
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Cavemen may have been good enough engineers to make Stonhenege, but they didn't actually make anything useful. I'd say they were still in the beta-testing stage of intelligence. Or maybe they were so strong they could just easily put the stones into place. I think you don't quite understand Lamarckian and Darwinian evolution. Organisms' doing as much as possible to survive is fairly central to Darwin's theory and implied in Lamarck's. The difference is that acquired adaptations (muscles from exercise, knowledge gained from experience, and so on) aren't heritable because they aren't genetic. That's directly against what Lamarck said, and Darwin was actually a proponent of inheritance of acquired characteristics as well. His theory just stressed selective pressures rather than the means of inheritance so that it's much more compatible with genetics. So yes, evolution consists of random mutations that add diversity, which is then acted upon by selective forces to alter the population to adapt to its circumstances. That's a combination of Darwin's natural selection and modern genetics. The problem is the speed of adaptation: the Spartans only stayed at their peak for a few centuries. The Spartans may not have had individuals born with obvious congenital defects, but that's not enough to suddenly select for strength. Again, the evidence is in history: Sparta was powerful, but it was not the undisputedly most powerful Greek city-state, and it eventually lost its power entirely. Warlike cultures tend to produce better warriors, but that's largely cultural and not genetic. When strength and martial prowess are valued they're more likely to be developed by individuals, but that has no effect on population genetics unless it goes on for thousands or millions of years. —Alorael, who concludes that evolution isn't always very intuitive. Lamarck makes a lot of sense despite being very solidly discredited. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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Canned
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written Friday, February 23 2007 10:55
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But could it be that life even on a short period contradicts it's own laws? Could we be just wrong? Or is it just random events in a random event of time? -------------------- You can jump off a bridge, fire a gun in your mouth, drink poison,or going in to the tiger's pit but you will still end up dead it's a mater of time and how . Posts: 312 | Registered: Sunday, November 26 2006 08:00 |
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La Canaliste
Member # 5563
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written Friday, February 23 2007 11:09
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We can't altogether dismiss Lamarck. Some highly significant accquired characteristics such as health, wealth and education are highly heritable. Just because they are not passed on through the genes does not mean they are not heritable. -------------------- I am a mater of time and how . Deep down, you know you should have voted for Alcritas! Posts: 387 | Registered: Tuesday, March 1 2005 08:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Friday, February 23 2007 12:28
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quote:No, or they wouldn't be laws. quote:Of course we could be. There's no indication that we are, though, or we'd be digging at those laws harder. quote:I don't know what you mean, but it sounds very profound. Saunders: Inheritance of health is a complicated thing. Some of it is genetic, some of it is memetic, some of it is environment in utero, and some of it is dumb bloody luck. Education is most definitely an acquired characteristic, but drive to become educated is inherited meme and possibly partly genes. Wealth is inherited, but by that reasoning so is living on Earth. [Edit: Taag!] —Alorael, who responds seriously to less than serious posts because humor is a serious business. It's especially serious when it has tentacles in it. [ Friday, February 23, 2007 23:58: Message edited by: Thromping Boy ] Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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Canned
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written Sunday, February 25 2007 03:00
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About the randomness i wanted to say that i could be possible that greek being strong has nothing to do with genes and the environment could it be that they just had this characteristic randomly in this period of time ? People are not necessarily well built to able to resist sickness and wounds that where common in that time. So then people didn't need so much muscle. And as Darwkin explain evolution is happening all the time i rather say that the environment is society and nature altogether you don't need millions of year to make a characteristic to be changed dogs are an example they are wolves that have been modified by human activity. Since there is jumps in evolution i think that a species or a group of individuals of one specie in any place could suddenly evolve a characteristic it doesn't rely need. Fortunately for us it doesn't happen much often because if a specie evolve the ability to have cancer is not going to help much is it ? Darwin said that species slowly evolved characteristics to suit to their environment? How come Darwin can't explain evolutionary jumps between a self replicating molecule to a highly organized cell ? Can he explain how can an jungle ape suddenly walks upright make highly sophisticated tools and sing? So evolution has species that jumps to next level. So can we debate this further? [ Sunday, February 25, 2007 03:34: Message edited by: upon mars ] -------------------- You can jump off a bridge, fire a gun in your mouth, drink poison,or going in to the tiger's pit but you will still end up dead it's a mater of time and how . Posts: 312 | Registered: Sunday, November 26 2006 08:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, February 25 2007 09:44
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Darwin can't explain anything happening suddenly. As far as we can tell from paleontology, however, nothing did happen suddenly. Evolution is a very slow and gradual process. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 6785
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written Sunday, February 25 2007 18:39
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Micro evolution can be seen by following several generations of short lived species. Birds in the Galopagos Islands are continually evolving beak shapes to deal with changes in food sources. Macro evolution that results in major changes is harder to observe since most of the intervening steps are missing from the fossil record. You can't count on a steady stream of evolving creatures all neatly dying in the same area so they can be later examined and dated. Posts: 4643 | Registered: Friday, February 10 2006 08:00 |
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Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
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written Monday, February 26 2007 11:17
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quote:I've always thought Lamarck got a bad rap. He was a brilliant scientist and just because he worked before Mendel did (let alone when Mendel's work gained widespread attention) he got the idea of heredity slightly wrong. Parts of Lamarck are indeed correct - he begat the general principle that traits are inherited over time, and his evolutionary mechanism was perhaps more complete than the one Darwin used in Origin. There's nothing saying that, if he had been a contemporary of Darwin's, he wouldn't have dropped the incorrect bits about acquired traits passing on. The only reason the silly fallacy of inherited acquired traits survives as 'Lamarckian evolution' is because it was a prominently incorrect feature of his theories. It was good science when it was new, it's just that it's been supplanted by better science. As a scientist, Lamarck would be happy with that. It's non-scientists, or at least very bad scientists, who desperately want to believe in the bits of Lamarck time has discredited. If it didn't also carry a connotation of political cronyism, 'Lysenkoism' might almost be fairer. Lamarck wrote in a time where nobody knew anything about evolution; he was a scientist. Lysenko write in a time where everybody knew quite a bit about evolution; he was a fraud. Even though core parts of their theories are about identical, Lamarck and Lysenko enjoy a dramatically different reputation, mostly by force of Lamarck working in the 18th century and Lysenko working in the interbellum. Yesterday's science is today's pseudoscience. Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
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Law Bringer
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written Monday, February 26 2007 13:30
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As I already said, Darwin believed in the heritability of acquired characteristics as well. Darwin's fame isn't from proposing what was inherited or how, it's for why, and his proposal is the basis of much of modern understanding of evolution. Yes, the theory has been modified since, but it's modification, not replacement. Lamarck was an early proponent of evolution, which is fine, but all his specific ideas were off the mark. There's nothing wrong with that scientifically, but it does mean we don't have his name attached to any central theories. —Alorael, who considers trying to clear Lamarck's name equivalent to clearing the name of Aristotle for his physics. They're both famous, and they both had some good ideas, but they were both wrong. (Okay, Lamarck was more of a scientist than Aristotle, so his work should be more respected than Aristotle's armchair physics.) Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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Off With Their Heads
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written Monday, February 26 2007 13:40
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Aristotle was not by any means a scientist in the modern sense of the term. He was a philosopher whose work included natural philosophy, and I'm starting to understand (reading Seneca's Natural Questions and soon to start on Pliny the Elder's Natural History) that, while textbooks try to fudge the difference between natural philosophy and science by claiming that one was just the precursor of the other, they really are quite different in their approaches and pretty different in their goals. Aristotle was a very good natural philosopher. He wasn't trying to do science, so the fact that he wasn't a good scientist isn't a black mark on his record at all. [ Monday, February 26, 2007 13:42: Message edited by: Kelandon ] -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Smoo: Get ready to face the walls! Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
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written Monday, February 26 2007 13:53
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Sounds interesting: what do you see as the difference between science and natural philosophy? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Off With Their Heads
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written Monday, February 26 2007 14:12
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Well, I'm by no means an expert, but I'll try to explain. Science is largely about building conceptual and calculational models that predict the future. For example, the success of Newtonian mechanics is that, if you have a ball and an inclined plane and satisfy a bunch of conditions (near the surface of the Earth, air resistance is negligible, etc.), Newtonian mechanics tells you what will happen. It gives the acceleration, the time it takes for the ball to roll down the slope, the speed the ball will have, and so on. In science, your models are supposed to match up to experimental data, both past and future, and they are judged on the extent to which they do this. In natural philosophy, experimental data is almost entirely irrelevant. Very few people (possibly no one) in the ancient world actually design and carry out an experiment to verify a claim. Natural philosophy is more interested in the moral lessons that can be learned and analogies that can be made using natural phenomena. For example, the aforementioned Seneca goes into a discussion of mirrors and what they are and how they work, and after some explanation, he describes the tale of Hostius Quadra, which serves no scientific purpose but instead a philosphical one, to impart a moral lesson. This is a large part of the reason why he's talking about mirrors, not so that we can perform experiments by shining lasers on them and observing where we see light and match this up to theoretical predictions, but so that we can know what proper place mirrors have in our moral and ethical lives. Now, this explanation of the difference between science and natural philosophy makes some distinctions that get much more complicated upon further inspection, and some of what natural philosophers are doing is a lot like science (usually bad science), but I think that there is a difference, and it's worth at least noting. I may write a thesis on this, so check back in a year and I may have a lot more to say about this. :P [ Monday, February 26, 2007 14:14: Message edited by: Kelandon ] -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Smoo: Get ready to face the walls! Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
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written Monday, February 26 2007 23:47
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It might be an interesting thesis. It might be worth looking at the historical emergence of science, particularly the late medieval stuff. That wouldn't by any means determine what people like Aristotle or Seneca were doing, but it might be informative to see just how their kind of natural philosophy later got morphed into science. It might help to highlight which features could best be seen as proto-scientific, and which might even be considered anti-scientific. The literature on the origins of natural science is of course vast, but from my small sampling of it, I wouldn't be surprised that most of it viewed natural philosophy through a scientific lens, rather than trying to assess it on its own terms. One point that occurs to me is that science predated natural philosophy, and continued to develop in parallel with it. Ancient astronomy and mathematics can be seen pretty clearly as genuine, if primitive, science. Ancient Sumerians and Egyptians were trying to predict the future, specifically various seasonal events related to agricultural, using mathematical models constrained by observations. And this activity continued through the classical natural philosophers. Ptolemy of Alexandria was a great astronomer, and his geocentric solar system was a model both simple (it had exactly one epicycle per planet) and sophisticated. Just how did the classical natural philosophers, and their medieval or Islamic heirs, affect the ongoing development of science? The impression I have from the late end of the story is that the impact must have been profound, because the early European developers of physics were spending a lot of time re-assessing Aristotle, as well as arguing over astronomy. But there's definitely something in the early end of the story that I don't know. For one thing, the ancient mathematical astronomy was strictly about modelling the patterns of nature. There was no notion of understanding them, in any sense of the elusive concept 'understanding' that I know. Perhaps by adding their moralizing glosses to contemporary scientific knowledge, the philosophers injected into science the basic hope of not only capturing nature in simple formulas, but of reducing it to simple concepts that in some way make sense to human intuition. If so, the hybridization of modelling and understanding remains incomplete, for these two goals still compete fiercely in science today. Perhaps it is even their competition that is the essential vital spark of true science, with quantitative modelling and observation to check philosophical complacency, and philosophical curiosity to check satisfaction with black-box modelling. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Off With Their Heads
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written Tuesday, February 27 2007 00:02
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One question that interests me is: how did the concept of an "experiment" develop? People have been interested in modeling reality for a long time, but the idea that someone would go into a lab and test a hypothesis is a fairly new idea. Galileo (Milton's friend — I love this fact) did some experiments, and he may have been the first one in history to do so. As far as "understanding" goes, the ancients thought of everything in anthropomorphic terms (or philosophical ones — the elements, fire, air, water, earth). The idea today that one should check one's preconceived notions at the door is completely foreign to ancient natural philosophy; your preconceived notions are what you go off of. So, just as classical gods were often simply abstract nouns given human qualities (Cupid is just the Latin word cupido, "desire"), so too were their explanations of phenomena often anthropomorphic. [ Tuesday, February 27, 2007 00:08: Message edited by: Kelandon ] -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Smoo: Get ready to face the walls! Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00 |
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Lifecrafter
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written Tuesday, February 27 2007 01:06
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Experimentation is when magic became science. If Gallieo did not invent it, he certainly coined the process. He's a pretty good candidate to separate natural philosophy and science, although a lot of good sciences started out as natural philosophies while awaiting better understanding that would allow experiments (at the very least thought experiments, which are the ugly cousin of the real thing but will do in a pinch, such as when one just does not happen to have a planet-sized superaccelerator handy). A good example of that is the ever-revisited evolution, which evolved (if you'll pardon that) from general speculation about heritability of traits and general speculation about the nature of traits to specific, hard-evidence-based understanding of genetics, evolution, and what the two have to do with each other. There are a number of sciences that await that sort of development and synthesis. If something like Asimov's psychohistory would ever exist, it'd certainly be more comprehensive than neurology and more scientific than sociology, but there's more holes than cheese in the real-life equivalent of it right now. Once you get down to it, the real and horrible temptation is to mislabel accuracy as science and inaccuracy as superstition - because we are all fans of science and we like what it does. But it's perfectly possible to be entirely correct wholly by accident; look at the American abolitionists, who had ridiculously unreliable grounds on which to consider blacks worthy of human dignity and who came to blows with a great many scientific minds of their day. Science is an ability to balance on the razor's edge of confidence in what one sees as real and understanding the way one sees it might be utterly false. The foundation of science is not reproducability but falsifiability. I dunno how open Gallileo or any other early scientist was to the idea of falsifiability - I'd have to look that up, and it is too late at night for serious scholarship. But I'd wager it's a later development than experimentation (it would be a wonder beyond belief were the scientific method to spring into the world fully-formed), and the merits according that probably belong to some largely forgotten figure in the annals of the late Renaissance. It's one thing to put forward a theory, demonstrate that it is right, and say 'Ha! Told you so.' It's another thing, and this is where it becomes science, to put forward a theory, demonstrate why it is right, and then strut like a champion gamecock in your momentary triumph. The latter gives someone else the tools to address you on your own terms - even if you aren't around to defend yourself. Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
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Law Bringer
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written Tuesday, February 27 2007 02:51
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quote:Words to live by. :P quote:For those who didn't get as much US history in school and for whom Wikipedia is altogether too brief... could you elaborate? What were the grounds, and what did the scientists argue? [ Tuesday, February 27, 2007 02:57: Message edited by: Dr. Johann Georg Faust ] -------------------- Encyclopaedia Ermariana • Forum Archives • Forum Statistics • RSS [Topic / Forum] My Blog • Polaris • I eat novels for breakfast. Polaris is dead, long live Polaris. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Posts: 8752 | Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00 |