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RE: Homo Just Became Less Special
October 22, 2015 at 9:40 pm
So in a nutshell, it took nature 3m years to get us from basic stone tools to space travel.
Is it OK to assume that other life on other planets would go through a similar time period for their brains to evolve?
Or is it not conclusive that our type of retentive intelligence is not a natural conclusion to evolution but rather an accident of sorts.
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RE: Homo Just Became Less Special
October 22, 2015 at 10:51 pm
Evolution has no natural ending or result. You would need conditions which ultimately selected for intelligence.
Remote as that may be it is far more realistic than some bearded sky-daddy who gets pissed if he sees you jerking off.
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RE: Homo Just Became Less Special
October 22, 2015 at 11:22 pm
(This post was last modified: October 22, 2015 at 11:28 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(October 22, 2015 at 9:40 pm)ignoramus Wrote: So in a nutshell, it took nature 3m years to get us from basic stone tools to space travel.
Is it OK to assume that other life on other planets would go through a similar time period for their brains to evolve?
Or is it not conclusive that our type of retentive intelligence is not a natural conclusion to evolution but rather an accident of sorts.
There is no strong reason to believe the progress towards intelligence necessarily brings with it increased survival advantage. So there is no strong reason to conclude intelligence is either a natural conclusion or a necessary waypoint along different paths evolution could take in different environments.
One could make a plausible scenario that shows intelligence is a inconsequential accident of evolution on earth, and when life on earth comes to an end at some distant future date, and if some alien intelligence were on hand then to examine the entire sweep of evolutionary history of all life on earth, they would conclude single cell photo synthetic organisms are by far the most successful, as well as most durable, most populous, and most influential lifeforms ever to appear on earth, and it's appearance on earth around 2.3 billion years ago fundamentally altered the entire planet in ways infinitely more profound than humanity's vainglorious effort to pollute the earth as hard as we can could hope to do. So at the end of life on earth, earth is the way it would be then because of photosynthetic organism had fundamentally and permanently altered the atmosphere, surface, as well as fundamental crustal mineralogy, and several million years of human existence by comparison left no trace at all on scale of hundreds of millions of years.
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RE: Homo Just Became Less Special
October 23, 2015 at 12:37 am
(This post was last modified: October 23, 2015 at 12:44 am by Alex K.)
(October 22, 2015 at 6:36 pm)Chuck Wrote: (October 22, 2015 at 5:42 pm)Alex K Wrote: Robert Shrock of the YITP was my masters thesis advisor, why, you know people there?
Indirectly. My parents are friends with professors Yang, van Nieuwenhuizen, and a couple of others formerly in the institute of theoretical physics.
Haha, well, tell them to say hi to Peter for me  . He taught me general relativity back in '04/05. One of the best lectures, if not the best I' ve ever attended. If only for the reason that we killed a bottle of white with him in the last one
I never met Yang unfortunately bc he was in China the entire time...
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RE: Homo Just Became Less Special
October 23, 2015 at 12:39 am
(October 23, 2015 at 12:37 am)Alex K Wrote: (October 22, 2015 at 6:36 pm)Chuck Wrote: Indirectly. My parents are friends with professors Yang, van Nieuwenhuizen, and a couple of others formerly in the institute of theoretical physics.
Haha, well, tell them to say hi to Peter for me . He taught me general relativity back in '04/05. One of the best lectures ever, if not the best I' ve attended. If only for the reason that we killed a bottle of white in the last one
That's funny. It usually takes me four bottles of wine before I (mistakenly) think I understand general relativity.
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RE: Homo Just Became Less Special
October 23, 2015 at 12:43 am
(October 23, 2015 at 12:39 am)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: (October 23, 2015 at 12:37 am)Alex K Wrote: Haha, well, tell them to say hi to Peter for me . He taught me general relativity back in '04/05. One of the best lectures ever, if not the best I' ve attended. If only for the reason that we killed a bottle of white in the last one
That's funny. It usually takes me four bottles of wine before I (mistakenly) think I understand general relativity.
Yeah, and to make matters worse, it was divided by 7 or how many we were. So we had to understand it the oldfashioned way...
The fool hath said in his heart, There is a God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
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RE: Homo Just Became Less Special
October 23, 2015 at 1:29 am
This is fascinating if it's true.
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