Posted on 04/18/2013 9:37:09 PM PDT by DennisR
As one who believes that God created the universe and all things therein, including man, just wondering how long the evolutionists on FreeRepublic believe man has existed on the earth and why.
I appreciate your advice.
As a note, tribal warfare is actually part of natural selection; natural selection includes species combating or competing with other members of their own or other species - indeed, that’s actually a large portion of it!
At the same time, while war has certainly shaped many aspects of us - often more culturally than biologically, especially in the short term - a large portion of our evolutionary history includes the beginning of morality itself.
You see, morality arises primarily from two aspects: empathy (that is, I don’t steal from you because I don’t want to be stolen from, or wouldn’t like being stolen from) and an understanding of consequences, especially punishment (I don’t steal from you because your brother will beat me up). Both of these are readily observable in the natural world; empathy - or primitive forms thereof - ranges from examples of altruism (in numerous species, primates included), to a concept of fairness (observed in chimps), even to such things as cross-species maternity. I do not believe I have to provide examples of animals understanding consequences - doubly so if you’re a dog trainer.
These behaviors arise instinctively thanks to a key factor: groups often survive better than individuals. Again, this shouldn’t need much demonstration, given the nature of multicellularity itself, however we can go on to extrapolate that traits which allow a group to act together better will allow them to survive better, and out-compete better. This is where such behaviors come in; a simple set of instincts that stops individuals from stabbing those of their group in the back is quite helpful for teamwork.
Now, at the same time, this sort of empathy has to have a shut-off valve, which appears as the “us and them” divide. In conditions of scarcity, where competition is necessary, having empathy towards *everything* would be a sever disadvantage, and thus we can readily explain not only the presence of empathy, but the ability to apply it only to those an individual considers their “herd” - perhaps tribe, if you prefer.
To come back to the point, I’m afraid your philosophical position on evolution is not entirely founded; you are neglecting that a large portion of what has allowed us to advance as far as we have remains cooperation. Rest assured, any anthropologist will be able to tell you about war and its affect on human culture as well.
Oh, as an aside: you appear to have linked voting Democrat to advances in human evolution; this carries an implication that I doubt you intended.
You’re very polite to potential adversaries
It’s obvious it REALLY is your virgin post.
God bless you.
man I remember when I was that nice here...lol
I shall take that as a compliment; thank you!
At the least, the welcome seems pretty warm thus far.
I believe you have a great future as a science writer.
A quibble is tribal warfare is an action of man so by definition is not natural. Very early forms can be considered natural but it became man made 200,000 years ago or much longer. Modern humans are the product of a super natural process. To say this is all natural removes all meaning and point to having a word natural.
I agree about morality. All animals that hunt in packs develop a morality, which is really a set of group rules to protect the survival of the group.
Modern anthropology is an embarrassing field full of crackpots that subscribe to the noble savage theory. Leading anthropologists tell us the Neanderthals likely died off from climate change, and never directly mention modern man killing them off on purpose. They tell us human intelligence came from better nutrition and that we walk upright to see better over grass, not because it frees our hands to wield weapons against competitors. Yes hands help us hunt and gather food, but animals show us that can be done fine without hands. Anthropologists often project their modern leftist values onto ancient people that makes them out to be happy hippies living in a commune until evil white man ruined everything. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
In general leftists come from the left side of the bell curve of their tribe. Their excessive vanity leads to envy which eventually sparks war. Leftists lose and die disproportionally during war. Sometimes the left side of the bell curve gets wiped out completely, however the bell curve spontaneously reforms from those remaining and the process repeats forever, man getting a little bit more intelligent and deadly each iteration. So we owe our high intelligence to the leftists among us, but they have little to be proud of.
At least 75% of academia is government funded, directly or indirectly. Because taxes butter their bread they tend to be pro higher taxes and bigger government and shun anyone not on board. High population density also produces people that have higher levels of vanity and therefore envy, and need bigger government to highly regulate away the freedoms of their neighbors. In the city you can’t have neighbors blaring their music at 3 am or barbecuing steaks on their apartment balcony, while living in the big land of Texas these activities are fine. Universities have high population density, are little cities, so they are prone to high levels of leftism.
The extremely wealthy become limousine leftists for the purpose of envy deflection. It works extremely well which is why they do it. While Warren Buffett talks publicly about how he should pay higher taxes, in private he hires an army of tax professionals to pay the absolute minimum. He can now enjoy his wealth openly and not worry about the left side of the bell curve burning his wealth to the ground. The rich do not fear the right so there's nothing lost in befriending the leftist beast so that they might be eaten last.
Religious people have many competitive advantages in school, sports, war, business, and life in general. They tend to be healthier, live longer, have more successful marriages, have more children, live in bigger houses, own bigger automobiles, which invokes great envy in leftists. You might ascribe their competitive advantages to a placebo effect, but who knows. There’s no easy way to gain these advantages without religion, so to attack religion is to wish the destruction of the competitive advantages of others. I'm not religious myself but I wish I was! It seems to require successful indoctrination during childhood, something the left is well aware of and one of the reasons they've worked to hijack education.
indeed...you write well and try to substantiate
Welcome to FR !
I think the main advantage to religious people today practically speaking is that they tend to produce and honor family...traditional families.
The structure that has proven to be the best vehicle for cultural success time and again.
And you are right...the disenchanted are trying to destroy that...our Achilles heel
The number of years is not the point. Gd has set up a genius system with genetics and epigenetics and things we have not even discovered yet. Judeo Christian philosophies are not mutually exclusive with biology. They can’t be because Gd created biology.
Words help us understand but words are limited. In different languages there are different meanings for things that supposedly translate perfectly. I speak 4 languages and I know that it isn’t so. Words come close but are not meanings themselves. They are tools. Our bibles are filled with truths but we may not be understanding them perfectly. We do the best we can.
There are wonderful things about this world and there are terrible. This week is an example of both. There are wonders and mysteries about us and our development both ontological and phylogenical. I think I just made up a word.
We aren’t meant to understand everything while we are here. But we have the curiosity to try.
I love your post.
“We aren’t meant to understand everything while we are here. But we have the curiosity to try.”
Given the incomprehensible size of the universe, this will be no problem. Furthermore, we should be curious about the number of years mankind has been on the earth.
Why not?
...and how do you know that?
Keep it civil and you'll probably be OK.
Nice job on #20, and welcome to FR. I particularly like your line about science being “the art of becoming ever less wrong.” I used to say something like that in discussions with a friend of mine who was into those Late Great Planet Earth books. He’d say “Scientists used to think the earth was flat!” and I’d reply “For most earthbound practical purposes, the earth *is* flat.”
Thank you; I take that as quite high praise!
Thank you; I’m much obliged!
That’s good to hear; thanks.
Say, how do you make that fancy italicized text?
Your quibble isn’t unfounded, but actually that’s one of the major problems with arguments about what is “natural”. Ultimately, since humanity has arising from nature, everything we do can be described as natural; the label “unnatural” is arguably just an example of the anthropocentric conceit - it’s apparently natural when a beaver builds a dam but unnatural when we do it; natural when a wasp builds a nest but unnatural when we make paper. By the same token, when we talk about this very topic in genetics, we speak of natural vs. artificial selection, where natural selection occurs in nature without our influence while artificial selection is the exact same thing, only humans are deciding what to select for instead of natural survivability and reproduction deciding it. There’s no difference in the process, only in human will being behind the latter - and amusingly, selection that occurs due to byproducts of humanity, such as bacteria developing nylonase, is generally termed natural selection.
Further, “supernatural” is even further away from having a workable definition; we generally define it to be events that are somehow removed from the natural order - the actions of faeries or gods or witches or such. The trouble with that is that so long as such things have an effect on the natural world, that effect could be assayed, examined, observed, and tested in some regard; that would allow us to extrapolate about the source, and place it within the realm of “natural”, as the naturalist would use it. On the other hand, if we were unable to assay, examine, observe, or test the effects of the supernatural at all, there would be no way to tell if it had any effect at all in the first place, and so it’s rather moot.
Essentially yes - I agree entirely; the term “natural”, as opposed to either unnatural or supernatural, is poorly defined and of little use when making these sorts of arguments.
I think you have an unfairly dim view on modern anthropology; it’s not a field I spend much time around, I will admit, but when I was taught the basics (we’re required to do a bit, you know), the prof held back nothing; he went over various cultures without the need to sugarcoat, discussing both nice and nasty qualities thereof - he simply withheld moral judgement, as it would have taken longer or gotten in the way of simply describing what they did. Maybe it was different when you were instructed, but the whole “noble savage” thing is actually discussed by the modern anthropological community in an attempt to avoid the sort of bias it contains.
Further, not to be rude, but given the existence of other primates, your argument on hands is a wee bit moot; hands do not evolve merely for weaponry, but can be considered an arboreal (tree-dwelling) adaptation which lends itself well to tool use in general.
Further still, it would be more accurate to say the upright stance is less about seeing over grass (though that may have helped) and more about the key physical advantage humanity actually has - distance running. We are not tremendous sprinters, nor do we have great physical weapons or defenses, but we can run for a long, long time - it’s said that while we can’t out-sprint a horse, an experienced human could chase after it until it collapsed from exhaustion. From the arboreal primate stance, the upright stance makes sense in terms of moving to the planes and taking advantage of running.
As to leftists, while I’m more than happy to chuckle about what I see as the less viable aspects of what they think the role of government is, and indeed would argue against quite a bit of the philosophy that underlies some - not all of course - of their principles, I’m afraid I would have to disagree that leftists come from the left of the bell curve as well. There is actually a statistical correlation between education, intelligence, and more left-leaning philosophies. It’s a bit of a strange divide; while we would expect that the impoverished (who are also typically less educated) would be those more likely to vote democrat in an effort to get support, there is a strong trend of those same people voting republican on the grounds that they think they don’t need the support - the Tea Party, especially after being astroturfed by Fox, are not exactly shining examples of education and intelligence - and I say that not as an insult, but merely a statistical observation. I could look up a source on it if you think it’s untrue; I’d be quite delighted to be proven wrong in this case.
See, if you were to say “leftists are often better educated, and therefore less experienced in the ‘real world’ and hold ideals that are nice-sounding but don’t work out because of it, often becoming more conservative with age” or something like that, I might be able to get behind it. But left side of the bell curve? That’s just tooting our own horn without an real support.
By the same token, while scientific research is fairly heavily government funded, I’m afraid you are not accurate in saying that academics are more likely to vote for higher taxes. They *may* be willing to vote for more progressive taxes - that is, taxing the rich more than the poor, but no one really wants higher taxes. On the other hand, they would argue for more money being spent on scientific endeavors - and given the rather huge difference in military spending vs. scientific research spending (I believe the statistic on a federal level is something like 19% of the budget on military spending and 2% on scientific research, as well as another 2% on education), they would be more likely to argue that we shift the budget so that we have more money for research (and likely education) - in many cases, they suggest reducing military spending, and potentially social programs, in an effort to bolster the sciences, rather than to increase taxes in general.
To be honest, I don’t think I agree with your point about vanity and higher population centers. I’m not entirely clear on how you define vanity in such a case, but when we’re talking about blasting music and grilling on balconies, it’s not a matter of the government taking away rights, but about respecting the rights of others. The core tenant of a conservative view on rights, as I see it, is “your rights end where another’s begin” - blasting loud musing and preventing others from sleeping is essentially infringing upon their rights. The grills on balconies thing is more a matter of public safety; especially in the big city that sort of thing has indeed been shown to be a hazard. The fire code isn’t meant to hold back your rights, but to stop you from burning the place down with another several-score people inside. By definition, when people are living more closely together, in denser population centers, there will have to be more care taken not to infringe on others’ rights, but this is more a matter of *all* those people having equal rights, rather than taking away the rights of the neighbors.
As to the claims about the religious, I’d say it’s not fully accurate. Religion is not strongly correlated with better educational performance, and owing to the fact that it often *is* correlated with less wealth, the reverse is actually true. I don’t think we can say that it has advantages in sports - rather, I would guess that if (and I frankly don’t know) there are more religious folks in professional sports, it is more likely due to the sorts of backgrounds people who go into pro sports have (as opposed to going into the sciences, say) rather than any sort of religious advantage. War I might agree with - religion is frequently used to create a strong “us or them” advantage, and encourage people to go to war - however, that is an advantage on the production side of things; it’s dwarfed by most combat modifiers on the actual battlefield - the best you can hope for is a slight advantage in moral and a willingness to be fed into a meat-grinder; the same can be said of extreme patriotism or other forms of fervor. Business I really can’t speak to; I wouldn’t know where to start that discussion, other than to point out examples of famous religious and non-religious businessmen and women, but we would have to be able to demonstrate that religion actually provided an advantage there.
As to the rest of life in general, I don’t know I can get behind your statements. Atheists actually have statistically longer-lasting marriage when compared to religious folks, for one. More children I’ll grant to the religious of course - owing both to religious beliefs that prohibit contraception, religious efforts to prevent *knowledge* about contraception, and because religion is especially common among people to the left side of the economic bell curve. To be frank though, I’m not sure I’d call that an advantage.
As to bigger houses, cards, and longer life, I don’t see that as being supported at all. Indeed, if one examines religiosity vs. wealth on a world-wide scale, it’s a strong trend that more religious countries are also less wealthy - and more wealth and longer life correlate. Some studies have shown the same for individual people. This is probably not a negative effect of religion itself, but rather a trend that when a country is more wealthy, it is better able to provide for education; with increased education comes an increase in freedom of thought, and thus less religious belief. Indeed, the US is actually an outlier in these statistics; we’re the only country that both has strong religiosity and a strong GDP - which seems to make quite clearly that it is not an advantage conveyed by religion, but something else.
Now I could be wrong here; I don’t suppose you have statistics that show that religion correlates with wealth or being “better off”? Again, I’m just not sure I see the sorts of advantage you’re speaking off; I’ve not seen support for these ideas, so if you could provide me that support I would be much obliged.
The human hand is a weapon, not for hunting but for quick head blows to other humans. Apes and chimps cannot form a tight weapon fist like we can. Humans were engineered for walking long distances while carrying a weapon. Running is what humans do if they forget their weapon. Kenyan running ability is likely an adaptation for outrunning a tribal warfare attack and little to do with putting food on the table.
You've definitely spent time in a leftist echo chamber and I'm not going to get far in countering that. I'd like to try to impart more respect for the benefits of religion, even though it's not for you. Here's a more scholarly write up that it explains it better than I can and there are many others you could look up: Why Religion Matters Even More: The Impact of Religious Practice on Social Stability
Although poor people tend to be poor from low IQ they are not religious because of low IQ but because they benefit more from it. Correlation is not causation.
Team sports are really practice tribal warfare, not just for those on the field but for the spectators/civilians as well. You can see that most clearly in American football where the teams often use Indian tribe names. Soccer was invented by the British so their colonies wouldn't practice more violent sports making them tougher opponents in battle. Soccer mainly teaches subjects how to throw down their arms and run for their lives. American professional football teams are often very religious because it imparts competitive advantages such as not giving up when the odds are long. Tim Tebow is famous for amazing comebacks that beat the odds, sometimes at least, despite his average athletic ability. When adjusted for other factors, Catholic schools mysteriously outperform in many sports compared to public schools.
Most leaps in technology are funded by military spending. For example the first integrated circuit cost $1,000 each and the first order was for use in a new American jet bomber. That created a market that eventually led to ICs costing pennies. Military spending drives the "cutting edge" of technology. Look at all through breakthroughs that came from WWII. We're still riding that wave. The wealth of a nation is largely driven by military spending 20 years prior. Today the military is investing heavily in robotics, an important technology that might keep America from going bankrupt from socialism 20 years from now. To gut military spending is to gut our future wealth, case in point: the formerly Great Britain now a socialist has-been.
Everyone is a Republican when it comes to their own paycheck. The outrage over January's payroll tax increase was most intense from Obama voters. People only become Democrats when you start talking about higher taxes on the other guy. About 50% of wealth that passes through government hands is destroyed due to the nature of the government beast. Taxes are already too progressive, taking wealth from those good at investing it, creating jobs and prosperity, and giving it to government, half to be destroyed. I hope you have plans to get a real job someday, not a government job with 3 day weekends and so much red tape you can accomplish little.
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