Slashdot Mirror
An Alternate Human
B0b Barker writes "What has six limbs, a prehensile tail, its brain in its chest, and reproductive organs in its mouth? The alternate human designed by biologist PZ Myers in Remaking Humanity, a story in Forbes.com's package on Reinvention. It may sound fantastic, but researchers are already working to re-build DNA, proteins and cells in a new field called synthetic biology, and we may have to meet these bug-eyed freaks sometime in our lifetime."
In addition to convenience, there's a good reason the brain is located in the head...in close proximity to the major sensory organs (eyes, ears, nose, mouth). This placement minimizes the time lag of neural impulse conduction, by minimizing the necessary length of nerve connecting the sensory organs to the brain. For this reason, I wouldn't expect many species to evolve with a larger-than-necessary distance between their brain and their sensory organs (unless such creature evolved a much faster method of conducting nerve impulses than we possess).From TFA:
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
how's that a change?
...look suspiciously like the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Sig? - yeah, whatever.
"we may have to meet these bug-eyed freaks sometime in our lifetime"
Dare to dream. Personally, I say we drop everything and try to make the reception on cell phones better.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
"What has six limbs, a prehensile tail, its brain in its chest, and reproductive organs in its mouth?"
My last date.
I present you the five-assed monkey!
http://religiousfreaks.com/Even though 99.9999% of all gods are about as real as the Easter Bunny
.0001% there, buddy. Next time don't do the calculation on an old Pentium.
You're off by
There's no particular necessity that the brain would form in the head
In modern humans the heart is positioned midway between the brain and the genitals, pumping blood to both.
Kyle: Watch out Stan, genetic engineers are crazy!!!
South Park, Episode 105, An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig
"...reproductive organs in its mouth"
Whose?
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
We will wear our underroos on our head?
We haven't stopped it, we've only altered the rules. Finding food and escaping predators is no longer much of an evolutionary influence. There are quite a few new things which can cause us to fail to reproduce. Humans will likely evolve in time to become less susceptible to cancer and asthma caused by air pollution, more likely to survive car crash trauma, be more tolerant of lead and mercury, and less likely to suffer negative effects such as heart disease from overconsumption of food. Women whose genetics prevent birth control from working well are currently far more likely to reproduce than others, so we will likely see some tolerance in the general population (although the medications will likely change at a much faster rate than we can evolve around). This is all just speculation though, I'm not a biologist.
I seem to remember John Smart talking about "developmental optimum" that evolution settles into. The eye most people get, having one doesn't give stereo vision, and three is redudant so the extra requirements of having a third eye get pared out over time. There are also some reasons having five fingers having to do with gripping a rock so it could be thrown accurately at ninety miles an hour. Get a pack of hairy men all throwing at a single predator/prey and they've got a serious problem. Our thowing abilities aren't too important today, granted, but consider how much engineering and design work would need to be completely redone to accomadate a couple extra digits. Sad to see this sensational article completely ignore the body of reasearch in this area.
You could be right, but we don't know for sure. It depends on how one defines sentience, and what we discover as we explore the oceans, as we're just beginning to do.
The case could be made that the mollusc body plan is the most successful on the planet. Squid, for instance, out-mass pretty much all other animals, in an astonishing variety of ecological niches (okay, not sure about krill... any biologists care to refresh my memory?). Molluscs can be found in just about any part of the earth.
As far as sentience goes, if humans crap out and extinct ourselves, my vote for the next evolutionary chance at the reign of intelligence would be for the cephalopods. They're adaptable, have a proven problem-solving intelligence, are highly communicative in ways we're just beginning to understand, have excellent eyesight, and octopuses in particular are highly dextrous.
Don't underestimate the mighty mollusc.
Damn those pesky terrorists
...
When we are a million species spreading through the galaxy, the questions 'Can man play God and still stay sane?' will lose of of its terrors. We shall be playing God, but only as local dieties and not as lords of the universe. There is safety in numbers. Some of us will become insane , and rule over empires as crazy as Doctor Moreau's island. Some of use will shit on the morning star. There will be conflicts and tragedies. But in the long run, the sane will adapt and survive better than the insane. Nature's pruning of the unfit will limit the spread of insanity among the species in the galaxy, as it does among individuals on earth.
...
The expansion of life over the universe is a beginning, not an end. At the same time as life is extending its habitat quantitatively, it will also be changing and evolving qualitatively into dimensions of mind and spirit that we cannot imagine. The acquisition of new territory is important, not as an end in itself, but as a means to enable life to experiment with intelligence in a million different forms."
-- "The Greening of the Galaxy," Freeman Dyson, 1979
Don't you think it might be a little more accurate if you separated those that are killing BECAUSE of religious reasons, as opposed to those that aren't? China and the USSR were doing all their killing for governmental/control reasons, to maintain their fascist state or during a revolution. That's pretty distinct from religious types who are killing people simply for worshiping the wrong gods. It's dishonest to try to put the two groups together. What you should be comparing are religious nuts who kill for religious reasons, and atheists who specifically target believers because of their religion. And if you actually do that, I'm pretty sure the religious types will win.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Designs are oversimplistic, inflexible, assume fixed conditions in the environment, and cannot function beyond their designed requirements specifications.
You must be a Windows programmer.
Evolution has proven superbly effective at creating workable systems...
Suppose I design an evolution process that is effective at creating workable systems, then by your claim, my design (evolution) must be oversimplistic, inflexible, assumes fixed conditions, and cannot function beyond specification. This is a contradiction to your claim, so evolution process must not be effective, or your statement about design is wrong.
Instead of "serious suboptimal causes" you should use the word "defect." Of course, no matter which words you use, your claim is a useless tautology, since a component that extincts is a component that has defect and vice versa.
But if you just say suboptimal, you can easily find someone who is biologically superior than you, then by your claim you should be extinct. But (I hope) this is not the case for you. There is observably some give or take on how suboptimal you can be. However, this implies that evolution is not so effective because it allows suboptimality, therefore a contradiction to your claim.
I hope other scientifically curious people are much more logically rigorous than you when defending evolution.
I once had a signature.
I can think of several examples right off the top of my head:
There are all kinds of improvments that you could make to the regular human if we were able to. I'd love to be able to see into the UV and IR. That would kick ass.
No, its even more fucked up than that. Muslims, Jews, and Christians all worship the same god. We slit eachother's throats because we don't worship the same god in the same way.
Someone stop this planet, I want to get off!
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Actually scarring is what mammals have instead of regeneration. Due to our higher energy metabolisms, we can't afford the weeks of downtime without eating to regenerate like reptiles can.
Instead, we evolved scarring, which cuts off resources to an area in the hopes that we can still feed ourselves without it. As another benefit, we close off wounds from infection faster than animals with regeneration.
Studies in mice have shown that shutting off the ability to scar leads to regeneration. The ability lies with in us, but it closed off by the benefits of scarring. Now, under modern societial pressure, we may be better off learning how to suppress scarring since it no longer means an inability to feed ourselves. Some have argued that organ regeneration will be the antibiotics of the 21st century in that it will revolutionize medicine.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").