"This conclusion is highly illogical, though: faced with the information that we share 98% of our DNA with the chimps shouldn’t make us doubt obvious reality, that is, the vast gulf between us. The only logical take would be to say, well duh, seems that DNA isn’t as important as we thought! We are clearly missing something here!"
I'd take it even further than that. I think what it shows is that genetic similarity tells us next to nothing useful about the ocean of difference between what a human is and what other animals are. In fact, what we might be looking at when studying chimps in particular is a kind of anthropomorphizing paredolia, made even more enticing by their structural similarities (skeletal plan, binocular vision. etc).
I was watching a pair of crows the other day, and it put me in mind of how Eurasian magpies are one of a very small club of animals that can pass the MSR mirror test. That is, they show the ability to recognize themselves in mirrors. It's a strange little club, and one that includes chimpanzees and mountain gorillas (albeit with some age-and-sex-based caveats with the former, and a great deal of conditions and controversy with the latter). Bonobos and orangutans from Borneo also pass, yet all other primates flunk it, including ones we tend to think of as "intelligent."
Bottlenosed dolphins and killer whales pass it, despite their somewhat alien body plans and vast environmental differences. Some elephants pass. One fish, the bluestreak clear wrasse, supposedly did (though not without controversy). But I think the magpie interests me most. It's also the only other fully bipedal creature on the list aside from humans, but that's about where the similarities end. Is a magpie -- or are blackbirds in general -- closer to humans than a baboon or a lemur, despite their more distant genetic and morphologic proximity? Crows seem to remember and recognize individual human faces in the wild. Or are they doing something else, which we interpret as more humanlike the way we see shapes in clouds?
Something big is missing in the explanation, indeed. Unless I've been secretly typing these Substack missives to a bunch of magpies and bonobos all this time.
Perhaps what we interpret into animals is true as well - they are acting out dramas, story arcs, friendship, love, grudges, war, etc. It is true. But from their perspective, they have a very limited awareness of that, and mostly go on instinct in the moment, although they have occasional glimpses. Perhaps *our* relatioship with the higher realms is similar?
Today I was working in the garden and there were some birds in the nearby trees and bushes I guess and they were just singing a song, but I'll be dammed I couldn't see the bird singing....I think there was more than one and the song was so sweet - it made my garden working easier and I tried to sing back to the bird.
I talk with birds all the time - at least I think I do in my mind.
I think a reasonable conclusion would be that the whole idea of DNA is bullshit - just like germ theory is. One follows the other in a way....not entirely, but no denying one bad idea leads to another and vice-versa hopefully (one good idea leads to another).
~
With that said, it is obvious who blew up the pipeline and so one can't help but wonder are the German citizens slaves of some narrative - seems as so.....seems as so that is the case in the whole of EU, so the EU is probably (do you want to bet on it?) toast, but is Germany toast as well - after all of Bismarck's efforts to unify local areas? It just goes to show, Germany, whatever it is now, does itself no favors when it acts and seems to be a puppet of another. That is a shame.
I like hawks as well, but the crows know how to take out hawks when push comes to shove and I can prove this if need be.
How many does it take to have a murder of crows? I'd say at least 4 and 5 is even better and six makes it for sure - 6 crows against 3 hawks one time I witnessed and the crows won this skirmish.
Conversely, do we overrate self-awareness as a defining human trait, deprecating other faculties that are just as important? Simply because an organism shares one trait with us (or two, I suppose - bipedalism in the case of magpies) doesn't necessarily make it closer than an organism that doesn't have that specific trait.
We're not in disagreement. The bipedalism of the magpie is shared by all other avians, for instance. But mirror interaction in itself isn't even sufficient to prove something like "self-awareness", despite the design goals of the test itself. Perhaps "design goals" is the more innately human capacity, since we can point to schema and then to constructs and say, " See? It's doing what I said it would."
Point being there's a vast number of differences that are shrugged off between humans and other fauna, despite the plain evidence that we ascended to supreme dominion in what amounts to an evolutionary eyeblink, and that nothing has approximated this leap before or since.
I'm inclined to think that grammar is the crucial element - the seed crystal dropped in the supersaturated solution of clever stone-throwing firebug apes. It suddenly made a far more precise and expansive communion between minds possible, which in turn led those minds to feed off of one another and vasten. To say nothing of more rapid technological development, broader social cooperation, and the accumulation of a cultural knowledge base.
And as far as we know, grammar is unique to humans. Maybe dolphins have it? Though we've yet to crack their 'language', which might operate on entirely different principles.
But then, it's also true that humans are extremely odd in comparison to every other animal at a basic biological level. Only mammal with lactase persistence, for example; ridiculously long post-reproductive life span; no mating season.
In any case, I tend to think of grammar as symptom, not cause. But even granting grammar as innately human, we are (as you say) still left with an abundance of mysteries related to morphology, development, age, and even weirder shit like art (i.e. language without grammar). I'm inclined to accept Occam's answer as being something like "We're God's anointed children." I'm open to debate, but Imago Dei seems to be the default setting (as it was in every human region and era we know of).
To be clear, I don't think grammar is uniquely human in the sense that no other creature *could* exhibit it. Just that none do, yet.
Art is an interesting case ... It seems to have appeared simultaneously with highly differentiated tools, ritual behavior, and other indications of recognizably human minds. I think there's a good chance that grammar enabled language, language then enabled the development of advanced intellect, and art etc. emerged from there. Sort of like, the connection between minds had to be established for the minds to nourish one another.
As to where grammar came from? Now isn't that the question....
"I think there's a good chance that grammar enabled language, language then enabled the development of advanced intellect, and art etc. emerged from there."
I think there's a good chance you have that backwards. Hmm. Maybe a good topic for a tonic discussion? I hate all this toxic, reprehensible "agreement" we've been having lately.
In university I took an introductory anthropology course, during which we were shown a documentary that contrasted the warlike, patriarchal chimpanzees with the peaceful, matriarchal bonobos. The political overtone was laid on thick, with the narrator concluding by noting that humans are, biologically, equally similar to both species, and can therefore choose which to emulate ... with the implication that we'd do better to model ourselves on the bonobos. It had rather the opposite impact on my teenage mind: if it was a choice between dying in war and being gay (the documentary made a specific note of the homoerotic methods of conflict resolution used by bonobos), then war it was.
But of course, humans are not chimps, but humans. Chimps can teach us nothing about what we *should* be, only about what our instinctual basis is. It's a matter of foundation and superstructure. To build, the foundation must be solid, meaning the biological and instinctive basis must be well developed and cared for. But on that foundation one may build whatever one wants, limited only by what the foundation can support. The foundation itself says almost nothing about the shape of the building.
It's quite common among leftists to proclaim for example that "we've evolved beyond" tribalism or what have you, which I've always thought is to completely misunderstand how evolution works. As though developing the capacity to think means we suddenly become beings of pure thought, or to use another metaphor, that evolving lungs means our metabolism no longer requires oxygen. Because humans are highly culturally flexible, they infer the tabula rasa ... a dangerous half truth. I guess what I'm saying is that chimpanzees can tell us a lot about the most fundamental constraints on human society, sort of like looking at the metrical structure of a poem, but they say nothing about the content of the poem itself. The left wishes to ignore the poem's structure, and therefore loses the poetry entirely, it just becomes a mess; conservatives focus too much on the structure, and therefore also lose the poetry.
The silliness of DNA argument is easily exposed by pointing at that *all* body cells share the same genetic code. How much is brain similar to liver to skin to intestine? 😏 Or from another angle, genome size doesn’t correlate with the complexity of organism, far from it. Some poor single-celled critters hoard much more precious nucleotide strands than we humans do 🤷
Hey hop, a leap to the other end of human life spectrum 😊 Dennis Meadows (of Limits to Growth renown) offers a balanced perspective, methinks:
🗨 I have often described politics as the art of choosing which of several impossible outcomes you most prefer. It is important to envision good outcomes. It may be useful to strive for them. But it is important to be realistic.
One might also look at human groups, or for that matter individual humans. The differences can be quite profound, despite the DNA being 99.99% identical. Very clearly, either tiny genetic differences have huge effects, and/or there's a lot more to it than just DNA (which is almost certainly the case).
To me it seems, some people get intuitively why, in certain contexts, "natural" _is_ "good" (as a tendency), but can't explain it, and others just poop "naturalistic fallacy, you simpleton!" on everything without thinking.
Natural = good to me means, if you don't cringe too much at the analogy, a good compatibility between hardware and software and surrounding conditions, so that things can remain functioning in enough balance to not tip over into severe dysfunction (moving a system out of stable operation parameters).
Where this would touch ethics is, indirectly - because the major ethics violations seem to be always the same to me, just manifesting differently - if (groups of) people force, or even just manipulate others, esp. on societal level, to either live in ways that will produce dysfunction and thus destroy wellbeing (up to, the entire species, as things are currently going). Either by doing things in ways where natural requirements are not met, or conversely, going against natural boundaries, which disrupts balance.
This could mean to deny any sort of mental natural requirements and putting people into triste "Commie block" buildings and areas made up of them promoting depression (hypothetical AFAIK, but not too far fetched as example), turning their food into unphysiological crap, pushing a designed-to-be-toxic culture to divide, etc.
"A natural law will just play itself out regardless. But if we, as a society, can override such “natural laws” anyway, then why bother?"
It plays into what I'll touch on later in this post - natural laws existing, and, as a _heuristic,_ trying as closely as possible to stick to what seems to be _it_, having a tendency to keep things working, is not the same thing as *pretending* one *knew exactly* what the natural laws were and could/should compell everyone else to follow the same idea. It may indeed only "play itself out", in the big picture, if there is some stochastics involved - there will be some error and some demise, but overall, it will work. Forcing everything into one direction probably always ends similarly to roughly comparable experiments in history.
But species do go extinct, and it doesn't always have to be the environment changing too much to quickly for adaption to fail to keep up - it could also be a species, as a system of flesh and ideas, going catastrophically out of stable parameters for the system to keep working.
A lot of people then just pretend it was generally obvious and easy to understand what "natural" actually is - but that's really sometimes the biggest problem, I would say. Precisely because of our complicated (developmental) history - us being really a mixed bag of compromises to meet numerous requirements from different (pre-)historical phases. Looking at one particular thing someone has his focus on and proclaiming: "ah, see! That's natural!" may often be delusional / seeing only a fraction of the picture.
Which reminds me of times when people thought they knew "fate". If something seemed to be turning in some direction, or a cause was there for them to fight for: "yep, that's fate. So let's embrace & go for it" - which is perhaps great for motivation.
Later, the concept of "fate" was then ridiculed, but also used as a strawman to cheaply ridicule, or ascribe false detriments to, "determinism" - which does not include the pretense of impossible universal knowledge - by people who cling to the ill-defined, religiously inherited concept of "free will".
"This conclusion is highly illogical, though: faced with the information that we share 98% of our DNA with the chimps shouldn’t make us doubt obvious reality, that is, the vast gulf between us. The only logical take would be to say, well duh, seems that DNA isn’t as important as we thought!"
I wouldn't quite put it that way. People wildly assume to understand what "98% of DNA" means. What ever amount of it influences how our brain gets its initial wiring - there is A LOT of other complicated stuff in our bodies that needs to be encoded, lol. And that we share with animals that look similar to us.
How this "x % of information" is coded does not have to be linear or in any other way obvious, and certainly not be proportional to size & weight of organs, or even apparent complexity.
TL;DR - "98% similar" is not nearly as much of a precise description of what's going on as some people seem to imagine. It is a rather vague statement, except to the point that we are, apparently, not some sort of totally independent creation from those chimps.
Those is a very insightful comment, thanks. I agree with most of it, and you put it well. As for DNA, my point was actually similar to yours: the conclusion is that we simply don't know enough, and to the degree that we do, we know there is a lot of complexity involved. What I was getting at is that you can't infer from shared DNA something that is against evidence: namely that there are vast differences between humans and animals, and any good theory needs to account for this.
Free will is a complicated story, and I generally don't think hard determinism makes much sense, but I also don't think we can discount it completely either. It's almost as if we can look at it both ways, and both positions are true in a sense, weirdly enough. We will do what we will do kind of thing.
I suspect we share 90% percent of our dna with just about all mammals....and probably many plants.
DNA is just "code" but if it is only a subset of the code that programs the "entity", then comparisons based upon the code as a whole are meaningless. I mean there is some fungus with way more DNA than humans - is that the basis of judgement? Who has the most? Obviously, the code runs deeper.
Myself - I could give flip and if you have free will you get to choose what you do and influence your own future - I suspect monkeys already know that, but it is just based upon their local situation.
If you think I'm full of shit, that is your prerogative, and I know this link is not definitive, but let me suggest just like germ theory is so wrong....judging based on DNA is as well.
Somebody blows up the pipeline obvious, but the chumps just take it?
Man - this is why I'm so glad my family left that place a long time ago.
Cause all evidence suggest the German folks are not only chumps, in disrespect to Bismarck and other leaders, but they are clueless and seem intent on following a pathway towards some light from some leaders who could give a diddily about chimpanzees and bonbons and others they consider inferior.
What you think - and know this - I would post this message, but hells-bells, I just paid to be a founding member and so I'd like to know the thoughts of a German.
No disrespect meant, but really Germany folks - they need to get a clue I think.
Well yes. Germany is a US satellite. There used to be some degree of independence, but not anymore. It is really sad to watch. And it is shocking how many go along with it and can't see the obvious. On the plus side, there are many Germans who do see, and are fed up. Even some mainstream politicians see it and say so behind closed doors, but are afraid to speak out. No wonder given that the new government is a total clown show.
of course, being I'm German, I guess I'm biased, but still really ---- I mean they blew up the pipeline and everybody who has a clue knows - so why aren't the German citizens upset about this terrorist action - lets call a spade what it is - it was terrorism...simple and true and harmful to german citizens, so you can't blame one for wondering - has germany lost its edge?
Honest question here - I think in history there have been some leaders who for the sake of discussion facilitated better communication, better railroads, better infrastructure in general and through the course of time it is remembered that these leaders led to improvement in the general welfare of the citizens and so why one wonders has this simple essentially a fact of past times not been learned?
Because it seem so simple and I think Kropotkin figured it out already.
This is a test of my founding membership commitment for 1 year.
Well - test passed and let it be know there is info time-wise on that, but probably I'm the only one who really cares about my choice to be a founding member.
I sure hope it was a choice well made, but sometimes it gets on my nerves seeing others griping with each other, or flirting maybe, but not really improving discourse.
I for one appreciate good discourse. Whether the discourse is in German or English. Really - either way is fine by me and sometimes I think German is a better language for communication and truly good translation is the key to better communication - is it not?
I think that from the religious point of view, the answer is probably that Adam was not the first primate, not the first Cro-Magnon, or even possibly the first carrier of homo sapiens DNA. Fully recognizing the many limitations of Science Inc., I consider the existence of the Earth and of creatures biologically very like ourselves prior to ~6000 years ago to be pretty conclusively established. Whether we believe the Genesis account or not, we can clearly see that there were things very biologically similar to humans for a long long time, but that ~6000 years ago something changed which is hard to pin down but it doesn't seem way off the mark to call it the Creation of Man. But something did change, the observation that something changed is more or less on the level with cogito ergo sum. We are having this conversation ergo something changed.
I am prepared to believe that there were people before that time who were biologically identical with you and I, and they appear to have done the sorts of things that you might expect chimps to do with increased brain power or perhaps some other sorts of biological advantages that you and I might have. It seems clear that they formed communities, used more complicated tools than modern primates do, built some structures, drew some pictures. But what is it that is different between them and us?
I have read several things lately about the differences between Western man and the rest of humanity. It seems that about 1500 years of Christianity have left biological marks on us. A lot of it seems to be due to church law forbidding incest, but probably other things that the church did to change our ancestors way of life have had meaningful impacts. Anyway, the deep secret of the immigration debate is that Christendom's descendants and the rest of the world are not interchangable, despite sharing a lot more in common than any man and any ape.
I suspect that the Adam Change was something similar. I expect, btw, that the impact of the Adam Change has been somewhat muddied by intermarriage with Pre-Adamite biological humans, possibly those referenced in the Hebrew Bible as Giants or even Nephilim. But perhaps, the answer is that rather than being the first biological human Adam was rather the first biological human to carry the Imago Dei. Does this mean the first human with an immortal soul? First with an awareness of eternity and a spiritual world? First monotheist in a world of polytheistic Neanderthals? First believer? First of the Elect?
"This conclusion is highly illogical, though: faced with the information that we share 98% of our DNA with the chimps shouldn’t make us doubt obvious reality, that is, the vast gulf between us. The only logical take would be to say, well duh, seems that DNA isn’t as important as we thought! We are clearly missing something here!"
I'd take it even further than that. I think what it shows is that genetic similarity tells us next to nothing useful about the ocean of difference between what a human is and what other animals are. In fact, what we might be looking at when studying chimps in particular is a kind of anthropomorphizing paredolia, made even more enticing by their structural similarities (skeletal plan, binocular vision. etc).
I was watching a pair of crows the other day, and it put me in mind of how Eurasian magpies are one of a very small club of animals that can pass the MSR mirror test. That is, they show the ability to recognize themselves in mirrors. It's a strange little club, and one that includes chimpanzees and mountain gorillas (albeit with some age-and-sex-based caveats with the former, and a great deal of conditions and controversy with the latter). Bonobos and orangutans from Borneo also pass, yet all other primates flunk it, including ones we tend to think of as "intelligent."
Bottlenosed dolphins and killer whales pass it, despite their somewhat alien body plans and vast environmental differences. Some elephants pass. One fish, the bluestreak clear wrasse, supposedly did (though not without controversy). But I think the magpie interests me most. It's also the only other fully bipedal creature on the list aside from humans, but that's about where the similarities end. Is a magpie -- or are blackbirds in general -- closer to humans than a baboon or a lemur, despite their more distant genetic and morphologic proximity? Crows seem to remember and recognize individual human faces in the wild. Or are they doing something else, which we interpret as more humanlike the way we see shapes in clouds?
Something big is missing in the explanation, indeed. Unless I've been secretly typing these Substack missives to a bunch of magpies and bonobos all this time.
Perhaps what we interpret into animals is true as well - they are acting out dramas, story arcs, friendship, love, grudges, war, etc. It is true. But from their perspective, they have a very limited awareness of that, and mostly go on instinct in the moment, although they have occasional glimpses. Perhaps *our* relatioship with the higher realms is similar?
Today I was working in the garden and there were some birds in the nearby trees and bushes I guess and they were just singing a song, but I'll be dammed I couldn't see the bird singing....I think there was more than one and the song was so sweet - it made my garden working easier and I tried to sing back to the bird.
I talk with birds all the time - at least I think I do in my mind.
I think a reasonable conclusion would be that the whole idea of DNA is bullshit - just like germ theory is. One follows the other in a way....not entirely, but no denying one bad idea leads to another and vice-versa hopefully (one good idea leads to another).
~
With that said, it is obvious who blew up the pipeline and so one can't help but wonder are the German citizens slaves of some narrative - seems as so.....seems as so that is the case in the whole of EU, so the EU is probably (do you want to bet on it?) toast, but is Germany toast as well - after all of Bismarck's efforts to unify local areas? It just goes to show, Germany, whatever it is now, does itself no favors when it acts and seems to be a puppet of another. That is a shame.
an effing shame...
Can't decide between magpie and bonobo, both options are tempting as all get-out 😂 Wait, oh noooo, I'd better be an orangutan, they're so cute!
I am a fan of crows. I like the whole Corvidae family of birds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvidae - I know you don't need the link, but just to be clear in communication.
I like hawks as well, but the crows know how to take out hawks when push comes to shove and I can prove this if need be.
How many does it take to have a murder of crows? I'd say at least 4 and 5 is even better and six makes it for sure - 6 crows against 3 hawks one time I witnessed and the crows won this skirmish.
Conversely, do we overrate self-awareness as a defining human trait, deprecating other faculties that are just as important? Simply because an organism shares one trait with us (or two, I suppose - bipedalism in the case of magpies) doesn't necessarily make it closer than an organism that doesn't have that specific trait.
We're not in disagreement. The bipedalism of the magpie is shared by all other avians, for instance. But mirror interaction in itself isn't even sufficient to prove something like "self-awareness", despite the design goals of the test itself. Perhaps "design goals" is the more innately human capacity, since we can point to schema and then to constructs and say, " See? It's doing what I said it would."
Point being there's a vast number of differences that are shrugged off between humans and other fauna, despite the plain evidence that we ascended to supreme dominion in what amounts to an evolutionary eyeblink, and that nothing has approximated this leap before or since.
I'm inclined to think that grammar is the crucial element - the seed crystal dropped in the supersaturated solution of clever stone-throwing firebug apes. It suddenly made a far more precise and expansive communion between minds possible, which in turn led those minds to feed off of one another and vasten. To say nothing of more rapid technological development, broader social cooperation, and the accumulation of a cultural knowledge base.
And as far as we know, grammar is unique to humans. Maybe dolphins have it? Though we've yet to crack their 'language', which might operate on entirely different principles.
But then, it's also true that humans are extremely odd in comparison to every other animal at a basic biological level. Only mammal with lactase persistence, for example; ridiculously long post-reproductive life span; no mating season.
Who dropped the seed?
In any case, I tend to think of grammar as symptom, not cause. But even granting grammar as innately human, we are (as you say) still left with an abundance of mysteries related to morphology, development, age, and even weirder shit like art (i.e. language without grammar). I'm inclined to accept Occam's answer as being something like "We're God's anointed children." I'm open to debate, but Imago Dei seems to be the default setting (as it was in every human region and era we know of).
To be clear, I don't think grammar is uniquely human in the sense that no other creature *could* exhibit it. Just that none do, yet.
Art is an interesting case ... It seems to have appeared simultaneously with highly differentiated tools, ritual behavior, and other indications of recognizably human minds. I think there's a good chance that grammar enabled language, language then enabled the development of advanced intellect, and art etc. emerged from there. Sort of like, the connection between minds had to be established for the minds to nourish one another.
As to where grammar came from? Now isn't that the question....
"I think there's a good chance that grammar enabled language, language then enabled the development of advanced intellect, and art etc. emerged from there."
I think there's a good chance you have that backwards. Hmm. Maybe a good topic for a tonic discussion? I hate all this toxic, reprehensible "agreement" we've been having lately.
💬 we ascended to supreme dominion in what amounts to an evolutionary eyeblink
Which put me in mind of MORT (Mind Over Reality Transition) hypothesis 😊 --> un-denial.com/denial-2/theory-short 🤔
The author has it upside-down (as per usual). The top commenter on the thread has the beat 😎.
In this here bizarre milieu we have the dubious pleasure to be living through, hardly anyone can be deadass sure which way is up 😏
The top commenter you favour is hopelessly flat, and plain booooring to boot! 😝
--
ETA 🗨 I want to acknowledge a difficulty that can arise when you start doubting too many things 🙂 (jessica5b3.substack.com/p/ma-ma-ma-mind-controlla)
'Nobody's right,' she doth protest,
then sells her links, with winking jest,
to pseudoscience finks and pimps
(in hopes to rack up Substack simps?)
🤔
In university I took an introductory anthropology course, during which we were shown a documentary that contrasted the warlike, patriarchal chimpanzees with the peaceful, matriarchal bonobos. The political overtone was laid on thick, with the narrator concluding by noting that humans are, biologically, equally similar to both species, and can therefore choose which to emulate ... with the implication that we'd do better to model ourselves on the bonobos. It had rather the opposite impact on my teenage mind: if it was a choice between dying in war and being gay (the documentary made a specific note of the homoerotic methods of conflict resolution used by bonobos), then war it was.
But of course, humans are not chimps, but humans. Chimps can teach us nothing about what we *should* be, only about what our instinctual basis is. It's a matter of foundation and superstructure. To build, the foundation must be solid, meaning the biological and instinctive basis must be well developed and cared for. But on that foundation one may build whatever one wants, limited only by what the foundation can support. The foundation itself says almost nothing about the shape of the building.
It's quite common among leftists to proclaim for example that "we've evolved beyond" tribalism or what have you, which I've always thought is to completely misunderstand how evolution works. As though developing the capacity to think means we suddenly become beings of pure thought, or to use another metaphor, that evolving lungs means our metabolism no longer requires oxygen. Because humans are highly culturally flexible, they infer the tabula rasa ... a dangerous half truth. I guess what I'm saying is that chimpanzees can tell us a lot about the most fundamental constraints on human society, sort of like looking at the metrical structure of a poem, but they say nothing about the content of the poem itself. The left wishes to ignore the poem's structure, and therefore loses the poetry entirely, it just becomes a mess; conservatives focus too much on the structure, and therefore also lose the poetry.
🗨 The older belief, that essence precedes existence, implies that what is possible is conditioned by what is actual.
😉
The silliness of DNA argument is easily exposed by pointing at that *all* body cells share the same genetic code. How much is brain similar to liver to skin to intestine? 😏 Or from another angle, genome size doesn’t correlate with the complexity of organism, far from it. Some poor single-celled critters hoard much more precious nucleotide strands than we humans do 🤷
Hey hop, a leap to the other end of human life spectrum 😊 Dennis Meadows (of Limits to Growth renown) offers a balanced perspective, methinks:
🗨 I have often described politics as the art of choosing which of several impossible outcomes you most prefer. It is important to envision good outcomes. It may be useful to strive for them. But it is important to be realistic.
One might also look at human groups, or for that matter individual humans. The differences can be quite profound, despite the DNA being 99.99% identical. Very clearly, either tiny genetic differences have huge effects, and/or there's a lot more to it than just DNA (which is almost certainly the case).
Sure DNA ain't no destiny carved in stone. Cue up/downregulating or even on/off-switching epigenetic factors we're only starting to glimpse 🙂
Lamarck had the last laugh on that one.
"What is “natural behavior”? And is it “good”?"
To me it seems, some people get intuitively why, in certain contexts, "natural" _is_ "good" (as a tendency), but can't explain it, and others just poop "naturalistic fallacy, you simpleton!" on everything without thinking.
Natural = good to me means, if you don't cringe too much at the analogy, a good compatibility between hardware and software and surrounding conditions, so that things can remain functioning in enough balance to not tip over into severe dysfunction (moving a system out of stable operation parameters).
Where this would touch ethics is, indirectly - because the major ethics violations seem to be always the same to me, just manifesting differently - if (groups of) people force, or even just manipulate others, esp. on societal level, to either live in ways that will produce dysfunction and thus destroy wellbeing (up to, the entire species, as things are currently going). Either by doing things in ways where natural requirements are not met, or conversely, going against natural boundaries, which disrupts balance.
This could mean to deny any sort of mental natural requirements and putting people into triste "Commie block" buildings and areas made up of them promoting depression (hypothetical AFAIK, but not too far fetched as example), turning their food into unphysiological crap, pushing a designed-to-be-toxic culture to divide, etc.
"A natural law will just play itself out regardless. But if we, as a society, can override such “natural laws” anyway, then why bother?"
It plays into what I'll touch on later in this post - natural laws existing, and, as a _heuristic,_ trying as closely as possible to stick to what seems to be _it_, having a tendency to keep things working, is not the same thing as *pretending* one *knew exactly* what the natural laws were and could/should compell everyone else to follow the same idea. It may indeed only "play itself out", in the big picture, if there is some stochastics involved - there will be some error and some demise, but overall, it will work. Forcing everything into one direction probably always ends similarly to roughly comparable experiments in history.
But species do go extinct, and it doesn't always have to be the environment changing too much to quickly for adaption to fail to keep up - it could also be a species, as a system of flesh and ideas, going catastrophically out of stable parameters for the system to keep working.
A lot of people then just pretend it was generally obvious and easy to understand what "natural" actually is - but that's really sometimes the biggest problem, I would say. Precisely because of our complicated (developmental) history - us being really a mixed bag of compromises to meet numerous requirements from different (pre-)historical phases. Looking at one particular thing someone has his focus on and proclaiming: "ah, see! That's natural!" may often be delusional / seeing only a fraction of the picture.
Which reminds me of times when people thought they knew "fate". If something seemed to be turning in some direction, or a cause was there for them to fight for: "yep, that's fate. So let's embrace & go for it" - which is perhaps great for motivation.
Later, the concept of "fate" was then ridiculed, but also used as a strawman to cheaply ridicule, or ascribe false detriments to, "determinism" - which does not include the pretense of impossible universal knowledge - by people who cling to the ill-defined, religiously inherited concept of "free will".
"This conclusion is highly illogical, though: faced with the information that we share 98% of our DNA with the chimps shouldn’t make us doubt obvious reality, that is, the vast gulf between us. The only logical take would be to say, well duh, seems that DNA isn’t as important as we thought!"
I wouldn't quite put it that way. People wildly assume to understand what "98% of DNA" means. What ever amount of it influences how our brain gets its initial wiring - there is A LOT of other complicated stuff in our bodies that needs to be encoded, lol. And that we share with animals that look similar to us.
How this "x % of information" is coded does not have to be linear or in any other way obvious, and certainly not be proportional to size & weight of organs, or even apparent complexity.
TL;DR - "98% similar" is not nearly as much of a precise description of what's going on as some people seem to imagine. It is a rather vague statement, except to the point that we are, apparently, not some sort of totally independent creation from those chimps.
Those is a very insightful comment, thanks. I agree with most of it, and you put it well. As for DNA, my point was actually similar to yours: the conclusion is that we simply don't know enough, and to the degree that we do, we know there is a lot of complexity involved. What I was getting at is that you can't infer from shared DNA something that is against evidence: namely that there are vast differences between humans and animals, and any good theory needs to account for this.
Free will is a complicated story, and I generally don't think hard determinism makes much sense, but I also don't think we can discount it completely either. It's almost as if we can look at it both ways, and both positions are true in a sense, weirdly enough. We will do what we will do kind of thing.
I suspect we share 90% percent of our dna with just about all mammals....and probably many plants.
DNA is just "code" but if it is only a subset of the code that programs the "entity", then comparisons based upon the code as a whole are meaningless. I mean there is some fungus with way more DNA than humans - is that the basis of judgement? Who has the most? Obviously, the code runs deeper.
Myself - I could give flip and if you have free will you get to choose what you do and influence your own future - I suspect monkeys already know that, but it is just based upon their local situation.
If you think I'm full of shit, that is your prerogative, and I know this link is not definitive, but let me suggest just like germ theory is so wrong....judging based on DNA is as well.
https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-DNA-do-all-mammals-share?share=1
Luke - got a quick question for you.
Are the Germans chumps?
Seems as so.
Somebody blows up the pipeline obvious, but the chumps just take it?
Man - this is why I'm so glad my family left that place a long time ago.
Cause all evidence suggest the German folks are not only chumps, in disrespect to Bismarck and other leaders, but they are clueless and seem intent on following a pathway towards some light from some leaders who could give a diddily about chimpanzees and bonbons and others they consider inferior.
What you think - and know this - I would post this message, but hells-bells, I just paid to be a founding member and so I'd like to know the thoughts of a German.
No disrespect meant, but really Germany folks - they need to get a clue I think.
Regards,
BK
Well yes. Germany is a US satellite. There used to be some degree of independence, but not anymore. It is really sad to watch. And it is shocking how many go along with it and can't see the obvious. On the plus side, there are many Germans who do see, and are fed up. Even some mainstream politicians see it and say so behind closed doors, but are afraid to speak out. No wonder given that the new government is a total clown show.
Well, thankyou for responding.
I hope the "clown show" ends.
I think Germany deserves
better.
of course, being I'm German, I guess I'm biased, but still really ---- I mean they blew up the pipeline and everybody who has a clue knows - so why aren't the German citizens upset about this terrorist action - lets call a spade what it is - it was terrorism...simple and true and harmful to german citizens, so you can't blame one for wondering - has germany lost its edge?
BK
Honest question here - I think in history there have been some leaders who for the sake of discussion facilitated better communication, better railroads, better infrastructure in general and through the course of time it is remembered that these leaders led to improvement in the general welfare of the citizens and so why one wonders has this simple essentially a fact of past times not been learned?
Because it seem so simple and I think Kropotkin figured it out already.
This is a test of my founding membership commitment for 1 year.
Well - test passed and let it be know there is info time-wise on that, but probably I'm the only one who really cares about my choice to be a founding member.
I sure hope it was a choice well made, but sometimes it gets on my nerves seeing others griping with each other, or flirting maybe, but not really improving discourse.
I for one appreciate good discourse. Whether the discourse is in German or English. Really - either way is fine by me and sometimes I think German is a better language for communication and truly good translation is the key to better communication - is it not?
I think that from the religious point of view, the answer is probably that Adam was not the first primate, not the first Cro-Magnon, or even possibly the first carrier of homo sapiens DNA. Fully recognizing the many limitations of Science Inc., I consider the existence of the Earth and of creatures biologically very like ourselves prior to ~6000 years ago to be pretty conclusively established. Whether we believe the Genesis account or not, we can clearly see that there were things very biologically similar to humans for a long long time, but that ~6000 years ago something changed which is hard to pin down but it doesn't seem way off the mark to call it the Creation of Man. But something did change, the observation that something changed is more or less on the level with cogito ergo sum. We are having this conversation ergo something changed.
I am prepared to believe that there were people before that time who were biologically identical with you and I, and they appear to have done the sorts of things that you might expect chimps to do with increased brain power or perhaps some other sorts of biological advantages that you and I might have. It seems clear that they formed communities, used more complicated tools than modern primates do, built some structures, drew some pictures. But what is it that is different between them and us?
I have read several things lately about the differences between Western man and the rest of humanity. It seems that about 1500 years of Christianity have left biological marks on us. A lot of it seems to be due to church law forbidding incest, but probably other things that the church did to change our ancestors way of life have had meaningful impacts. Anyway, the deep secret of the immigration debate is that Christendom's descendants and the rest of the world are not interchangable, despite sharing a lot more in common than any man and any ape.
I suspect that the Adam Change was something similar. I expect, btw, that the impact of the Adam Change has been somewhat muddied by intermarriage with Pre-Adamite biological humans, possibly those referenced in the Hebrew Bible as Giants or even Nephilim. But perhaps, the answer is that rather than being the first biological human Adam was rather the first biological human to carry the Imago Dei. Does this mean the first human with an immortal soul? First with an awareness of eternity and a spiritual world? First monotheist in a world of polytheistic Neanderthals? First believer? First of the Elect?