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Comments by Goldy


201. Where do US lawmakers stand on science?

Comment #199397 by Goldy on June 25, 2008 at 5:23 pm

My old was an engineer (petroleum) and an atheist. I work in the the medical school of Auckland Uni - about half of the scientists are very religious (one PhD was actually a Bible literalist...).
Maybe in my case, acs, it's something to do with being in the southern hemisphere...you know, like the Coriolis effect or something ;-)

202. The Flea Delusion

Comment #199394 by Goldy on June 25, 2008 at 5:13 pm

Regarding RM - I still feel for him. After all, he cannot be of sound mind if he needs, as opposed to just wants, a religion to help him through. People like that need help and I am willing to give my time (within reason) to help. Only thing that troubles them is the need for a god.
"We can love Him, because He first loved us."
A cry for help. Read it - can't you see how pathetic it sounds? (Of course, hard to love something that doesn't think twice about wiping us all out by flooding...and send us to hell if we don't love it "Love me or else!" - but that's my personal opinion). He needs a love. Here's a hint (read his blog entry)

So there I was.

Alone again.

203. Science is not philosophy

Comment #199353 by Goldy on June 25, 2008 at 2:56 pm

Goldy, stop touting your course. If you haven't got enough students, then maybe, just maybe it's because your course is intellenciontalylly challenged. :D
Ain't true! It's the funding, innit! All going to forensic science cos that's on telly and it's farking ace!

204. Science is not philosophy

Comment #199345 by Goldy on June 25, 2008 at 2:46 pm

And the way the guru's are fawned on by some people is somewhat sickening too.

Hmm, gurus eh? I keep telling the students I work with I am a guru. Not sure if I qualify here.
May I ask a personal question - are you a student? Young? (OK, that's 2 questions...)

205. Science is not philosophy

Comment #199340 by Goldy on June 25, 2008 at 2:41 pm

"philosophy" = "just finkin', innit?"

Nah, mate. Jus' sam farking old git finkin intellectionally and sayin it wiv farked up words.

206. Saudi Marriage Officiant : 'It Is Allowed To Marry A Girl At The Age Of One'.

Comment #199337 by Goldy on June 25, 2008 at 2:36 pm

On marriage - I got married becasue my wife told me to. Chinese don't see unmarried couples in the same light as we westerners do. Turned out to be quite good, mind - if we hadn't married, my children would not have got a British passport.
Parenting - so many different forms of parenting, not that many (relatively speaking) fucked up children. Stop being swayed by the media. And gay couples can bring up children - it won't fuck them up. After all, all gays I know are a product of the traditional family...
Moslem/Muslim - Moslem to my ears (and eyes) appears old fashioned. But I don't think it matters. Check out how many different ways Gadafi is spelled (and my way is yet another :-))
HitbLade - if you must, but within the next week - wife comes back then. And did we have a wee accident with out name? A bit late on the capitalisation, methinks.
bnow, back to hating Mu(o)slims...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7469180.stm

"I am so sick and tired of hearing nationalists talk of killing Muslims, of blowing up mosques, of fighting back, only to see these acts of resistance fail to appear."
I'm waiting for this line to appear in these threads one day ;-) (joke - but with a serious undercurrent. Sometimes I feel this sentiment is heartfelt in some of the comments I read)

207. 'I despise Islamism': Ian McEwan faces backlash over press interview

Comment #198978 by Goldy on June 24, 2008 at 11:49 pm

Goldy, I must agree with you in regards to #234

I'm sorry for bringing it up - just a small peeve of mine and irrelevant here except to try and make a point. Maybe the rugby had something to do with it to... ;-) Can never read the Herald's sport pages for about a month after any game against England!

208. Saudi Marriage Officiant : 'It Is Allowed To Marry A Girl At The Age Of One'.

Comment #198977 by Goldy on June 24, 2008 at 11:44 pm

It was obviously a completely different mindset back then

Indeed it was. I think the same probably carried on in Europe at the same time.
However, what happened then has no bearing on what happens now. These people that say Mo has an absolute hold on morality and use his example on how to live today are screwed in the head - I am pretty sure Mo would not have done now what he did then.
I am reminded of a story in the NYT about falafel sellers in Baghdad being targetted - apparently falafel was not around in Mo's time so was un-Islamic. One falafel seller did try and point out that AK47s were not around during Mo's time either, but that didn't seem relevant to the militias...

209. Science is not philosophy

Comment #198976 by Goldy on June 24, 2008 at 11:35 pm

I can't imagine what a Ph.D. in business has to do with "philosophy" except in the very broad sense that tera explained.

Tried to explain in Comment #198953. Makes sense to me...but then, I wrote it, so it would :-D

210. Science is not philosophy

Comment #198953 by Goldy on June 24, 2008 at 9:10 pm

I got the same, so I looked it up. That's how I heard of Natural Philosophy. And then someone told me that one had to research something no one else has done - going out into uncharted waters as it were. One has a hypothesis - an argument, if you will - which one has to defend. To defend, you need data and information, which is why one does the research. But in the end, it is your hypothesis which is the subject of your PhD - you are defending your philosophical "musings" on a particular subject, with evidence to back up your arguments from your research.

211. Science is not philosophy

Comment #198949 by Goldy on June 24, 2008 at 8:39 pm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy
Reagerding science and philosophy - all in the definition :-) By the way, ever wonder what the Ph part of a PhD stood for? Or the Phil part of MPhil (I have one of those...in biological sciences)?
Mordacious1, I feel for you. Bad enough having teeth pulled, even worse when having your child have to go through that pain. It is hard enough to comfort a toddler - having an autistic child as you describe must be very very hard.

Edit - ID is not a science, nor a philosophy. It is a religion.

212. 'I despise Islamism': Ian McEwan faces backlash over press interview

Comment #198947 by Goldy on June 24, 2008 at 8:28 pm

People who get massive payments can't be living in poverty. Poverty implies having no money.
Depends which people get the money. A holocaust survivor is not necessarily the receiver of funds if said funds get handed to a government authority for distribution. I have found that governments have a habit of sometimes diverting money from the recipients it was paid for to other projects...

213. 'I despise Islamism': Ian McEwan faces backlash over press interview

Comment #198945 by Goldy on June 24, 2008 at 8:25 pm

http://www.codoh.com/zionweb/zizad/zizad26.html

As a precaution, Stern sent Naftali Lubentschik to Beirut, which was still controlled by Vichy, negotiate directly with the Axis. Nothing is known of his dealings with either Vichy or the Italians, but in January 1941 Lubentschik met two Germans --Rudolf Rosen and Otto von Hentig, the philo-Zionist, who was then head of the Oriental Department of the German Foreign Office. After the war a copy of the Stern proposal for an alliance between his movement and the Third Reich was discovered in the files of the German Embassy in Turkey.

There's more - I'll let you read it. Of course, it is just something from the old interweb - no idea how the truth has been twisted to fit any political agenda...

Edit - one doesn't even have to look hard to find Jewish Wehrmacht soldiers...
http://www.jewishaz.com/jewishnews/020705/army.shtml

214. 'I despise Islamism': Ian McEwan faces backlash over press interview

Comment #198944 by Goldy on June 24, 2008 at 8:20 pm

Contrast that with what the British colonizers did to the indigenous cultures in Australia and New Zealand in the 19th century -- kidnapping Aboriginal children to be brought up white, beating Maori school pupils for speaking their own home language. That's what I would understand by the term "cultural imperialism".
While I don't deny the occurences stated here, I do want to ask...how many generations have to pass before the crappy things get attributed to the colonial masters and the good stuff to the now separate colonists.
I say this because I am always told it was the British that did all the cultural genocides etc but it's never the British when talking about stuff like the Anzacs at gallipoli (oh, except when it comes to bad leadership - obviously Australia, NZ, SA etc never had anyone in a leadership capacity).
I do believe some of the excesses of cultural "assimilation" occured in the 20th century...by white Australians and white New Zealanders.
Sorry, just a bit of a peeve of mine as a Pom in Aotearoa.

215. Saudi Marriage Officiant : 'It Is Allowed To Marry A Girl At The Age Of One'.

Comment #198903 by Goldy on June 24, 2008 at 5:13 pm

From the Auckland Uni website
http://www.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/about/news/articles/2005/11/evolution_puberty.cfm
Extracts...

They found that Paleolithic girls arrived at menarche at a similar age to modern girls - 7 to 13 years - suggesting that this is the evolutionarily determined age of puberty in girls.

"This would have matched the degree of psychosocial maturation necessary to function as an adult in Paleolithic society based on small groups of hunter-gatherers," they write.


But now there is a mismatch, because society has become vastly more complex, so becoming psychosocially mature therefore takes longer.

"For the first time in our 200,000 year history as a species we become sexually mature before becoming psychologically equipped to function as adults in society," says Professor Gluckman.

"All our social systems work on the presumption that the two types of maturity coincide. But this is no longer the case and never will be again because we cannot change biological reality. We have to work out a new set of structures - schooling, for example - to deal with this reality."


So, "What would Mo do?" is not really going to cut it as a bumper sticker, becasue Mo don't live today. What would Mo have done had he lived today be probably closer to the mark.

Edit -
http://www.liggins.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/liggins/events/2006/09/lectures/evolution-adolescent-brain.cfm
Dr Bagshaw will report that our current attitudes about young people extend back at least as far as classical Roman and Greek times.

Now, I am making a supposition here, but pre-Islamic Arabs would have known what Greek and Roman thought was - especially if they were traders...

216. Saving Us from Darwin

Comment #198880 by Goldy on June 24, 2008 at 3:41 pm

Tera You have been posting non stop for a couple of days now. Enough to tire anyone out. Why not take a day's break and come back to things later?

Corylus, you know that's going to be hard! It's a drug - the arguments, the knowledge, the sheer liberation and the ability to argue points with people who militantly cherish their ignorance, the way you can use your brain to think of arguments! It's like mental chess, you can release all your pent-up cleverness and no longer have to think at the lowest common denomination in order to talk to someone.
After a few days the exhilaration wears off and then you can get back to normal life. Until the itch starts again...eh, Dr Zara?
TB will go soon...but let the novelty wear off first..

217. Saving Us from Darwin

Comment #198864 by Goldy on June 24, 2008 at 3:17 pm

With regards to feminism - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukhtaran_Bibi
She shows what can be done and has earned my deepest respect.

218. Saving Us from Darwin

Comment #198861 by Goldy on June 24, 2008 at 3:15 pm

Having an Austrian mother, I'll have mine with mayonnaise, a la continental style :-)
Just how dis this get to feminism? I have to say I did find TeraBrat, on another thread, a bit emotional. Something to do with us being nasty to animals. I could see the point but it seemed, well, a bit girly (sorry!). Now I read that bad language might drive some back to religion. ?????????? And then we get to feminism, defense of women, fucktards, battered women, battered women with condiments and a side of fries.
And still people complain... ;-)

219. Saving Us from Darwin

Comment #198855 by Goldy on June 24, 2008 at 3:11 pm

Pretty good, but they need Tapatio, otherwise they are just bland....

Could probably do with a side of kumara chips...

220. Saving Us from Darwin

Comment #198824 by Goldy on June 24, 2008 at 2:24 pm

You people really aren't any different from fundamentalists. You are as mysoginistic as the most devout Muslim

Small hand raises in the back row..."I'm not" says a shy voice...
:-)
Damn, why do you all save the good stuff for when I'm all tucked up in bed?

221. Saudi Marriage Officiant : 'It Is Allowed To Marry A Girl At The Age Of One'.

Comment #198821 by Goldy on June 24, 2008 at 2:19 pm

It appears to be a relatively recent development in Sunni theology - mirroring the development of Mutta marriage in Shia Islam. Name escapes me at present - if you wish to find out, I'd suggest asking on faithfreedom.org/forum
Reading the correspondance, misyar marriages appear to have a slightly unsavoury reputation. Mind you, so does prostitution and that's still going strong...
http://www.arabnews.com/search/search.asp

222. Should We Rid The Mind of God? A Debate

Comment #198422 by Goldy on June 23, 2008 at 9:42 pm

TB

I'm not saying McGrath is right, but, a lot of people are won over by charisma.
Maybe, but then they'll read his book, or another fleabook, then maybe they'll stop to think ;-)
As it is, if you really believe, you'll never be swayed by anything. If you are wavering then it's either the "dark side" or another religion - my money's on another religion...probably Buddhism ;-). If you don't believe, then whatever McG's charisma, he is wrong and you know it.
Right, off home now. Must pick up fuel for fire - sodding cold today!

223. Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill

Comment #198417 by Goldy on June 23, 2008 at 8:36 pm

Comment #198407 by Cartomancer
Oh dear - tears are rolling down my face! People look at me and slowly move away...

Edit -

Working out what the hell other gay people were talking about must have been a nightmare though...
http://www2.prestel.co.uk/cello/Polari.htm
I had to look it up!

224. 'I despise Islamism': Ian McEwan faces backlash over press interview

Comment #198410 by Goldy on June 23, 2008 at 7:53 pm

Further along the north African coastline...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/world/africa/23algeria.html?ref=world
Why sometimes it's not the people's fault they are as they are...

225. 'I despise Islamism': Ian McEwan faces backlash over press interview

Comment #198400 by Goldy on June 23, 2008 at 6:45 pm

Despite the report, the holiday season at the Taba/Sharm El Sheikh/Alexandria is as busy as ever. Great coral treasures at the red sea for those who are interested.
I have to say I really enjoyed my holiday there. Of course, after the Luxor massacre security was damn tight. I think Cairo is one of the nicest cities I have been to - don't know why but it felt really good there. Friendly people too.
As for the heeadbanging mark - it that any worse than walking around with a Bible, as I believe the Bush administration does...?

226. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #198348 by Goldy on June 23, 2008 at 3:43 pm

I'm wondering how many times I've been trolled for worthless comments now ;-)

227. 'I despise Islamism': Ian McEwan faces backlash over press interview

Comment #198339 by Goldy on June 23, 2008 at 3:28 pm

Meanwhile, in Egypt...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7469221.stm

228. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197972 by Goldy on June 23, 2008 at 2:42 am

I was trying to talk about the context in which accumulated information finally allows us to "transcend" (there's that pesky word again) undirected selection.

Hmmm. If selection made us the abstract and logical thinking machines that we are, would the "directed" selection merely be a continuation of the "undirected" selection? We think we are directing it, but in fact we are just following what selection has conditioned us to think?
Getting out of my area of comfort now :-)
Jethro, the same Genesis that has God making men and women on the 6th day? Forgetting to make it rain? Making Adam after the 7th day and Eve some time way after that and confusing forever those of us who were told Adam and Eve were the first people? I have read through Genesis - a more blatant cut and paste job is hard to fathom. What is even harder for me to fathom is how it endured...

229. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197921 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 10:48 pm

What I'm interested in is, what's the reason why our particular type of agency---a rather complicated form, no doubt---makes our deliberate intervention in our genome a different type of selection from all the others that fit so nicely into being "natural"?
That I am not sure of. I think it is natural. We know what we want - why? Because it has been imprinted into us, as it were, by our evolution. By carrying on the same theme "outside" natural selection doesnt make sense to me as natural selection got us here - we're not transcending anything but carrying on the same journey, as it were.
We evolved into thinking things naturally. That the thinking makes us try to direct the evolution is part of our evolution. That by natural selection we got this far shows it is a good strategy and we carry on the same because we select for it ourselves following our instincts (hmm, is that the right word - hopefully you know what I mean. Nothing to do with aliens...).
Hominids have already selected smaller brains - H. neanderthalis had bigger brains, apparently. And then there's the Flores hobbits to consider (though that seems to have really gone into all sorts of directions now!).

230. Atheism's Wrong Turn

Comment #197916 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 10:35 pm

Written language, I believe, originated with clerics to record taxes and revenue, expanding to tracking production, crops and trade, then general government bureaucracy (with bureaucrats recruited from the clergy as only they were literate much of the time).
Are you sure about the role of clergy here? Sounds very Eurocentric and Dark Ages to me. Roman grafitti suggests otherwise...and reading one the origins of writing as we have it in the west, cuneiform usage suggests not so much clergy as accountants being the main users.

231. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197908 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 9:53 pm

Well, now I feel like a naughty child. But you're right LL1 - I'll stop.

232. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197900 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 9:22 pm

Maybe I need your help to solve Roswell.
Ok...but first you help me extract hydroxychloroquine from tablets!
I done plenty of speculating on this one and I'm still getting really poor yields.
Don't you ever let your mind go on a flight of fancy? And the aliens was completely irrele...ah, forget it. Yes, they were central to my argument! You win! Beers on you!

233. 12 Year Old Girl Prodigy Paints Pictures of God

Comment #197894 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 9:06 pm

some of you should be ashamed to be posting comments like this. I think it is definitely possible that this girl is just extremely gifted and God has blessed her with that kind of talent. Is it so hard to believe there really is a God?

yes, it is hard ot believe there is a god. She'd paint the same, God or no God. You can tell - she painted a white bloke with a beard, by the looks of it. She is talented, I'll give her that. With the right tuition, she could be really good.
and have some respect for those of us who believe in God.

Eh? Fuck off! Earn the respect first, then come to us, you homophobic, Jew hating, mysogenistic, ritualistic, self important, deluded and arrogant individual.
Edit - well, it was a very vacuous entry to put into an atheist site, wasn't it.
PS - there is no god.

234. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197893 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 8:59 pm

As a scientist I don't see the point in seriously speculating on something like that.

And, as a scientist, I find speculation sometimes helps me get out of a rut.
Ah, well, I see you cannot see the argument for the aliens. Wish I had never mentioned them now.
Anthropogenic - seeing as it means born of humans (if my classical Greek isn't too far off) then yes, everything we do and make is, by definition anthropogenic. Anyone who argues the point doesn't know what the word means. Those termite mound would be termitogenic and so on (can't find the Greek for beaver or I would included them).
Never mind, I'll detach humanity from nature and leave it at that then. Much easier.
Brian
Goldy, you really are takin' the piss from me today. If we couldn't survive, the possibility of survival was non-existent, then we didn't survive. So, we could survive, however poorly, but still it was possible, in fact it occurred. :)

:-D It's that manuka wheat beer I made. Wonder how I'll be when the chilli chocolate beer is ready? ;-)

235. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197884 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 8:23 pm

If it were to change so abruptly that we couldn't survive, well then we couldn't survive. :D
But it did and we did :-) I'll concede the sun thingy, mind. If it changed drastically or even went out, we'd be fucked.

236. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197883 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 8:20 pm

http://www.jqjacobs.net/anthro/paleo/bottleneck.html
The bottleneck thingy.

How do you do that? Can you even begin to imagine what kind of thought processes an alien would have if they even existed? We have a hard enough time understanding other human cultures. How do you propose explaining an unknown alien?
That's where imagination comes in - I am a human, not a Vulcan! And I try and project how we look at things "below" us upward, as it were :-) But again, as you say, I am inferring a human quality on these aliens - for all I know they'd just see us as...carbon based complex molecular structures. But that is not what i was trying to illustrate - the aliens are completely irrelevant except to illustrate how we have to look at ourselves. You're focussing on the completely wrong end of the argument. The aliens are not the important bit, the important bit is what is natural and what isn't and where does one draw the line...

237. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197881 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 8:14 pm

What if it's global? What if everything changes quickly and drastically?
Our DNA suggests we have been there before, that we are all descended from a handful of people. We occupy a variety of different anvironments, from arctic cold to desert heat (I'm remembering the Afari tribesmen here - what was that program? They were running about playing footy with an English bloke. He suffered, they didn't - was at about 50°C)
A few are bound to survive. Whether they have what our ancestors had to reach the stage we are at now, who knows. Maybe they'll be rabid atheists - bye, bye God!

238. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197878 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 8:08 pm

I'm sure they do, they believe in god. I fail to see what this has to do with us not showing a belief in fictional characters.

Sometimes one has to step a bit out of the box in oreder to get the people one is talking to to try and view a point from another angle, if you see what I mean. I am not saying aliens from the planet X exist, but in order to view ourselves, we have to try and see things from a non-human point of view, eh?
Now, Comment #197873 by txpiper , note him. Not only is he wildly more speculative than I am, he actually believes the stuff he talks about is true! No philosophical musings for him! Everything he writes is, to him, fact. Not even theory or even hypothesis, but fact.
Brian, other than the sun getting too hot, I think we'd cope. Even an ice age (though not, methinks, the ice sphere of our txty's imagination). Yes, even a nuclear winter - that would be akin to a mega eruption, would it not? We survived Toba about 70-odd thousand years ago, I believe...

239. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197875 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 7:58 pm

You have the right to your own thoughts. I'm just wondering if a scientific forum is the place to raise fictional questions like that. I'm sure there are forums for that kind of discussion.

Don't forget that religious people come and read these forums. If we start speculating about aliens we may lose all our credibility. "AHA! You don't believe in God but you believe in aliens. What if aliens are God..."

They would then get a quick tutorial in the difference between idle speculation nad philosophical thoughts on subjects and the sheer fuckwittery that is faith in gods :-)
Brian
If our environment changed so abruptly that we couldn't counter the negative effects with technology, then surely evolution would be no help as it requires long time spans. We'd just become extinct.

Luckily we, as humans, occupy a variety of different environments. I guess we'd cope...

240. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197866 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 7:41 pm

Goldy, are you suggesting that Termites have the cognitive ability to decide any issues, not least building their mound? If so, please present the evidence. Imagine all those extra billions of sentient beings we'll have to consider when making laws......

Heheheheh! No, I don't. And for all I know they make the mounds more as an easy lunch bar for ants rather than for themselves ;-)
TeraBrat, you're right, I'm wandering into complete personal speculation. Just wondering how an outsider would view us...as we view ourselves or as we view other non-sentient creatures. Assuming there is an outsider to speak of, of course...

241. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197865 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 7:38 pm

Now, some can argue that because consciousness arose naturally, and because we are natural creatures then it's natural selection. But this just confuses different meanings of natural. And anything, including a computer would be termed natural under this broader idea of nature. In fact, everything would be termed natural because it exists and the substrate of existence is material.
Yep. Which is why I get confused! :-(
But is natural selection made us what we are now, surely everything we do follows the same principles of natural selection? What if environmental pressures change and the less thinking of us have an advantage? I know we can change our environment to a degree, but to what degree? Certainly we are not any different from our immediate ancestors and look how the mini ice age of the late middle ages altered things. Should we enter an ice age, would we be able to change things? Despite our knowledge and reasoning capabilities, we don't seem to be making much of an impact on maintaining the status quo regarding climate change (apart from heating things up!). And there is debate regarding the global warming too...
Argh. Think I'll go back to trying to extract hydroxychloroquine from tablets...

242. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197860 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 7:28 pm

You're takin' the piss Goldy. Termites deliberately building their mound. What next? Termite construction company decries building regulations. ;)
Don't laugh, mate - bloody regulators get everywhere! But then, the environment is changed and who is to say it isn't deliberately done (in termite terms)?
Terabrat
Do I need to go on?

Yes, I know - but step out of H.sapiens shoes for a bit, become an alien and would you see it the same way or would you conclude that we have evolved ways of changing the environment? After all, we are the product of natural selection as much as any other animal here. The fact that we are destructive might be no different to those petri dish colonies that collapse once population saturation has occurred and nutrients are lost due to demand.
We look at ants and aphids and beavers and stuff and say it is natural and yet ours is not. Would others think the same of us or the same as us?

243. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197858 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 7:21 pm

Quine

Goldy, it is a big subject....

You are not kidding! Sometimes a bit out of my depth when discussing it, I have to say. I do feel, though, sometimes it stumbles on matters of definition...eg, thinking. I say our thinking is due to natural selection, so thinking could be under the same as eye colour, fatty deposits to combat cold, etc. Yet thinking, per se, is not, is it? If we make an AI machine, it's thinking is not due to natural selection as such.
After that I start to get confused....

244. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197852 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 7:12 pm

OK, most creatures do not deliberately atler their environment or select other creatures for certain genetic traits. I would say at this point the evidence is that we are the only ones who do this.

Termite mound not a modified environment? Beaver dam? Ants looking after aphids? Or indeed their own (honeypot ants, is it?)?

245. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197820 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 5:51 pm

A bit emotional, isn't it? Comment #197810, I mean. I have been in a slaughterhouse - watched sheep bleed to death while suspended upside down. Made me hungry and so I went, after work, to get a lamb shank. Many, many people kill the animals they are going to eat - talking to my parents, they had to kill chickens to eat them. They still like chicken.
I have also watched, via the medium of television, baby animals being ripped apart by carnivores who specifically targetted the baby because of it's vulnerability.
Emotion is one thing and it can be very admirable but it does not win arguments.

246. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197807 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 5:42 pm

Goldy and Quine,
Was it you guys that talked about 'transcending' our natural selves a while back?

Sort of - I argued against.
Terabrat
But they can't survive without us. So the success is artificial. If we go they go.
The housefly uses us like crazy. As do rats, mice and a horde of other wee besties. If we were to die off, they would too..ish. Obviously those that don't need us as much would, evolutionarily speaking, have an advantage which they would pass on to subsequent generations.
The fact that some animals are completely dependent on us and that there are genetic problems is neither here nor there. They survive...becasue we provide the environment. Of course, one can argue that we make an artificial environment and that naturally they would die off. But I say that we are how we are by natural selection and the fact we provide this host mechanism is also part and parcel of the natural selection process.

247. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197776 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 4:45 pm

But that's not selection acting on us directly. And one can say because we are as we are by natural selection, then our action on the floral and fauna is by natural selection with us as the environmental pressure.
Tenuous, I know...and almost smacks of goddiness.

248. Oystein Elgaroy - the Christian defender who became an Atheist

Comment #197770 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 4:30 pm

Am I too late to congratulate Oystein for his intellectual honesty?

I'd say not. Go on, give him a big congrats :-)

249. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #197769 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 4:29 pm

Quine :-)
I know. But then again, one can say there is a lack of intention on our part. We grew bigger brains and developed the parts for abstract thought (unintentionally). That unintentional development leads us to try and rise above the Natural Selection (as we define it) but surely that is the result of the way we developed...unintentionally. So we are doing what we think still...without knowing why we do what we do :-)
Hmmm, need more coffee....

250. Oystein Elgaroy - the Christian defender who became an Atheist

Comment #197765 by Goldy on June 22, 2008 at 4:12 pm

Teratornis, I cycled for 3 years before. My main gripe at the time was the buses - they are driven by shaved apes, taught some rudimentary language and minimal driving skills. Unfortunately, we have to share the bus lanes as cycling lanes are not that extensive. Cyclists are told they are not used much, so councils do not set aside money for extending them, by as cyclists say, it is hard when the cycling lanes appear to disappear and we have to share with the traffic.
However, there is some action trying to get cycling more "rights" - http://www.caa.org.nz/ and http://www.getacross.org.nz/
The rising petrol prices does seem to have thinned the ranks of car drivers, but it still is very crowded on wet days (Auckland, unfortunately, is not known for its lack of rain).
I also used to cycle in the UK before emigrating. 2-3 miles down to the Thames, then a 5 mile slog up to Sonning Common to work at Johnson Matthey - I was involved in fuel cell research, plating palladium and silver onto ceramic tubes to purify hydrogen. The journey back was great due to the long hill down to the Thames...but there was a school on the way. Scary things, myopic mums in trucks picking their little darlings up and driving them the few 100 metres back home...

so every country would adopt a one-child policy to arrest population growth

Isn't this why Europe needs immigration? There are no policies on the number of children there. In China there is, yet the population is not really going down, as far as I can tell. One doesn't need a policy - just raise the standards of living (if possible) and people will opt to have less children. They eat into one's leisure time. As it is, the next generation pay the taxes that pay the pensions - having less children can lead to rather large social disruptions...higher taxes for the new generations and less pension for the older.

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