Questions of deepest, most profound interest to humans, "through the wormhole"
BelgarathMTH
Member Posts: 5,653
Hi, this thread is for the most serious of serious discussion, which will be fun for people like me who actually have fun with serious, profound discussion.
Ask your "ultimate profound question" here, and have it discussed by people who care about such things.
I would appreciate it if people who enjoy derailing seriousness by making banal, eye roll inducing jokes, just move along. That said, humor that actually makes good, insightful points is welcome here.
I will start the thread with two topics that just came to my mind through playing NWN2, and a second one that came out of it for some strange reason as a "non sequitur." I'm not sure why, but, here are the first topics for discussion, for which I am very interested in answers from this community, since you guys are the smartest and wisest people with whom I have ever had the pleasure of associating on the internet:
1) Humans, food, fire, and cooking.
Human beings cannot naturally ingest raw meat of any kind. If you kill an animal, tear into its guts and bones, and start trying to eat what you find there, you are going to get a horrible experience; for example, nausea that includes projectile vomiting, and quite horrific bacterial infections that don't hurt natural carnivores, but are deadly to humans, and gag-inducing hair, bone, and other awfulness. This has been true since there have been homo sapiens in existence. It has also been true ever since there were homo sapiens, that the species body must have a source of either animal or plant protein to survive.
It is also a scientifically accepted truth, that, in survive or die mode, humans can choke down animal protein in the form of dug out insect grubs , raw adult insects and arachnids (spiders for dinner, anyone?), or sucked-out bone marrow from recently killed animals.
At some point along the evolutionary trail of prehistory, humans (either Neanderthals, or homo sapiens, or a pre-homo sapiens species,) discovered controlled fire, for use as light, and a weapon. And then, God created cooking, and it was good.
Somehow, these prehistoric hominids discovered the technology that fire applied to inedible animal protein (i.e. MEAT), would break down the indigestible, precious protein into, not only edible and digestible, but absolutely delicious form. And then, these prehistoric hominids even discovered spices in their environments, which made the heavenly meat taste even more heavenly!
Now, evolution, unassisted by either human ingenuity or a divine power, had left homo sapiens with thin, weak nails that were meant to be grown out as digging tools, and dull, flat teeth that were good for nothing but stripping and then grinding vegetation, insects, arachnids, or bone marrow. And lo and behold, the gift of fire was so powerful, that the early prehistoric homo sapiens developed an entire culture centered on hunting, and gathering. (Fruits and berries had always been human treasure, but sadly lacking in the ultimate treasure, protein. Except for nuts, which were the platinum find of the prehistoric human. "Take all the gold and other useless metal you want, just give me the nuts!") In fact, the need to crack nuts was probably the main evolutionary incentive to invent tools!
So, am I right about how human omnivorism came to be, especially for its carnivoristic component?
I'd very much like to read other BG:EE forumites' opinions about my question one.
(2) Abiogenesis
Thank you if you are such a serious philosopher that you have borne with me through my first wall of text question.
Here's my second initial topic for discussion:
Abiogenesis. I am constantly hearing and seeing this field brought up by fundie creationists as an argument against evolutionary theory. Of course, they pretty much always go on to show that they have no understanding whatsoever of evolutionary theory. Their first fallacious, and just plain untrue statement, is that the Theory of Evolution expects transitional fossils, and that, in their weird delusional world, NO transitional fossils have ever been found. This always makes me widen my eyes, shake my head, and go "Oh my God." There have been SO many transitional fossils found, but if you present them with one, such as Archaeopteryx, (had to look up the spelling on that one), they will just tell you it's a fraud.
Never mind the other hundreds of saurian fossils found that have feathers, apparently for the purpose of sexual attraction. (The human "hairy male" comes to mind, pre 1990's "eww, shave it all off" change in human female preference.)
Who knew that "hairy males" in the reptile world, would eventually lead to birds, and the power of flight?
The second objection to evolutionary theory, abiogenesis, is a bit more compelling. How can life at the single-celled level ever emerge from inert, non-living, organic chemical compounds? There are three things that I have never seen a creationist demonstrate awareness of.
a) Darwin's Theory of Evolution has no interest in abiogenesis, never even addresses it nor mentions it, and simply considers the first "egg" of the "chicken" to be an axiom of the system. You get just ONE self-reproducing biological single cell of any kind, in any way, and the whole Theory of Evolution is just fine from there, thank you. Darwin wanted to keep his faith in the Christian God in the face of his observations of Nature, and the Theory that he was forced to conclude from them, so he probably would have accepted "God" as the answer to the "Chicken or the Egg" conundrum.
However, if you have your whole faith in the Christian God down to "you cannot get life from chemicals without an intelligence", then you are on shaky ground indeed, as far as the rest of your religion. It is an overwhelming number of logical leaps to get from "There must have been an Intelligence that started Life from inert chemical compounds" to "The Christian Bible and Christianity are therefore absolute Truth."
b) "Intelligent Design" people, who are very good at lying and deceiving others about the fact that they are actually conservative Christians who wish to throw Darwin into Hell, and then to make the whole world embrace Christianity, love to try to use probability theory, combined with all the mathematics of getting from inert chemical compounds, to single-celled organisms, to animals and plants, to human beings, into a ridiculously (to them) faith-based hypothesis. Then, they go straight from there, to , "You see, the Christian God of the Christian Bible exists, and you should follow our religion if you have any sense."
What they show to me with these probability-based arguments is that they are unable to even imagine what "Four Billion Years" means. With a time span of that magnitude, anything and everything possible according the laws of physics, and, even more importantly, natural selection, is bound to come to pass.
c) I have never seen a fundie or an ID person show any awareness of the fact that "abiogenesis" is a real and thriving field. Try googling "abiogenesis". This field is the subdiscipline of biology that seeks to replicate the conditions on primeval Earth, and to generate ever more complex structures using those parameters. While they have not yet replicated a living single cell in the laboratory, they have created complex protein chains by injecting electrical current into their best guess of "primordial soup", containing nothing more complex than simple amino acids. It's really fascinating.
Seriously, if you're into this sort of thing, you should google "abiogenesis".
Okay, this ends my wall of text. I am very interested in any responses from anyone who is seriously interested in these kinds of "Through the Wormhole" questions, and in other similar "questions", as well as responses to the first two I've posted here.
Ask your "ultimate profound question" here, and have it discussed by people who care about such things.
I would appreciate it if people who enjoy derailing seriousness by making banal, eye roll inducing jokes, just move along. That said, humor that actually makes good, insightful points is welcome here.
I will start the thread with two topics that just came to my mind through playing NWN2, and a second one that came out of it for some strange reason as a "non sequitur." I'm not sure why, but, here are the first topics for discussion, for which I am very interested in answers from this community, since you guys are the smartest and wisest people with whom I have ever had the pleasure of associating on the internet:
1) Humans, food, fire, and cooking.
Human beings cannot naturally ingest raw meat of any kind. If you kill an animal, tear into its guts and bones, and start trying to eat what you find there, you are going to get a horrible experience; for example, nausea that includes projectile vomiting, and quite horrific bacterial infections that don't hurt natural carnivores, but are deadly to humans, and gag-inducing hair, bone, and other awfulness. This has been true since there have been homo sapiens in existence. It has also been true ever since there were homo sapiens, that the species body must have a source of either animal or plant protein to survive.
It is also a scientifically accepted truth, that, in survive or die mode, humans can choke down animal protein in the form of dug out insect grubs , raw adult insects and arachnids (spiders for dinner, anyone?), or sucked-out bone marrow from recently killed animals.
At some point along the evolutionary trail of prehistory, humans (either Neanderthals, or homo sapiens, or a pre-homo sapiens species,) discovered controlled fire, for use as light, and a weapon. And then, God created cooking, and it was good.
Somehow, these prehistoric hominids discovered the technology that fire applied to inedible animal protein (i.e. MEAT), would break down the indigestible, precious protein into, not only edible and digestible, but absolutely delicious form. And then, these prehistoric hominids even discovered spices in their environments, which made the heavenly meat taste even more heavenly!
Now, evolution, unassisted by either human ingenuity or a divine power, had left homo sapiens with thin, weak nails that were meant to be grown out as digging tools, and dull, flat teeth that were good for nothing but stripping and then grinding vegetation, insects, arachnids, or bone marrow. And lo and behold, the gift of fire was so powerful, that the early prehistoric homo sapiens developed an entire culture centered on hunting, and gathering. (Fruits and berries had always been human treasure, but sadly lacking in the ultimate treasure, protein. Except for nuts, which were the platinum find of the prehistoric human. "Take all the gold and other useless metal you want, just give me the nuts!") In fact, the need to crack nuts was probably the main evolutionary incentive to invent tools!
So, am I right about how human omnivorism came to be, especially for its carnivoristic component?
I'd very much like to read other BG:EE forumites' opinions about my question one.
(2) Abiogenesis
Thank you if you are such a serious philosopher that you have borne with me through my first wall of text question.
Here's my second initial topic for discussion:
Abiogenesis. I am constantly hearing and seeing this field brought up by fundie creationists as an argument against evolutionary theory. Of course, they pretty much always go on to show that they have no understanding whatsoever of evolutionary theory. Their first fallacious, and just plain untrue statement, is that the Theory of Evolution expects transitional fossils, and that, in their weird delusional world, NO transitional fossils have ever been found. This always makes me widen my eyes, shake my head, and go "Oh my God." There have been SO many transitional fossils found, but if you present them with one, such as Archaeopteryx, (had to look up the spelling on that one), they will just tell you it's a fraud.
Never mind the other hundreds of saurian fossils found that have feathers, apparently for the purpose of sexual attraction. (The human "hairy male" comes to mind, pre 1990's "eww, shave it all off" change in human female preference.)
Who knew that "hairy males" in the reptile world, would eventually lead to birds, and the power of flight?
The second objection to evolutionary theory, abiogenesis, is a bit more compelling. How can life at the single-celled level ever emerge from inert, non-living, organic chemical compounds? There are three things that I have never seen a creationist demonstrate awareness of.
a) Darwin's Theory of Evolution has no interest in abiogenesis, never even addresses it nor mentions it, and simply considers the first "egg" of the "chicken" to be an axiom of the system. You get just ONE self-reproducing biological single cell of any kind, in any way, and the whole Theory of Evolution is just fine from there, thank you. Darwin wanted to keep his faith in the Christian God in the face of his observations of Nature, and the Theory that he was forced to conclude from them, so he probably would have accepted "God" as the answer to the "Chicken or the Egg" conundrum.
However, if you have your whole faith in the Christian God down to "you cannot get life from chemicals without an intelligence", then you are on shaky ground indeed, as far as the rest of your religion. It is an overwhelming number of logical leaps to get from "There must have been an Intelligence that started Life from inert chemical compounds" to "The Christian Bible and Christianity are therefore absolute Truth."
b) "Intelligent Design" people, who are very good at lying and deceiving others about the fact that they are actually conservative Christians who wish to throw Darwin into Hell, and then to make the whole world embrace Christianity, love to try to use probability theory, combined with all the mathematics of getting from inert chemical compounds, to single-celled organisms, to animals and plants, to human beings, into a ridiculously (to them) faith-based hypothesis. Then, they go straight from there, to , "You see, the Christian God of the Christian Bible exists, and you should follow our religion if you have any sense."
What they show to me with these probability-based arguments is that they are unable to even imagine what "Four Billion Years" means. With a time span of that magnitude, anything and everything possible according the laws of physics, and, even more importantly, natural selection, is bound to come to pass.
c) I have never seen a fundie or an ID person show any awareness of the fact that "abiogenesis" is a real and thriving field. Try googling "abiogenesis". This field is the subdiscipline of biology that seeks to replicate the conditions on primeval Earth, and to generate ever more complex structures using those parameters. While they have not yet replicated a living single cell in the laboratory, they have created complex protein chains by injecting electrical current into their best guess of "primordial soup", containing nothing more complex than simple amino acids. It's really fascinating.
Seriously, if you're into this sort of thing, you should google "abiogenesis".
Okay, this ends my wall of text. I am very interested in any responses from anyone who is seriously interested in these kinds of "Through the Wormhole" questions, and in other similar "questions", as well as responses to the first two I've posted here.
Post edited by BelgarathMTH on
1
Comments
As foe your second topic, I can't really discuss it, as I've always put a sharp boundary between religion and science. Being on the edge of atheism myself, I am prone to believe more in science than in religion, as facts hold more truth than assumptions, which can be interpreted in many more different ways.
So we don't know, but it is interesting that the things we're made of - hydrogen, oxygen and carbon - are the most common elements in the universe.
And when it comes to probability, the universe is very old and very huge. Think of a lottery; the odds of me buying a ticket and winning are probably about fourteen million to one. But, so long as the lottery organizers sell millions of tickets, the odds of someone winning are actually really good.
None of these examples speaks to my original question. I already put forth as an axiom that primitive humans could consume arachnids (spiders, shrimp) as raw protein. I didn't mention raw fish. That would indeed be a possible source of animal protein for early hominids, BUT, it would presume access to a large body of water, which was not so for many, many areas of early hominid development.
As far as present day human beings being able to consume certain forms of raw cow flesh, I would counter with this: such cow flesh consumption requires a high level of technological ability to manipulate and change what is found in the raw cow carcass. And, the first "cows" available for such experimentation in food were "wildebeasts" or "buffalo", which were enormously powerful mammals requiring great sophistication in weapon-making and hunting technique to be taken down by such a physically impoverished animal as a human, without previous experience and natural selection to see "cattle" as food. This could not happen unless the pre-humans in question had already mastered the eating of meat for their animal protein.
Which begs the question, as I asked at the beginning of the topic. How did humans come to see mammal meat as food?
I still can't see any reason under God's green earth why naturally existing homo sapiens would see other mammals as food, unless they had already developed fire, cooked raw meat from a mammal killed by a more well-adapted and powerful predator, and then had an "aha!" moment of revelation. That "aha!" moment would mean that such primitive humans had already learned about cooked meat, and it would have had to have been accidental on the first time - maybe they dropped part of an animal carcass that had been killed and dragged into their camp by "man's best friend", the wolf, into their fire that was being used for heat and light, and then, they pulled it out, and it smelled oh SO good, and they took a bite, and then, humans became wolfish carnivores forever after that?
Bone marrow is also a really good source of protein, and it's a part of an animal most other predators can't get at. So maybe that played a part as well...
So, why? Obviously chimpanzees, our closest relatives, are much better evolved through natural selection to catch, and especially to kill, other mammals through biting them, in order to eat their meat, than are we humans.
Our incisors are clearly evolved to strip either vegetation or meat from a vegetable core or a bone, but are woefully inadequate to kill anything. Why were our teeth naturally selected for?
But I think the assumption has always been that our teeth and jaws became small and dainty after we started using fire to cook and soften our food, and so there was no longer a need to chew so much.
That's a most interesting hypothesis, indeed. Does anyone know of any scientific research along those lines?
Or maybe not, it is just a hypothesis. I think it's quite widely accepted though that seafood, such as crabs and fish were responsible for increase in our brain size, all those omega fatty acids, yum.
As for the creationist bunch, spot on. Thank goodness there are only a handful of those nut-jobs here in Europe. And by that I don't mean people who believe in it, but those who want it to be teached as a science. Their arguments aren't based on ignorance, but deliberate manipulation of research and intentional misunderstanding of the word 'theory' and misrepresentation of data.
My own "Through the wormhole" question regards the existence of life outside Earth. My own view is that of course there is life outside of Earth, hell, they've already proven that there has been running water on Mars, and possible signs of bacterial life. The question is, whether there is any intelligent life out there. Usual answer is that why haven't we heard of them yet. To put simply, we've been looking at the sky for a hundred or so years only, while the universe is about 14 billion years old. Quite a lot of time for species to evolve and disappear. This counters the Fermi paradox, that with all the suitable stars and planets for life, we haven't been visited yet. The thought that there would be another civilization alive at this very moment and it would be close to us is, in my opinion, very egocentric. It'd be impossible to think that we are just one blinking light in the cosmos, gone before anyone notices.
They touch a bit on the flawed thinking about complexity in nature too.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2013/apr/22/podcast-science-weekly-rutherford-creation
I look at the distances involved, and then study the history of life on our own planet. Earth had several mass extinctions before we finally got into the current cycle that led to intelligent life. There's no reason I see to think that the same cycles of mass extinctions wouldn't have also happened on other life-bearing planets.
Thus, I think it's entirely possible that intelligent societies all over the Universe tend to arise in tandem, given the time scale, with only relatively minor differences in levels of technological development.
So, other intelligent societies are likely to be developing interstellar travel capability at the same time we do, if anybody ever does, and that's still a big if. Einstein's limitations on speed are very pesky and persistent.
As far as broadcasting, we've been doing it for not much more than 100 years. That means our oldest broadcasts are only around 100 years out. I think it's probable that the broadcasts of other intelligent civilizations are also still close out from their own stars and planets, and that the distances among planets that support intelligent civilizations are likely quite a bit more than 100 light years apart.
"The truth is out there", but I think we will have to find some way to get around the light speed barrier before we're going to be able to look for it effectively. I don't think it will be done through actual, physical speed. I think it will be done by finding some way to use stable wormholes or singularities to fold space and time and take an interstellar "shortcut".
It's funny, I've got an actual episode of "Through the Wormhole" with Morgan Freeman on my DVR right now that I haven't watched yet, entitled "How Would Aliens Think?"
We don't quite know how life started on Earth, but there is evidence that it started quite early in the history of the planet, 3 - 4 billion years ago... suggesting that maybe it's not really that difficult or unlikely for life to start when all the right elements are around.
It's hard to speculate on alien life when we only have Earth as an example. I suppose we can look at the number of times different traits have evolved to get an idea of what life elsewhere might be like. Eyes, for example, seem to have appeared quite early and lots of times, so we can probable expect that wherever there is light, the life there will also have some kind of eyes. But intelligence, or at least human-like intelligence where we create tools and language and science... that's only happened once.
So, my feeling right now is that life might be very common in the universe, but intelligent life quite rare.
As far as space exploration goes, the good news is you don't really need to travel faster than light. Because of time dilation, if you can go near the speed of light you would travel across the galaxy quite quickly, at least from the point of view of the astronaut. So possibly good news for future astronauts, although for those of us stuck on Earth it would still seem to take a very long time.
Otherwise, as I said; the elements for life are extremely common, so there is good reason to be optimistic about that. I specified human-like intelligence though, and I agree; there doesn't seem to be much evolutionary need for it, or it will have happened far more often.
This seems an interesting concept. You see, it was my assumption that 100,000 years would pass for the astronaut and that many more than 100,000 years would pass on Earth; I suppose I was fundamentally misunderstanding a part of the theory of time dilation. Thank you for correcting me, I do not like to spread misinformation.