My Five Wills/Code of Ethics

[deactivated01089]

Uhmm. Disagree. there is no real "homo sapien" it's just a name we give to ourselves cos humans like to name things (especially scientists, just take a look at all the proteins). There is no point in time where homo sapiens came into being, it's a continuous change. Gradual and slow change but continuous. We name things not to reflect reality but for organizational purposes, in this particular case. (Species has a functional purpose because separating populations that way does help us understand them better, but in evolutionary terms ... species across timescale, eg. if you go back far enough, you'll be biologically unable to breed with your own ancestor, I don't see the point of having this separation, because it has no practical purposes and doesn't help us understand evolution any better, which is not discontinuous.) Other than that if we don't go extinct, we'll be the ancestors of whatever occupies the face of the earth, just like forever ago a single celled organism was our ancestor. Whether it's "us" or "something else" is something for people to play with depending on their definitions, but it's not something that any evidence will speak to, it'll depend completely on what one defines to be a homo sapien.

I don't think evolving into something else is extinction. Extinction requires that a population completely dies out. Evolving is a state of being for every population. As long as a population is evolving it is not extinct. And every population is evolving.

It's not "just a name." Species are functional classifications of organisms, grouped according to similarities in their physiology and/or their genetic code. Perhaps your view of evolution doesn't warrant specific classification. But there are differences between organisms, and those differences are the result of evolution. With regard to organisms that are venomous or poisonous, understanding those differences can be a matter of life and death. Hardly "just a name." Homo sapiens is a distinct organism from Homo erectus, Homo habilis, or Homo neanderthalensis. You're arguing semantics, really. Yes, it's a gradual change; yes, it's hardly ever possible to notice substantial variations between parental and offspring generations; and yes, it would thus be difficult, if not impossible, to isolate a "first Homo sapiens" from a comprehensive collection of Homo heidelbergensis and Homo sapiens remains. But the fact is that modern man is not the organism we classify as Homo heidelbergensis/rhodesiensis or as Homo erectus. It is a distinct species, with distinct physiological and genetic differences from its ancestors. These distinctions arise as a result of evolution. So, perhaps, it is your view that needs updating.

You say, "I don't think that evolving into something else is extinction...as long as a population is evolving, it's not extinct." Where did most of the 99.9% of species that are now extinct go if not evolution? We say, "the dinosaurs are extinct," despite the fact some dinosaurs evolved into modern birds. Modern birds exist, yet dinosaurs are extinct. As you mentioned, all organisms on this earth, whether human or banana, descend from a single universally common ancestor. As far as we now know, that ancestor is extinct, yet it has evolved into us. We exist, yet it is extinct. And this is my point: regardless of whether we evolve into something other than Homo sapiens, or some extinction level event wipes us out before we can evolve, we will eventually go extinct. If the former is the case, there will be organisms that have descended from us, but they will not be us.

In other words, we will still go extinct, as all species generally do.

In any case, this is a massive digression from my original post. The point is simply that I don't find it particularly rational to care about anything that happens after I am dead. As I will be dead, incapable of existing again, nothing that happens after that point will bear any relevance to me. I see it as important to make the world as pleasant as possible while I am alive, and once I am gone, whatever happens is in the hands of those remaining, and of our universe. It is their concern, not mine. While I adore the beauty of this world's many life forms and natural scenes, they simply cannot matter to the non-existent, which I will be.

And just FYI, the singular form of Homo sapiens is Homo sapiens, not Homo sapien. Common mistake.

[pineapplebunnybounce]

It's not "just a name." Species are functional classifications of organisms, grouped according to similarities in their physiology and/or their genetic code. Perhaps your view of evolution doesn't warrant specific classification. But there are differences between organisms, and those differences are the result of evolution. With regard to organisms that are venomous or poisonous, understanding those differences can be a matter of life and death. Hardly "just a name." Homo sapiens is a distinct organism from Homo erectus, Homo habilis, or Homo neanderthalensis. You're arguing semantics, really. Yes, it's a gradual change; yes, it's hardly ever possible to notice substantial variations between parental and offspring generations; and yes, it would thus be difficult, if not impossible, to isolate a "first Homo sapiens" from a comprehensive collection of Homo heidelbergensis and Homo sapiens remains. But the fact is that modern man is not the organism we classify as Homo heidelbergensis/rhodesiensis or as Homo erectus. It is a distinct species, with distinct physiological and genetic differences from its ancestors. These distinctions arise as a result of evolution. So, perhaps, it is your view that needs updating.

I'm fully aware of the biological definition of a species and said quite clearly that it is worth differentiating in the species that currently exists but doesn't make much sense besides for organizational purposes to differentiate species as we go back in time. What I mean here is a single ancestral line, not a bunch of different species at a point in time, but a single ancestral line that continued to evolve. Since the possibility of interbreeding is nonexistent because of the temporal difference, it is for organizational purposes that we name them differently. Just like we we say 18 is when a teenager turns into an adult. Obviously not by biological definition, since everyone develops at a slightly different rate, but simply to make it easier for lawmakers.

You say, "I don't think that evolving into something else is extinction...as long as a population is evolving, it's not extinct." Where did most of the 99.9% of species that are now extinct go if not evolution? We say, "all dinosaurs are extinct," despite the fact some dinosaurs evolved into modern birds. Modern birds exist, yet dinosaurs are extinct. As you mentioned, all organisms on this earth, whether human or banana, descend from a single common ancestor. We say that ancestor is extinct, yet it has evolved into us. We exist, yet it is extinct. And this is my point: regardless of whether we evolve into something other than Homo sapiens, or some extinction level event wipes us out before we can evolve, we will eventually go extinct. If the latter is the case, there will be organisms that have descended from us, but they will not be us, and thus, we will still be gone.

you're again, assigning them names and saying they're extinct because we don't call them by the same thing anymore. But in fact the population did not at any point die out, merely changed. 99.9% died out, btw, not evolved into something else. Saying they evolved into something else is more accurate if you want to talk about what actually happened, saying we will evolve into something else and saying we'll go extinct are two very different things. I don't know why you saw the need to correct someone for saying we would evolve into something else, when clearly it's not the same as saying we'll die out and some other species will take over the world, which I tried to point out and then you thought i needed to "update" my views.

My main point is it's a waste of time trying to decide when we started being "human" and when we will cease to be "human". So whether or not future generation is still "us" is not a scientific question, but one of personal preference.

[bennyboy]

Of course most species are now extinct. That's because they failed.

It's true that there will eventually be no organisms that we'd recognize as human. But it's not necessarily because we die out. We may simply survive long enough, and encounter enough new environments, that we evolve out of it.

You don't seem to understand very much about evolution. There will come a day, however you define that day, when there won't be a single homo sapiens left on this earth. "Evolving out of it" is still "dying out," in the view of homo sapiens, which won't exist anymore. It won't be "us." Forms will have mutated sufficiently for their classification to fall outside of "homo sapiens," and those remaining who are will eventually die. Maybe not the first time, maybe not the second, but, eventually, natural selection will favor the new forms over us. Those new forms will be a new species, and it will have its own concerns. I don't much care about what those are.

You've managed to be both insulting and wrong at the same time. Well done.

In any case, this is a massive digression from my original post. The point is simply that I don't find it particularly rational to care about anything that happens after I am dead. As I will be dead, incapable of existing again, nothing that happens after that point will bear any relevance to me. I see it as important to make the world as pleasant as possible while I am alive, and once I am gone, whatever happens is in the hands of those remaining, and of our universe. It is their concern, not mine. While I adore the beauty of this world's many life forms and natural scenes, they simply cannot matter to the non-existent, which I will be.

That's a lot of words to say "I'm selfish and I'm proud of it."

[The Grand Nudger]

To be fair, the idea of "new species" is inextricably tied to our system of classification, and as a "new species" would be a sidestep, whilst a speciation event would actually be a derivative...so long as our descendants remain there will always be hs in the world, in the same way that we have maintained the lineage of the rungs "above" us on the ladder. The long and short of it, is that eventually we're going to need to add more rungs to the ladder. The hs lineage (in the hypothetical) will have only gone extinct when all hs deriviatives are themselves, extinct.

(the system we use to call things this or that was set up before we had a very accurate picture of the biological reality of the situation - so there are bound to be things "lost in translation")