Slashdot Mirror
Hawking Says Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution
movesguy sends us to The Daily Galaxy for comments by Stephen Hawking about how humans are evolving in a different way than any species before us. Quoting:
"'At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information. I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race,' Hawking said. In the last ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, 'an external transmission phase,' where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. 'But the external record, in books, and other long lasting forms of storage,' Hawking says, 'has grown enormously. Some people would use the term evolution only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes.'"
This is basically just a useless semantics argument.
...the singularity is already here...
Doctor Spaceman, when they check my DNA, will they tell me what diseases I might get, or help me to remember my ATM pin code?
Absolutely. Science is whatever we want it to be.
So it must be true.
So he's talking about memes.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Memes.
Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist of some note, coined the term to describe the ideas that people create, that reproduce in much the same way genes do.
This came from his earlier ideas of a "selfish gene" to postulate that genes existed to propagate themselves, which helped to describe a lot of aspects of evolutionary development, from altruism to various kinds of suicidal behavior. In other words, it isn't the lifeform itself that is important in the reproductive cycle, so much as the information they pass along.
Ryan Fenton
This is a fairly accepted view among cultural anthropologists, who pay their bills by digging up ancient cultures and studying the progression of ideas, religions, and technologies. One guy, whose name I forget, but whose paper they made me read in Anthropology 101 made the comparison between hardware and software evolution. In more modern terms, Windows, Linux, OSX, etc, all run on the nearly ~30-year-old x86 CPU, but no one is going to say that computer programs now are where they were 30 years ago, just because the instruction set hasn't changed much.
It could be argued that we are devolving, since we now try to keep everybody live with modern medicine, and the "less genetically robust" are able to reproduce. Here's part of a not entirely unrelated discussion.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
And I thought he was smart?
Ten thousand years is only 400 twenty-five year generations. That's not a lot of time for any significant alteration in how our evolution works, especially considering the millions of years it took to get us this far in the first place. Perhaps Dr. Hawking should stick to theoretical physics.
Of course having said that, he's a father, grandfather, world famous author, and Nobel prize winning genius, despite being a wheelchair bound victim of neuromuscular dystrophy who can barely speak, whereas I am single, childless, and broke, despite being relatively healthy.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yes, but we must be willing to use that knowledge to improve human chances for long-term survival, not to counteract the evolution just to feel good. If we take the latter course of action, as it is trendy to do, we are in effect using our evolutionary advantage against ourselves.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
We are either the sum of our genes True False or Indeterminate. And the ideterminacy of Heisenberg is obvious in our DNA if you look at it a certain way.
Also, my slashdot ID is Phrackwulf
And that was supposed to be the symbol for "infinity" in the above equation but slashdot couldn't handle it!
ARRRGGGH!
[-)
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
Errrgghh.... Stephen Hawking said something that bothered me. I feel weird.....
Now, I am not a biologist, or even in the field. I have read The Selfish Gene, and consider myself up on evolutionary theory....
OK. There are several misconceptions about evolution that drive me nuts. Why? Because it's incredibly important to understand, as it helps explain so much about life on this planet. It hurts me that people accept the Law of Gravity, but poke at the evolutionary process....
Ok... Misconceptions.
1. Evolution has a goal.
It doesn't. We are not going to transcend or become ultimate beings. No. It just adapts critters to their environment. What's neat is that critters adapt to each other, together. Think about that, and ecosystems, and all that web of life stuff for a while and it's pretty neat.
2. Evolution is critter-centric.
We are simply carriers for genese. Evolution is gene centric. Most of your genes are useless to you. Stuff that is stupid at a critter level can make perfect sense at a gene level. Those little bastards are using us, and don't care about us at all, as long as we breed.
3. Survival of the fittest.
It's survival of the breediest, not necessarily of the fittest.
4. Evolution works through mutation.
Errrrgghh... I disagree with Stephen Hawking. Ok, mutation helps, but you know what? Evolution doesn't need it. Most mutations result in a f*kup, not something useful. Evolution just needs seperate populations and/or environments. Eventually populations diverge and become more suited to their environments.
I feel weird....
-Tony
Machines should stay machines. Just get smarter and be better able to be used by us. I can't wait to give my design for the best safety gunlock ever to Springfield Armory! Machines = Machines. Humans = Humans. Humans with too much machine equals broken doll with living soul! SCARY! Like Chuckie! Humanity should be able to decide on that and they will once everybody on earth has a laptop! World government! Also the U.S. government just made money worthless because we are a debtor with the biggest gun on earth so all we need is an economy based on money, credit and sex as work and women are liberated from being slaves to men and garden of eden results! Works for lesbians and homosexuals right now! Unless they become indeterminate! YAH!
HAHHAHAHHAHHAHAHHAHHA!
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
If someone is stupid enough to purchase a fake product for a flu that won't kill them in the first place, we can only assume this is for the greater good of the world. If they are a high risk factor (cancer, etc) then one would like to think they aren't on the Internet purchasing random drugs.
genius in a wheelchair versus moron with nine kids
ding ding ding round one!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I think you're trying to make a useful argument here, and on the surface you're trying to challenge the idea of racial intelligence. But your post is horribly misguided. I can't decide if you're flaming on purpose, or just plain ignorant, so I'll bite.
You're assuming that everything that has value is somehow linked to science and technology. You completely dismiss differences in cultural values as being somehow 'less' than the output of the Europeans. The IQ test has, built into it, the cultural bias of the white, european, while completely disregarding other values. You can bet that if the IQ test included intelligence and observations on how nature behaves outside of the constraints of 'the scientific method' the Europeans would have their asses handed to them by the native americans, the australian aboriginals, or any other culture that couldn't give two pig shits about European science or technology.
Walk, don't run, to your nearest library and check out "Guns, Germs and Steel". The author successfully challenges and completely and systematically demolishes the idea of some sort of inherent racial intelligence difference.
I think doctor Hawking is missing a step. Natural selection did not manage to produce humans without any external information. Humans are Mammals. Most (all?) Mammals tend to pass on behavioral traits in a non-genetic fashion from parents to offspring. So another major step in the evolutionary process would have been the appearance of animals whose mothers continue to care for them after birth, and impart higher-order influences on their offspring other than the contents of their genes.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I have no idea where morons like you come from. Sub-saharan Africa has the highest genetic diversity on the planet. Ponder that for a moment. It means that your notion of some sort of genetic "dumbness" is bunk.
But maybe that explains your own stupidity, fear and ignorance. I'd feel sorry for you, if you weren't such a loathesome pile of garbage. Now go find a rock, you useless piece of shit.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes.
Take that line a step further and you get transhumanism. We are no longer an isolated life form, but are inherently coupled with our tools. Tools that extend our minds around the planet. The Internet.
Books are cool, but they're pretty uni-directional. Wikipedia is cooler, updating our knowledge base in real time. Twitter is even faster; a brain extension so fast and light that it recently fomented revolution.
Yeah, we're past genes. What's more, we're rapidly passing static tools like rocks, newspapers, and books. Our minds are connected to each other in real-time, planet-wide. Our individual minds are gaining connectivity to the hive mind and extending our capabilities, much as our giant neocortex lifted us above the other animals.
See: Transhumanism
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Life isn't just about passing on your genes. ...anger, joy and sorrow...
We can leave behind much more than just DNA.
Through speech, music, literature and movies...
what we've seen, heard, felt
these are the things I will pass on.
That's what I live for.
We need to pass the torch,
and let our children read our messy and sad history by its light.
We have all the magic of the digital age to do that with.
The human race will probably come to an end some time,
and new species may rule over this planet.
Earth may not be forever,
but we still have the responsibility to leave what traces of life we can.
Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing.
... and use higher and higher levels of abstraction so to communicate and develope more and more refined technology that will someday allow us to advance beyond where we can see ourselves going today. To the point of enabling us to create a black hole for the purpose of its rebound effect of creating a galaxy so as to continue on the expansion of the universe for the insurance of the continuation of conscious life.... to repeat the process.
One of the things I have noticed about our evolution is that it seems to be related to population growth. As our population grows we face new problems that we must adapt to and this generally leads to advancements in social development. One recorded event is the story of the tower of Babylon and how the population growth and specialization grew to the point of a bicameral mind break down that lead to expansion and now so long after, we have come back together in population growth with further advancements.
Another interesting analogy or extension of this process is that of open source software where branching projects off to eventually bring the best of the branches back together.... and its all based on, in essence, Abstraction Physics of code development. Where the difference between human to human language and human to machine to human, is automation of human created abstractions...
Sure, he's a smart guy, but what are his qualifications? He's a physicist. He should leave the biology to the biologists. You don't hear Richard Dawkins speculating on the nature of black holes, do you?
Stephen Jay Gould told an anecdote about Richard Feynman excitedly announcing that he had discovered new principles of evolution. On inspection they turned out to be either well known findings or well known fallacies. Basically he was largely ignorant of the literature in the field. It says more about physicists than about evolution that he would deem himself qualified to wade into the fray with such minimal preparation.
It is not surprising that Stephen Hawking, another great physicist, similarly feels empowered to speculate about evolution without apparently having read Richard Dawkin's popular works. Others have mentioned memes, but Dawkin's notion of the extended phenotype might be even more pertinent. Hawkings appears to be taking the notion of the meme to the extreme of thinking that species evolution is now relying on actual gene analogues outside our physical corpus. Rather, our genes remain internal, but their somatic expression is external to ourselves.
If Hawking is saying our evolution is now dependent on our (for most people) public education system... we're fucked.
Pack your bags, it's Idiocracy time.
I am ready to become one with my robot overlords.
But computer programs aren't that different compared to 30 years ago.
;).
Just look at the operating systems:
Unix is pretty old. When you strip away the "transparent windows" and flashy glitz, the popular desktop computer O/Ses (Linux/OSX/Windows) are just as primitive as stuff 30 years ago.
And look up the "Mother of all Demos" - they had real time video conferencing, working together with a remote user over a WAN on the same document. So many innovative concepts, 40+ years ago.
The hardware available then naturally limited these pioneers, I'm sure they had plenty more they could think of but could not implement.
Linux - just Unix revisited.
Mac - The WIMP from PARC finally makes its way to the public (note the scrollbar was invented in 1977).
Windows 95/2K- ok the taskbar was nice (I think the Acorn had it first).
Windows XP - whoopee a new colour scheme, and some rearrangements, no big improvements
Windows Vista - I can't say this is a big improvement, in many ways the user experience is worse.
KDE/GNOME - basically the same old thing as "X" years ago, now with Wobbly Windows and stuff copied from Windows 95.
As for apps, the spreadsheet was a decent leap 30+ years ago. The browser? Go look at the Demo again and look up the history of hypertext. DTP? I dunno...
The Lisp fanatics will say stuff is just as primitive as it was 50 years ago, if not more primitive
Sir Stephen Hawking is a very smart man, and I have the utmost respect for him.
However, he should stick to the areas of his expertise and let biologists talk about evolution, because that's their area of expertise.
I wouldn't expect anyone to take Dr. Richard Dawkins' thoughts on quantum mechanics as definitive, and this is no different.
Soylens viridis homines es
Hawking is talking about cultural adaptation, which isn't a new concept. What's (relatively) new is the realization that human evolution has continued into historic times. So, Homo gets three bites at the apple: a chance to adapt via culture, enabling it to survive in environments that would otherwise select against it; adapt via thus far dormant or undesirable existing genetic characteristics; and adapt via continuing random mutation (most of which will continue to be undesirable for a given situation).
Luke, help me take this mask off
So you're saying that the Scientific Method is bunk? Sorry, but you just lost me with your argument there. The Scientific Method is the reason we have advanced technology now, and aren't just sitting around in grass huts or caves and suffering with a life expectancy of 30. The "all cultures are equal" line is bunch of liberal B.S. Some cultures are absolutley superior to others. Cultures which treat women as property, for instance, are inferior cultures.
Of course, this has nothing to do with race, but as a typical liberal, you had to inject race into it. Cultures developed differently, in different places, because of external factors as noted in Guns, Germs and Steel: geography, suitability for agriculture, etc. The people from these cultures are interchangeable: take some African-born infant and raise him in Western Europe with advanced medicine and European parents and he's going to turn out basically a dark-skinned European, with European culture and probably just as smart as an average European. The IQ test isn't biased; it's just showing that people raised in poor conditions, with poor nutrition (especially in childhood), possibly in war-torn countries, tend to not grow up to be as smart as children that grew up in better conditions, where were able to spend their childhood exercising their brains learning math, science, language, etc. instead of dodging bullets or swatting flies.
You mustn't allow yourself to be chained to fate, to be ruled by your genes. Human beings can choose the kind of life that they want to live. What's important is that you choose life... and then live.
I see where Hawking is coming from and I guess that he's right if you accept his new use of the word evolution, which is fine. But in the classic Darwinian sense I would argue that humans have STOPPED evolving. Our weak and stupid are allowed (rightfully i suppose) to live simply because we have created a civilization to support each other (in most countries). There is seldom any real natural selection in the traditional sense since the weak (whatever your definition of that might include) live on and most likely will breed along with all the strong. You could argue the Idiocracy point of view that we are "devolving" based on the same kind of argument but I wouldn't take it that far... yet.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be. -PF
Hawkins is right about the external store.... But the real change is when we began to code processes for computers. The interesting thing about books isn't that they exist, but that we can read something from 2000 years ago and continue processes defined by such texts.
The interesting thing about programs isn't that they exist external (like books), but that a machine reads something defined external to itself, perhaps from another country or time, and executes the processes defined by such tasks.
In the latter case, no HUMAN was required. We successfully built a mechanism by which processes can be defined and propagated without direct human involvement (other than supplying the computer, and putting it in touch with the software).
Suddenly I can have access to processes meticulously defined and tested by others without having to read a book or study or practice. I just load up a program and execute.
We have not only externalized the genetic store, as it were, but also the role of the organism in executing the processes.
That's the point of what cultural evolution is. The basics nuts and bolts haven't changed. But what you do with it has. 30 years ago, you didn't do your personal banking online, you didn't read news online, you didn't do your research online, and you couldn't get a quick sanity check on your calculations by looking up something on google or wikipedia. But after 30 years of purely software innovations running on the same hardware, the (cultural) mindset us geeks have when using a computer has adopted useful practices and rejected the dead ends, which is exactly what cultural evolution is.
I think this highly oversimplifies things.
Yes, many "mechanical" things about computer software hasn't changed that much in 30-40 years. The C language is 40 years old and still is the language of choice for many things. Most other languages are similarly imperative, if not downright derived from C (functional languages, while at least as old, never really caught on much). Operating systems still basically work the same way: they allow separate processes with isolated memory, separate users, restricted access to hardware by programs, preemptive multitasking, etc. Even GUIs aren't that new, since the WIMP interface was invented by PARC in the 70s.
What's new is all the high-level stuff done with it: having an internet that not only connects universities, but is accessible by everyone from their home or their mobile phone. Buying stuff on the internet, communicating with each other on Facebook, etc. The thing that's changed is who uses this technology, and what they use it for.
When I was in high school in 1989, the only people that had computers at home were either adults who needed them for work, or geeks like me. Most people didn't have computers, and thought anyone that spent their spare time on a computer instead of watching some crap on TV were crazy. Now, every knucklehead has a computer and knows how to use the internet. People spend all kinds of time screwing around on sites like MySpace and Facebook. So many people read the news online that newspapers are going out of business left and right. All kinds of people are using Craigslist to buy and sell stuff locally, or to meet each other.
As for apps, the spreadsheet was a decent leap 30+ years ago. The browser? Go look at the Demo again and look up the history of hypertext. DTP? I dunno...
Actually, browsers have evolved a lot in the last 15 years. They started out as just a way to display marked-up text, and now they're a way to not only show all kinds of data (text and video), but a way to interact with other systems. For instance, look at Google Maps, or other AJAX apps. That's not static data, it's basically a way of running an application remotely. IMO, the whole HTTP legacy of web browsers is holding them back. The entire way interactive web pages are written now seems like a giant kludge, when for many things it seems like it'd be simpler to just write an app in C++ or Java or whatever, run it on the remote server, and display it remotely on the user's computer.
This is a slippery road to finding God... or something.
Otherwise known as the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Human genetic evolution is Darwinian, but cultural (memetic) evolution is Lamarckan.
In the PBS version of Guns Germs and Steel, Diamond starts out with the aboriginals on Papua New Guinea. If you buy the latest claims of mitochondrial DNA mapping, these guys went straight from Africa heading east ~100k years ago and havent changed since. I mention the PBS version because the opening scenes of this segment show almost an entire village squatted down in a dirt field tending to individual tubers ( I forget what kind exactly, but it's supposedly the only stuff that can grow in the highlands). That scene should make you understand what selective forces the environment can have on the cultural evolution of different races. These guys settled in a place where in each and every one of them had to squat down in the dirt all day just to put enough food on the table. With a constraint like that, its no surprise that they been living in the same grass huts for a hundred millenia. There's simply no time to think, let alone advance.
So, he is comparing the natural (genetic) evolution with our intellectual (externally carried information) evolution.
Then, we could compare the stages:
speech <==> multi-cellular organisms
writing <==> central nervous system
printing <==> dry-land vertebrades
internet <==> ???
What's next?
factor 966971: 966971
Culturally, Europeans, Asians, Indians (and to some degree, Persians/Arabs) have provided humanity with many cultural advancements/improvements in art, philosophy, the 'humanities', and so on - arguably up to and largely inclusive of the earlier disciplines which led to current science and mathematic disciplines. Africa, on the other hand, has provided us with endemic disease, lecherous political problems, and pretty much nothing of positive consequence (other than solutions forged elsewhere for their problems).
"Guns, Germs, and Steel" is just one theory. It does not accurately (or even try to ) account for modern conditions, where the diseases are of domestic origin and non-trivial amounts of assistance have been given to make the endemic population successful.
IQ tests are designed to test reasoning and problem solving ability, first and foremost. Simple mathematical x + y = z type stuff, as well as other differentiation scenarios. It doesn't factor in "cultural values" or any such bullshit which has no sway on intelligence. They don't test "what does this person know?" they test "how well does this person figure?"
Asians have shown to have an intelligence as much over Europeans as Europeans have over Africans. I believe the "20 point" figure of the GP is mostly true. This does not, however, indicate a lack of humanity on the part of the Africans, though it might suggest a threshold for societal acceptance for more advanced social principles and behavior (as indicated by the historical record and status quo).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
So you're saying that the Scientific Method is bunk?
No, that's not what he said at all.
And we can evolve faster than ever thanks to that!
The Scientific Method is the reason we have advanced technology now, and aren't just sitting around in grass huts or caves and suffering with a life expectancy of 30.
Actually, the scientific method has done no such thing for us. Western society - and the principles/behaviors responsible for further advances - were forged long before the scientific method, in name or practice, was around.
The "scientific method" is largely a bunch of hokum. In practice (for quite a long time) it's been "I have a hypothesis, and I'm going to try and provide a setting scenario where x, y and z fit my hypothesis" has been the way in which it has advanced. Sometimes, it works, but most of the time it's a bunch of trial and error bullshit.
The vast majority of our advances in Western society have been due to sheer intelligence - IE, observations, and the keen insight (from whichever source it comes, inborn or otherwise) derived from existing knowledge, understanding, and insight into the world around us. Newton, Einstein, Socrates, and the myriads of philosopher-scientists who formed our societal underpinnings used this approach.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
OK, to show you my POV - here's what I consider a big change- when humans get virtual telepathy, telekinesis and augmented brains.
;). In contrast Douglas Engelbart and gang really stretched the limits of technology in the 1960s.
:).
This is already being crudely done with mobile phones (communications and buying of stuff via vending machines).
And the tech is already there for:
1) humans (and other creatures) to control stuff just by thinking.
2) adding extra senses (google for "seeing tongue")
3) Small cams, microphones etc
Once you can do it safely and reliably, add some clever software and you can use "thought macros"[1] to control stuff and communicate.
You could then take a picture/video of something, tell your e-brain to save it and associate it with a particular thought pattern so that when you rethink that particular pattern the object is retrieved, and you can also send it to someone else[2].
Then humans, computing and culture would enter a new stage of evolution...
As it is, you can show me all that fancy AJAX and I'll just go "meh". Yes all that is very nice and useful, but looking at what's possible with the current state of the art I'd call that "underperforming"
Then again maybe it was a waste of resources and we would still have what we have today even if he and his bunch didn't do all that? Oh well, I'm just getting rather impatient though
[1] I bet nobody's thought patterns are the same - so you'd have to "train" the program to recognize thought macros.
[2] Trouble of course is the **AA might have something to say about that and want to collect toll on each retrieval and share. I wouldn't like that particular evolutionary path.
An organism interacts with it's environment by slightly modifying it's behavior. That behavior alters the environment, sometimes radically. Sometimes a positive feedback loop is established between organism and environment that causes unusully rapid evolutionary change. Man is the most extreme case of niche construction . See Niche Construction for details.
Unaware of what year it was, Joe wandered the streets desperate for help. But the English language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, valleygirl, inner-city slang and various grunts. Joe was able to understand them, but when he spoke in an ordinary voice he sounded pompous and faggy to them.
u calin fiddy a bur den wite boy??
...have already weighed in on this subject. Stephan Hawking is a man who is not the world's greatest physicist, nor is he doing any work now that is in any way in the forefront. Mostly what he is is a motor neuron disease survivor. If he were to die tomorrow, it would be a tragedy, but not in the way that he had great work in the future. He would have had significant work towards unifying quantum mechanics and relativity theory, at least thirty years ago, a beautiful family, and a wonderful face on what is often a very hard disease. I long to kiss that cheek. But I don't deny that flesh has had its day in about it's fortieth year. Let the world's embraces be felt. But he is not a Homo Novis.
teleny, friend of cats.
Now there are some funny words, written in an alphabet which like almost all other alphabets in the world, are derived from one used in North Africa. We can trace western science and math to a point outside of the west, that North African civilization. They electroplated jewelry, made a steam engine, made our basic measurements of time, did quartic equations and decimal arithmetic. And at the other end of Africa, in the far south, there was another advanced civilization far older than any greek one, even though the europeans that discovered it thought it was some long forgotten european colony, since those Africans couldn't have made it.
This is not a new idea, and it's beatifully told here: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Medawar/technology-and-evolution/
I have noticed that Liberals will always make double-standard excuses for the most egregious behaviors of their favored cultural demographics, i.e. anyone who is not male and European, and come down with the most sanctimonious outrage on similar behaviors by those who are unfavored. Europeans arrive in the New World and displace indigenous populations? Miserable, terrible, horrible Europeans, how could you have done such a thing? Indigenous Aztec populations subject tens of thousand of war prisoners to grisly death to appease the Sun God? It's a unique and attractive form of cultural and religious expression that is equally valuable to any of the creations of the Old World - but you just wouldn't understand.
The human race has enjoyed an exponential growth phase, in which reproduction was so easy and common that natural selection hasn't been much involved or observable in humans. As our numbers increase to many billions and we destroy our environment, environmental pressure is going to kick natural selection into overdrive. Then we'll possibly see the human race evolve at a noticeable pace even within an average lifetime.
hawking must have believed the 2012 stuffs afterall.
"The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what mythos is."
-Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
While I agree with Stephen Hawkings that we are more than the sum of our genes, we currently use the term "Evolution" to mean "Darwin's Theory of Evolution", which is all about accidental genetic changes that happen to be beneficial. Lamarck's Theory of Evolution may be closer to Mr. Hawking's statements, if we must call it "evolution", but I do believe Mythos over Logos is a better way to describe the mechanism of change that we're seeing with humanity as a whole.
Or go on tour with Peter Frampton, either way. He oversimplifies how complicated evolution is and overestimates human knowledge of genetic engineering. ps I say this knowing that he is more brilliant than I, or anyone on this board, can ever hope to be.
The Lisp fanatics will say stuff is just as primitive as it was 50 years ago, if not more primitive ;).
One good CDADDDR deserves another!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Evolution created a situation in which the Germans, the French, and the English have an IQ that is signficantly greater than the IQ of the typical African
I can't tell if you are supporting the idea of racial intelligence or not, but if you are you should have a look at Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" which makes a pretty convincing case that different races succeeded more than others due to their geographical positioning, instead of due to their inherent abilities as many people assume.
First of all, not all computing is x86 based. Even now that's not true. 30 years ago it was just an insignificant platform.
But even if we just focused on that, so much has changed in 30 years. Comparing a 16bit 8088 that could only run in real mode with the latest core i7 which supports 32bit protected mode, an instruction set that has been revised a number of times (i386, i586, i686) along with specialised instructions additions (mmx, sse and their own successors), all of which are indispensable by now.
And as of a few years, even hardware assisted virtualisation and the jump to 64bits.
Sure, the principles are still the same, but there's more difference in 30 years of x86 evolution that between primates and modern humans
Don't conflate human offspring and inanimate books. A much better thought experiment for this question is:
If you had to choose one, would you rather raise a randomly assigned adopted child as your own, or have your biological child randomly assigned to adoptive parents. In neither case does the adopted child have any contact with its biological parents.
This is how you determine the value placed on genes or memes.
Ok, this is reaaaaaally oversimplified, and pulled out of my bum, but....
All populations have variance. Lets take height. If we lined everyone up and measured their heights and took frequency counts, we'd get a nice bell curve.
Lets take those folks and divide them evenly. We separate them in two environments. One favors tall folk. The other favors short folk... for some weird reason, i don't know, it's just an example.
Over time, just a little bit of favoring one way or the other will give some genes a competitive advantage. It doesn't have to be much... In Tall Land, if tall folk have 1% more kids than average folk.... give it a few hundred generations and voila! After a while the short and tall populations diverge by quite a bit.
My girlfriend is arguing the point with me. I love her very much. :D She says you need mutation to create the variance in the first place. I say it just happens through random noise. :D
-T
2. Undesirable traits are not usually identified as evolution. To evolve implies continued survival of the species, otherwise the species was unable to evolve. An undesirable trait that leads to extinction, such as human overpopulation or habitat destruction, is therefore not an example of evolution.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
I have no idea where morons like you come from. Sub-saharan Africa has the highest genetic diversity on the planet. Ponder that for a moment. It means that your notion of some sort of genetic "dumbness" is bunk.
There is more genetic diversity among chimpanzees than humans. That is not the reason chimps are considered less intelligent.
I just re-read the parent and realized he was making the same point. I thought he was trying to say that cancer and overpopulation were examples of evolution.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
Africa, on the other hand, has provided us with endemic disease, lecherous political problems, and pretty much nothing of positive consequence (other than solutions forged elsewhere for their problems).
And all this despite the huge amounts payed back as a compensation for slavery and exploitation.
Sheesh.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Hawkins may be brilliant but he is missing a core value of human beings.
Someone ALWAYS wants to rule us all.
We fight wars.
We have the bomb.
The arabs will soon have the bomb.
The arabs are crazy.
Soon we will all die.
When we are all back to living the 'green' life and there are only 10% of the people we have today.....how good do you think that store of knowledge is going to be?
How will people access it? After the first generation, how will they understand it? After ten generations is will be all lost and mostly myth.
I think I will trust to my dna in order to continue life in some way rather than the vague hope that someone one day will read the technical papers I have written.
Sorry, but I think we will blow ourselves back into the bronze age sometime soon (at least in evolutionary terms).
(Disclaimer: I am a scientist, so this isn't anecdotal)
Mod my parent up. This is -precisely- true. The idea that we test a hypothesis and refine it based on experimental outcomes is utter BS. In all but the most -basic- of processes, there simply is no way to account for all possible results of testing a system; this is further compounded in my field, where an 'in vitro' experiment may yield different results than one 'in vivo'. To make matters worse, those 'in vitro' experiments may in fact yield different results in /different cell types/, given all other conditions being precisely the same.
Without going into too much detail, the real nature of science is that we already have a fairly good idea of what we -want- to happen before we begin testing. I may have a vague theory about the experiments will come out, but more often than not we end up writing the theory to fit the facts around the time the data is published, in such a way that it fits the data we've collected, even though that final theory may not have any relation to the initial expectations.
Some of this is also attributable to the funding system (at least in the US). Submission of a grant (money to do experiments) requires that you already have (preliminary) information, and a fairly tight and detailed set of theories to explain how what you propose to do will result in a conclusion, as well as what those conclusions will be. Essentially, you need to present some data in order to get funding to obtain data. Give too much preliminary research, and you won't have enough theory and interesting suggestions to get funding, but if you don't have enough research done (how you do this without money is a nice conundrum), you won't get funding.
In practice, this often means researchers with no active funding will dust off old unpublished work, and write theories around it, in order to talk the NIH into paying out money so real work can get done (since once you're funded, you can really do whatever research you want -- especially if we're not talking about a renewable grant).
So it's really a messed up system all around, but the scientific method as you know it has virtually no role in it either way.
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
Because the more we are, the less does any single person need to know, to survive and successfully reproduce.
Also we have two types of reproduction now: The genetic one. And the reproduction of thoughts and ideas.
So you can leave children in this world. But you can also leave a philosophy/mindset that changed people. (Or both.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Wow, did you even read the post he was replying to? The original poster made an argument that Africans are stupider than every other race. The post you replied to, was explaining that race has nothing to do with intelligence. And then for some reason you accused him of bringing race into it, when he clearly did not.
Everyone, please try to understand the context of a post before replying to it. It will make the conversation go so much nicer.
Qxe4
Studies on evolution is a field which is very less explored. There haven't been many substantial additions to Darwin's first theory of evolution. I think this field will attract more scientists and researches, than nanotechnology or biotechnology would.
Many of us believe that evolution takes thousands of years, to change an organism. But, in contrast, I read an article on dailygalaxy.com in which a lizard-like animal evolved in a period of 36 years, after it was relocated to a new neighboring island. It has its digestive system changed with new features, a larger head and a completely new diet.
Moreover, the way the human population is increasing, the most basic concept of Darwin's theory-the Survival of the Fittest-collapses miserably.
Many biologists will now rethink and possibly edit Darwin's theory to involve human evolution into it, which will have many side-effects, including a "see-I-told-you" kind of reaction from the Church.
Moreover, I think evolution is taking the path it was destined to take.
From the beginning, life-forms always tended to unite or team-up with the output being a more advanced organism. The mitochondria united with the cell, many cells united to form tissues, organs, organisms. This may look like the biological hierarchy of an organism, but if you look at it closely it is the path of evolution.
Now, we are at the organism stage. The next stage would be the stage in which many organisms unite to form one system composed of organisms. Doesn't that system of organism fit the definition of civilization?
So, in theory the next step in evolution would be the development of civilization, if the planet lasts.
There's a large diversity among fish. But none of them are good at climbing trees.
Diversity != infinite range or variety.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hawking wrote the same book twice. In it he first said that all old philosophies were null and void because they did not include quantum mechanics. In the second book he omitted this part and then put in a new ending based on his old philosophy ( positivism I believe ).
That's because the real power of the scientific method is enshrined in the motto of the Royal Society (UK Academy of Science): "On the Words of No Man." Before science was 'invented', people relied on authorities, like Aristotle, or the Bible, for knowledge. After the advent of science, people said, "No longer will we believe something to be true just because someone said it. We want to be able to verify it ourselves." This is the ideal of science, and it is extremely powerful.
Later on, with the rise of positivism and later philosophers, the definition of science got narrowed too much, and became a bit detached from reality, as you have pointed out. I wish more people would realize it, as you have, because there have been way too many 'appeal to authority' fallacies going around on slashdot.
Qxe4
What human evolution means and how it interacts with culture is an active field of research and has been so for a long time. There are mathematical models, empirical observations, and long scientific debates. It's so typical of physicists to ignore all that and jump in with the kind of observations that a smart lay reader of popular science books would make. Hawking should stick to physics, where he actually is an expert.
We haven't entered a new stage of evolution, we have entered a stage of devolution. The incessant focus on all (human) life being precious has severely impacted our long term prospects by continuously contaminating the collective gene pool for instance.
I for one welcome our new human overlords.
Now, every knucklehead has a computer and knows how to install malware
There, thats fixed it for you!.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
30 years ago it was a very poor ripoff of the PDP11, which was already nearly 10 years old, and the biggest thing in computing.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
What do you think is going on now ? You CAN write your app in whatever language will run on the server. HTTP is merely the popular protocol that's used to transmit data back and forth. The clue is in its name. It is tolerant of delays and dropouts (due to its underlying transport mechanism) and has the concept of sessions. Apache isn't written in HTTP, it's C. MySQL is written in C and C++. Java is Java. What do you suggest instead ? A networked X session ? HDMI over continental distances ? RDP ?
Web browsers are web browsers, not dedicated to your proprietary application. So get on with it and write your server app. But write a client too, don't try to shoehorn an application meant for interpreting and displaying text into being your perfect client. Google Earth is a client server app, that seems to work just fine. There are a myriad of FPS games that work just fine too. Just let everybody else know what port you'll be using for your dedicated app, and be prepared for a fight if something else is already using it. There aren't unlimited ports, there are a lot, but there was a big IP space when IPv4 started. Look how that's turning out. So you would be sensible to use an existing protocol for transporting your data. This has nothing to do with what language your client server app is written in.
Seriously, I love his black hole theory as much as any other nerd, but from the article, it sounds like he doesn't even know what he's talking about re: evolution and natural selection. Evolution is differential reproductive success, through the functioning of natural selection. Books aren't genes aren't attached to individuals and transmitted only to offspring - otherwise the idea of school would be a lot more fun.
It's not useful information that is added, but useful information added and passed down to a larger number of offspring than another representative but less useful bit of information. Once you've had your last child, you're out of the pool. How do books work into that scenario?
For example, say a child was born in a library with no humans around, and its mother dies in childbirth. Nothing in the library but books and food. That child could grow up and die and it would never have necessarily learned to read. Real evolution isn't that easy to derail. Unless he's saying that humans transmitting information to successive generations in order to boost their survival skills is evolution. In which case, he should be mindful that John Tooby doesn't write books about black holes, and that his contribution is not neccessary or helpful.
I also liked how he's quoted as saying that in the 18th century, there was a man reported to have read all existing books. Is there an entry for that on snopes.com? Because I call shenanigans. That's completely ridiculous. There was a lot of books in the 18th century, and the 17th, too. Could I request that we add the 'getoffmylawn' tag to this story?
He said nothing of the sort, he said knowing math and science does not make you more intelligent, it makes you more knowledgeable, theres quite a bit of difference there.
The IQ test does not, NOT, measure pure intelligence, it assumes that you have working knowledge of language and math.
So, in short, intelligence has nothing to do with specific types of knowledge, it has to do with how well you can reason and think and observe.
Let me get this straight .... you claim to be a scientist ... and then claim that the scientific method is junk?
Awesome. That's like your dentist saying "you know, I really have no idea what I'm doing here ... but let me go get my pliers".
That said, I would expect though I haven't tested it or read much research on the subject, that primitive cultures tend to have a wider range of intelligence, with more relatively unintelligent people. There simply isn't as much selection going on, if all you have to do all day is feed worms and eat them it doesn't matter how smart you are. That is another thing argued in the Outliers book: you don't have to be the smartest just smart enough.
An example of this was University of Michigan. Because of affirmative action and a goal of 10% entrance of minorities the entrance requirement for African Americans into their law school was much lower than that for white students. So the group of white students were on average smarter/better students going into the program as the miniorities. What effect did that have on their ability to complete their studies and get similar quality jobs as the whites? None. No noticeable difference in job success. They were smart enough for what they wanted to do. Similar to nobel prize winning scientists, they tend to be smart but they also come from a variety of good undergraduate schools (again good enough, doesn't have to be the best), and aren't necessarily the smartest of their peers, they are just really really good at the thing they do (or lucky).
"Look at Germany, France, or Great Britain"
Yes, I look at them and I see that their people were barbarians for thousands of years while the African nation of Egypt (and the Asian nation of China, let alone the Middle-eastern nations of Sumeria/Babylonia/etc) thrived and prospered, and produced great wonders of invention and technology and construction.
In short by your own argument, Europe is proven to be far genetically inferior to Africa.
the modern ability to manage and/or cure a number of life-threatening conditions is greatly impacting the evolution of our species as well. people who would never have made it to adulthood a century ago are now passing on their crappy genes to their kids.
If Hawking is saying our evolution is now dependent on our (for most people) public education system... we're fucked.
Pack your bags, it's Idiocracy time.
That movie was missing the Morlocks. All we ever saw were the Eloi.
You can't take the sky from me...
And you, sir, have just outed yourself.
When people stopped competing on who could keep eating enough for survival and as social interaction between people increased, the evolutionary battle moved from being physically based to one based on knowledge.
Though this is really a different way of thinking about evolution, there are a lot of parallels I can think of between classic evolution and a knowledge based evolution.
I'd say that as knowledge became more important this evolutionary race moved from just being about independent people a common pool of knowledge grew, almost as an ant hive has a swarm life of it's own, all building for a common purpose, the advancement of that race as a common goal.
Just my 2 cents, as I said I've never really considered this before so I'm only just getting my head round it
Sounds like a wonky way of noticing that culture matters in a techno-barbaric age.
The answer only tells you if you've had a child yet. No parent, without a serious psychological problem, can look at his or her child and think that there is any higher calling on Gods earth, nor believe for a moment that anything would be worth trading that child's existence for.
There are substantial genetic differences between different ethnic groups around the world.
We all see obvious differences in appearance and physique. From pygmies of ~1.5m average, to the Dinaric Alps of former Yugoslavia with 1.86m average. This is obviously nature not nurture.
West Africans are without doubt the most powerful people in the world, with high natural levels of fast-twitch muscle fiber, only 1 out of 68 people to have gone faster than 10s over 100m is of non west-African descent.
So why is it ok to acknowledge that differences in physical attributes are determined by genes, and yet when it comes to another part of the body (the brain) also deriving it's construction and operational features from genes it is anethema to accept that there could be any differences determined by ethnic heritage? You may be squeamish about it but that particular lump of meat is just as subject to evolutionary processes as any other part of our bodies.
Take for example the ashkenazik jews. As a result of the harsh rules and treatment they have been subjected to as a result of the resentment and antipathy arising from their exclusionary practices they have been subjected to evolutionary pressures that have selected for hard working and intelligent people, . As a result they have average intelligence that is up to one standard deviation higher than the general european population. Due to the the long-tails of the bell curve those differences show up as massive over-representation at the highest level of attainment as is pretty obvious to everyone. On the down side they are also subject to higher incidence of certain genetic diseases like tay sachs etc.
It has been demonstrated in so many ways in so many arenas that differences in aptitudes between populations and genders do exist, you don't even need to use IQ tests, you can look at all areas of achievement and with statistical analyses find differences between the average performance of different ethnic populations. Take a look at http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/ for worked examples
And so while the parent may not have it quite right in terms of his specific examples there are genuinely large differences between ethnic groups in terms of average aptitudes/abilities in all areas of human activity that can be rigorously measured. The socialist ideal of the improvability of man, nurture over nature has been thoroughly disproved, it is almost all down to the great gene lottery - just as most people always thought from observing their classmates. Knowledge and acceptance of this may help us deal with the social consequences and hopefully help us to improve outcomes for everyone.
There may be a quote from pre-Abrams Star Trek in here ("Code of Honor", TNG perhaps).
Hell, its only karma. What has Africa given to civilization, and I am not speaking of the Egyptians either. Name one advancement to the human race, technological or even socially that came from Africans, in Africa, without western education. Lol, what I thought. Not to say Africans are inherently stupider than other races, but they sure did not develop any type of technology or even culture that was of note. Never have figured out why either. Most Africans I know; Nigerian and Gold Coat mostly; are intelligent, speak several languages and are hard workers capable of improvising and problem solving. Wonder if it a environmental or cultural thing that prevented them from advancing technologically like every other race did?
The knuckleheads know there is an internet, and they know there is porn available on said internet, but it is a stretch to say that they know how to use the internet.
They know how to clicky-clicky blue e.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Wittgenstein said: That the world is, is the mysterious.
In other words, why is there anything rather than nothing at all? That's the definition of God.
It's good to see science people accepting the Mystery again, thinking you have all the answers was the mistake of the religion people. It's all just this big Mystery that somebody set up for us.
Some cultures are absolutley superior to others. Cultures which treat women as property, for instance, are inferior cultures.
So what you are saying is that specialization, and acknowledgement of the fact that women differ from men is inferior to the Western ideal that "all men are created equal" ("men" including women, of course) and just letting everyone do everything with no regard to specific gender-related (or race-related, or handicap-related) differences?
Just because a culture is different than yours does not made it inferior. I would argue that Western culture, women's rights and all, is inferior to Eastern culture in that Western culture idolizes drug abuse, pornography, violent crime, and ignorance. Try to listen to some popular music with an objective standpoint, or popular movies, and see exactly what Western culture is.
Thank for reading to the sig. You may stop reading now. It is safe. There is no more content. Why are you still reading?
What Hawking may be referring to is similar to the ideas found in the series and the first movie. Hopefully someone can summarize those ideas in the following posts for those pathetic souls, on Slashdot, who are not acquainted with the stories.
If I understand it correctly, average life expectancy was probably closer to 20 in the stone age(for example). Though quite how that figure was reached I'm not sure. Anyway it's very important to clarify though that it's average life expectancy we're talking about here. It was low mainly because babies tended to have a high mortality rate, due to being eaten or whatever. People weren't sitting around the cave dying of old age at 30. If anything it's only in relatively recent years that we're living as long as our ancestors did. Our advanced culture has along with all the good things (like /.) given us disease, war, obesity, plenty of things to shave years off our lives.
Thanks, you expanded my knowledge of computing history with this post.
First of all "define substantial".
Secndly, the molecular data is clear. Every single population outside of sub-Saharan Africa is far more closely related than a number of populations in sub-Saharan Africa.
I'm afraid to justify your position, you're just using terms so loosely as to be meaningless.
Ethnicity is not genetic.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Cultures which treat women as property, for instance, are inferior cultures.
How does this have ANYTHING to do with the scientific method?
Christ, if we were fighting the Russians instead of the Mid-East you'd be saying cultures that prefer vodka are SO backward.
"It's good to see science people accepting the Mystery again, thinking you have all the answers was the mistake of the religion people. It's all just this big Mystery that somebody set up for us"
..
Nothing in the quoted article does it have Hawking refer to mysterification, rather he address well under process in Evolution. There is nothing mysterious about passing on information through human culture, it's called a viral meme
"I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race"
Japanese IQ test results actually tend to be quite a bit above European/American IQ test results. Why? Because of their culture, which promotes education and knowledge. This however does not mean that the Japanese are some sort of "master race". There is no such thing. IQ tests do not even measure "pure" intelligence - they measure intelligence through methods requiring *knowledge* (of maths etc), which is not the same as intelligence.
Race has nothing to do with intelligence. I can take some African kid, raise him in America by American standards and he will be just as "smart" as your typical American - he will be an American with dark skin and relatives on another continent.
Humans do not differ a lot by race. Sure, race defines your appearance and it can also have a mild impact on health related issues, but it does not influence your intelligence or ability to reason. Humans aren't really divided by race a lot - they are divided by culture. And yes, there are superior and inferior cultures (come on - a culture that treats women as inferior beings is inferior to cultures that treat women equal to men, period) - but that is no reason to judge people simply because of their heritage, which is just foolish. Else, you could just as well say that all Europeans are in favor of gun control and nanny states, all Americans are Christian fundamentalists, all French and Japanese are racist etc which is just as much BS as claiming that all Africans have inferior intelligence.
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
I think you guys are having a very productive discussion right here.
I'll toss in something that I occasionally think about, that's related to what both of you are saying: the design of the operating systems in common use for personal computers. The kernels for Linux, OS X and Windows XP are all basically server technology that has been pressed to serve for desktop use. For example, all of them have been designed to maximize system throughput with techniques that increase end-user latency, like swap.
For example, the OS X Dock has a feature that magnifies the size of the icons as you mouse over them. However, when an OS X system faces memory pressure, the kernel will swap out pages that are in use by the Dock. When this happens, you get a pause of a few seconds between mousing over an icon and the computer magnifying it. The Dock is an element that is always present in the OS X user interface, but the kernel apparently doesn't know about that, and treats it as just another application that can be paged out to speed up something else. And more simply, switching to an application that's been unused for a while is often not just slow, but sluggish; it's not that the application takes a long time initially to perform the commands, it's that the application takes a long time to even respond to user input in the most basic ways.
An OS designed from scratch for personal computing would look quite different from what we have now. There would be a lot more emphasis on real-time response to user input. That's not what we've gotten. What we've gotten is, at best, hacks on top of timesharing server operating system kernels to make them less bad at interacting with the user.
Are you adequate?
Perhaps he's wrong to say that we'd still be sitting around in caves, but technology has still advanced tremedously in the last few hundred years since "the scientific method", so it's not true to say that all this progress happened "long before the scientific practice".
I'd argue that many of the scientific advances before then were still the scientific method in practice, it's just that the process wasn't formalised (this wasn't a sudden thing after all - the method was formalised over a period of hundreds of years and is very much a part of scientific progress itself - e.g., see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_scientific_method ).
The vast majority of our advances in Western society have been due to sheer intelligence - IE, observations
And? Using intelligence to form a hypothesis from observations is the first stage of the scientific method.
Einstein
Einstein fits perfectly with the scientific method. Both relativity and the photoelectric effect came from trying to solve known problems, based on observations that had been made. His theories were then tested (I suppose you could argue that in some sense, testing wasn't required, in that it was already proven from the observed data - I'm reminded of Einstein's reply of "Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord", when asked what if the experiment failed to support relativity. But we cannot always be so sure).
Newton similarly followed the scientific method when he came up with laws of motion, and a theory of gravitation, to explain observed facts. The progress he made was a fundamental part of the scientific method. His dabbling on alchemy and the occult was not so scientific, however - yet would you suggest that these somehow contributed to science and technology?
Socrates was a philosopher - but he himself came up with the Socratic Method, which I would argue is the sort of rational approach that later lead to methods such as the scientific method.
I think you are misunderstanding what the scientific method is. It's not "let's tinker around randomly and hope we find something through trial and error" as you imply - it's precisely the application of intelligence to observation that you describe, followed up with testing to make sure we are right. Hypotheses are not randomly made up, they must still fit the observed data, and theories must provide a model to explain the observed data.
What method do you advocate in place of the scientific method?
Yea, but try to explain their inferiority to them and then the police come and lock you up...
go figure
No, what you've noticed is that some people, some times, exhibit that double standard in judgement. Then you just arbitrarily glossed a gigantic generalisation over some nebulous ill-defined boogeyman you've labelled "Liberals".
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
It's a kludge because applications are written to seem like they are based on a constant connection, when in reality, because of HTTP, the connection is set up and broken quite often relative to how long the application is used.
There are numerous security problems with this model, in addition to the overhead associated with guaranteeing the server "remembers" the client between connections.
The browser and JavaScript and HTML/XML documents are quite close to being a really good application platform, but a stateful, connection-oriented protocol is what you want for the information transfer between a dynamic client and server, not HTTP.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
I know this is a bit offtopic to this article, but there is a dianetics advert on slashdot! What the hell is going on guys!?!? Get rid of it!
After the science of genetics has been developed to the point where DNA sequencing has become almost trivial and now we're able to do some degree of slicing, dicing, and splicing such that it has become an industry (genetic engineering), I'd say it's safe to say that evolution is going to become a whole new ballgame. No longer an entirely natural process. And this change is not just for humanity, but for any species closely associated with us, or even those that are particularly interesting such that they may be considered useful.
Ethics and laws aren't much to stop this either, the proliferation of the knowledge and technology means jurisdictions and social norms can be skirted just by virtue of relocating. I'm not so sure of a full blown Isle of Dr. Moreau situation, but it's not completely outside the realm of possibility anymore.
Try to listen to some popular music with an objective standpoint, or popular movies, and see exactly what Western culture is.
If you think popular* media represents western culture, you haven't spent a lot of time in western society. Do Japanese anime and sushi encapsulate Japanese culture?
*heavily marketed, because people wouldn't care for it otherwise
No, he said that due to various reasons most scientists aren't able to use the scientific method in their day to day work.
it's in my head
So what happens when someone with very different ethical standards shows up in your country demanding special accommodations for their culture? Or when they get into a war with you?
The IQ test has, built into it, the cultural bias of the white, european, while completely disregarding other values.
Yes, that explains why Jews and East Asians do so horrifically on it.
in my LSD and Weed smoking days, no one interviewed me, and I certainly had no magazines or authors contacting me for my "evolutionary knowledge"
meh
I am totally "mesmerized" (! can't believe I wrote that word, but I wanted the most grand and elegant expression for - fucking unbelievable !!!!X@&%$!@-+_@#()*#@@) that someone who is supposed to be as smart as Hawking and he believes in CCCRRRRAAAAPPPP like evolution of the human race (yes us) from an elementary cell !!!!!!! But then I come to think about it, Indians are great in math, hydraulics, science and programming, and yet they believe that their destinies and fortune are controlled by cows ! And ancient Egyptians also believed that they would be judged in the after-world by a half-man half-hawk (or something to that effect) and they worshiped a bundle of creatures that can surpass anybody's imagination : hawks, rhinos, birds, cats, frogs, coyotes, alligators .... and again they were a smart civilization - they built Pyramids and other stuff.
Its like farting out loud in a fully dressed formal consulate dinner in the presence of 200 people and not even being bothered of what people would think ...
The final simple / logical / un-debatable fact is that GOD created us, and there is ONLY ONE GOD. Like it or not, its THE FACT.
....back in the 80s when Sagan said it.
When you strip away the "transparent windows" and flashy glitz, the popular desktop computer O/Ses (Linux/OSX/Windows) are just as primitive as stuff 30 years ago.
So when you strip away all the things OS developers have been working on for the past 30 years, they're just as primitive as 30 year old OS's? You don't say!
Perhaps we could call the GUI improvements "memes" compared to the "Darwinian" aspects under the hood, but the whole point of the article is to convey the notion that memes have become as influential as Darwinian DNA. Can't think of a better example.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Do I sum you up correctly by saying that what is intelligent varies with circumstance?
I have no source, but I think it has been shown that when humans select for mating, a decently intelligent partner is one of the most important criteria, which is why the IQ gets higher and higher with every generation.
But would you not say that good knowledge of language and math helps a person to develop his intelligence towards its optimum (assuming there is any such thing)? I'd consider both language and math kinds of knowledge management, making thinking processes â" if they are essentially non-verbal and non-mathematical â" more efficient. And is not that what intelligence IS; thinking efficiently?
The article describes an evolutionary "external transmission phase" referring specifically to the propagation of information, but doesn't mention the Internet as a driving force? If there's anything that has caused a recent escalation in this scheme it's gotta be the Web. The article only refers specifically to books! Meanwhile Facebook has to have changed human behavior more than any single book published in the last 50 years.
No doubt Dr. Hawking has not ignored the Internet in his deliberations, but it's strangely ironic for an online article to overlook its influence in this matter.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
When comparing cultures, you must compare on the same level. That is, you cannot put the philosophers of the East against the drug abusers of the West (or vice versa). Popular culture against popular, high culture against high culture. If you do it that way, it will mostly come down to your personal preferences, at least if you compare the higher expressions. Besides, cultures are not monolithic and interact and intersect in a multitude of ways.
The brain is different from legs in that it can remap itself to do other stuff. A pianist has a greater area of the brain devoted to his hands, and that is not due to some genetic factor, it's because the brain is malleable. When he stops practicing, this area shrinks. So one really cannot reason in precisely the same way when it comes to the brain cells as one can do with muscle-fiber.
I did not check "Post Anonymously"?
Um. Dude, I've seen a lot of flame bait here but that takes the cake. Rather than modding, I'm gonna comment. My white German and Irish arse is gonna kick yer lame thing off this North-American-owned website. Now shut right the hell up and deal.
C|N>K
WTF does Hawking know about evolution anyway, he is a physicist. He has no scientific credibility in this area, and is trying to act the big man (ironically) because of his fame, exploiting the man on the street who thinks he is an expert on everything. Language is just behaviour, as is the recording of information. Evolution does not work in 'phases'. What he is talking about is memetic replication, which has nothing to do with genetic replication and evolution. He is not saying anything new anyway. Dawkins blah.
Stop pushing new areas of evolution when the old areas have not been factually and clearly identified.
There are large gaps of evolution that have yet to be found before and after the prehistoric and other areas of time. Fossels do not evolutionary fact make.
It doesn't. It was in retort to the parent poster's assertion that basically all cultures are equal, which is a bunch of liberal BS. In the same post, he called the Scientific Method bunk, and I also replied to that.
No, the Russians (during the Cold War) were NOT backward. Misguided, perhaps, and pretty screwed up with that Communism stuff that kept them from developing any great art, music, or literature like that had before the Bolshevik Revolution, but they certain could do science and technology decently well during that time.
Every culture has its advantages and disadvantages. But to say they're somehow equal or can't be compared is garbage. Some cultures really are inferior. Most middle eastern cultures fall into this category, with their disgusting treatment of women, as do the cultures of places like Somalia, Sudan, etc. Western culture certainly isn't infallible, either: it's produced a lot of lazy people who aren't interested in doing anything useful and want to be overpaid managers and corporate executives doing nothing but sitting in meetings all day rather than doing real work, which they think they can farm out to other countries while they still get paid for just flapping their lips all day, and this is going to come back and bite western culture in a big way.
This is 2009. Stephen's comments were made in 2007, don't you know? This is pretty old news.
So you're saying that the Scientific Method is bunk? Sorry, but you just lost me with your argument there. The Scientific Method is the reason we have advanced technology now, and aren't just sitting around in grass huts or caves and suffering with a life expectancy of 30. The "all cultures are equal" line is bunch of liberal B.S. Some cultures are absolutley superior to others. Cultures which treat women as property, for instance, are inferior cultures.
Of course, this has nothing to do with race, but as a typical liberal, you had to inject race into it. Cultures developed differently, in different places, because of external factors as noted in Guns, Germs and Steel: geography, suitability for agriculture, etc. The people from these cultures are interchangeable: take some African-born infant and raise him in Western Europe with advanced medicine and European parents and he's going to turn out basically a dark-skinned European, with European culture and probably just as smart as an average European. The IQ test isn't biased; it's just showing that people raised in poor conditions, with poor nutrition (especially in childhood), possibly in war-torn countries, tend to not grow up to be as smart as children that grew up in better conditions, where were able to spend their childhood exercising their brains learning math, science, language, etc. instead of dodging bullets or swatting flies.
I saw this and I would just like to say I am a pakistani so yes I am working class, however I go to a good school. The ones in my town are absolutely no good and I wouldnt dare go to them. I go to a school 20 mins away from my house. My IQ is good-Sets 1s and 2's for everything and expected B's for everything. (well except PE and DT graphics). I dont want to boast, but just proving you wrong. I have also been told that my father was one of the more clever ones in school when he lived in Pakistan. Also 30 years ago, Pakistan was in a much worse state than it is now and my dad had a high IQ. This throws your theory straight out of the window.
Oh and the media is responsible for all the women as property thing. Just like in other countries, they view the US as cowards which is wrong also. In lots of Pakistani/Arabian families the women are the ones making the decisions not the men
Scientific method didn't enable us to create technology, we were creating technology before the scientific method existed.
Stop warshiping science as if it were a god, and stop thinking you're so superior.
You aren't even following scientific method in your post. saying 'Cultures which treat women as property, for instance, are inferior cultures.' is purely an opinion, one for which you haven't provided any evidence to back it up at all, let alone any evidence that clearly illustrates your point, which you simply don't have since theres never been a controlled experiment to confirm the hypothesis either way.
You have an opinion, nothing more, certainly not a fact by any standard.
Scientific method is not bunk, but retards like yourself who use it in an argument but don't even understand it make the common person tend to think of it as bunk because as a general rule, the people who spout it generally don't know what the fuck they are talking about, you for example.
Do I think women should be owned? No, but that is my opinion, and there is absolutely no evidence to suggest its better, historically speaking, I think owning my wife would make it far easier for me to get laid.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Huh? Disease and war existed long before our advanced culture came about, and they exist in other cultures too. Most of today's inferior cultures are plagued by war: the middle east, most of Africa, etc. European history before the Renaissance is filled with war, and lots of disease too (remember the Bubonic Plague?). Native American tribes were constantly at war with each other before the Europeans came along to oppress them.
Yes, everyone knows (or should know by now) that a low life expectancy doesn't mean that everyone suddenly died of old age at 30. It's an average, made low by things like infant mortality (very common in pre-modern culture without today's medicine), disease, and war. But I'd rather be part of an advanced culture, where my chances of dying before old age are remote, rather than some primitive culture where my chances of dying before old age are > 50%. Sure, some people in primitive cultures live to be 85, but many more are the unlucky ones who die before they even reach 1 year old.
Sorry, I replied to that rather quickly and didn't read the parent post closely enough, so my accusation there was unfounded. But the rest of my post stands.
However, the parent was right that Africans are basically pretty stupid on average; it can be seen in their cultures. My argument is that it's not their genetics that are at fault, it's their upbringing and environment. It's the classic "nature vs. nurture" argument, and I fall firmly on the side of nurture. Raising children in some disease-ridden war-torn African country with insufficient nutrition and zero education is not a recipe for making intelligent adults. It doesn't matter what race they are.
But it's not just Africans; there's lots of other places in the world full of stupid people, producing little to nothing of value. We even have many places like that here in the USA, such as Mississippi, Louisiana, and also Wasilla, Alaska.
You're not making the point you think you are. Humanity still uses fire and the wheel, still makes furniture out of wood and prints books on paper, and still communicates through speaking. Truly new ways of doing things only come around occasionally, in the meantime existing ideas are improved upon incrementally.
Way, too, many, commas.
Sorry, I know not everybody cares, but some of us find it harder to read when we're distracted by spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. It's sort of like hearing sour notes in music.
Feel free to ignore me. I'm just venting.
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
The point Hawking's making is interesting, and potentially relevant, but it's hardly a novel claim. What he's talking about it often called "cultural evolution", and people have been talking about it for a while now, starting(?) with Cavalli-Sforza et al back in the 80s. It's regained momentum with the recent (~ last decade) resurgence of interest in the evolution of language (cf. papers by Simon Kirby, Henry Brighton & friends in the 2006 PNAS).
Also, it seems doubtful to me that we're literally no longer evolving in the "traditional" sense of the word. Sure, we're doing things to artificially prolong life and enhance reproductive success, but that doesn't really change the fact that natural and sexual selection are still at work.
Disclaimer: I am NOT a biologist. I AM a linguist.
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. -- Wernher von Braun
and I am not speaking of the Egyptians either
Translated: "Not counting their most fundamental and most famous contributions (after fire, which would be a pre-racial contribution), what has Africa given to civilization". Those weren't all Egyptian originals, either: in many cases, that was the just the last stop of the technology diffusing across Africa before crossing the Mediterranean I'm guessing that a lot of other African contributions "count" as Greek contributions. It's convenient to assign all the developments to Egypt, since that's where it met European civilization, and then after having done that, decide that Egypt doesn't count as Africa, maybe because of some Greek intermarriage in the Pharoah line.
I also think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Population_figures is relevant. Just statistically, you'd expect most technological achievements to come from Asia, and thenuntil very, very recently, Europe was the next. In reality, we don't usually double-count inventions that already happened in another culture unless they were European inventions that already existed in isolationist ancient China (where, to be fair, they weren't doing any non-Chinese civilization much good), so once a region already has a technological/industrial advantage it's more likely that what inventions it does produce, are going to "count".
You actually do NOT know what you are talking about. Your girlfriend is correct. Random noise, variance, or whatever you want to call it is created through mutation. Please acquire a brain somehow.
The "all cultures are equal" line is bunch of liberal B.S. Some cultures are absolutley superior to others. Cultures which treat women as property, for instance, are inferior cultures.
Treating women, or any other group, as property would get a big old "inferiority" label from many (including myself). Except it's a crude oversimplification, and thus not scientific, to judge a whole culture by one practice, especially one not shared by every person in the culture. The US has a huge gap in wealth for the top 5% versus the bottom 95%, does this 2 class wage slavery make the whole culture inferior, or just that part? Compared to (nearly?) all other countries combined, the US puts more money into offensive weapons and uses them; does that make the whole culture inferior? Monkey and dog packs have pecking orders, does that make them inferior to swan pairings? To get back on topic, can we pick and choose the best parts from historical records, and shy away from the worst; much like species mutations that live longer or die early based on their environment?
... because of external factors as noted in Guns, Germs and Steel: geography, suitability for agriculture, etc.
Guns, Germs, and Steel is an interesting premise, but like you said it ignores oil, minerals, water, food, other natural resources, power, government, propaganda, education, and many other aspects of people and life. An overwhelming difference between ruling parties and people is the desire to generalize and control by the former, and the need for individuality and freedom by the latter.
The people from these cultures are interchangeable: take some African-born infant and raise him in Western Europe with advanced medicine and European parents and he's going to turn out basically a dark-skinned European, with European culture and probably just as smart as an average European.
You came so close! Skin color is irrelevant, leave out the "dark-skinned" and we're left with a nearly perfect assessment.
No one should honestly consider this issue scientifically decided once for all. If a Nobel prize laureate with specific (immense) knowledge on human DNA like James Watson thinks race may actually be correlated to one's intellectual potential, we should consider all this still debatable, to say the least. (No, he didn't withdraw his statement, he confirmed it adding he was sorry his words offended so many people).
Moreover, there's an actual, very understandable stigma on this opinion. It's well known that taboos are formidable weapons in the human quest for knowledge. Weapons to destroy knowledge, of course. In no other subject will you see so many insults flourish in comments. Many people here react like scared dogs. The issue is hot, but usually those who resort to abuse are barely confident in their own opinions.
Unfortunately, being horrible, unfair, outrageous and unacceptable doesn't necessarily make a theory also false.
I'm sorry for not being able to make clear my own position here. I still don't know whether the Sun truly orbits the Earth. On the other hand, the abundance of people untouched by doubt cheers me up a little. What I myself know for sure is I don't like a debate where only one position is represented, or where one is ridiculed, even in a clumsy, childish way. Not even the devil is denied an advocate.
Or at least stop smoking that Obama Gold crack cocaine that you arrogant ass holes must be smoking. Are we to believe that rather than taking very long periods of time, even millions of years, that smoking dope can increase the speed of evolution some how?
I guess internal re-compensation, or compensation from Arabs for similar (and usually more brutal) slavery wouldn't have had a significance, either? Here's a hint: African slavery occurred for (at least) hundreds of years prior to Europeans accepting the tradition.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
One of the biggest fallacies I'm aware of that still has wide acceptance is the "ice cap"/ice age/glacial theory (as there is at least enough evidence in contrary, never mind common sense, to suggest otherwise). Somehow, glaciers are supposed to 'flow' uphill, towards the equator. Somehow, there are glaciers near the equator in many locations where they should not exist (unless you work off the assumption that the earth has had multiple different polar regions throughout history, at which time the 'alternate polls' formed ice caps). So many theories and disciplines rely on the gradual-change theories shackled with the ice age 'fact' that it seems to me have led to a lot of incorrect conclusions.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I disagree. The "scientific method" relies upon an initial (and usually unacknowledged) hypothesis. This hypothesis is usually acquired non-scientifically - ie, basic human observation and, more often than not, intuition.
Acting on these observations happened long before we had a "method" for it, and I've no doubt Newton, Galileo, and Einstein had to start with an initial "oh, gee, look at that" which was contrary to the contemporary thought of the day.
As for my initial post, as to how the scientific method is bunk: most of modern science in several disciplines is based off of a handful of unverified (and improbable/impossible) postulations which have been accepted as a verified belief (what scientific communities so often presumptuously refer to as 'fact').
Case in point: ice age glaciers and their current movement. Geology, biology, archeology, and I'm sure other disciplines. Egyptology is, as I understand things, somewhat prone to this. They all rely upon the time scales set forth by these ideas, leading to the dismissal of much more convincing evidence (ie cataclysm as a means of change, which is readily documented by the naked eye on a daily basis). Very often, it seems theories ignore the world around them and rely almost completely on aggregate theories. (For instance, if the pyramids were constructed with primitive means, where are the roadways utilized to move their 17+ ton stones? Someone who studied more than the ancient discoveries of others - say, an engineer - would see this endemic problem with contemporary theory right off the bat, but gets dismissed due to not being educated/not having the correct discipline background.)
So that's what I mean by the 'scientific method' being bunk. It's very often abused and incorrectly 'used', and holds no resemblance in practice to the actual process. You've got to test your theories and assumptions or you're not doing science any more than some nut who says the earth is only 6,000 years old due to Biblical addition.
Yes, I believe in intelligent design (in some guise or another) and cataclysm as a means of change. But that's because I've seen too many counter-examples invalidating the contemporary theories. If those contemporary theories were correct, you would not have to try to shoehorn a new discovery into it; the theory would instead be verified by the new discovery. If your theory does not cover a condition, you need to find a new theory.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
So, is it Hawking's assistant that helps him smoke drugs, or
is there a special chocolaty mealtime treat involved?
Pfffttt!!!
Yeah, that sounds like a misconception that could cause problems. Seems like someone who was willing to do the work to correct those theories could totally revolutionize that part of science.
I was referring to more general logical fallacies, though. They are really convenient if you want to convince someone in a confusing way, but annoying when other people use them.
Qxe4
Who put Hawking in charge of the obvious?
inferior cultures
Troll much? Anyway, you ommitted the word average from the original post, more advanced does not directly equate to better, and since you seem to know, exactly at what point in history did we become advanced?
Can some of you people who believe in "crap" - sorry - evolution (!!!) ask themselves : if evolution was true, and that everything we have today as a feature of our human body is a result of selective growth for a purpose - then a) what are eyebrows used for ? b) what is hair for ? c) what is pubic and arm-pit hair for ? what is the use of virginity ? what is the use of a beard ? if evolution can develop muscles as "tireless" as a heart muscle, and as strong as a jaw muscle, why didnt ALL the muscles be from the same fiber, then you can run like a jaguar maybe - or jump like a flea ? and if evolution were capable of equipping bats with radar sensors and hawks with hi-res eyes - why didnt we get some - we needed vision too ? why dont we have hair on the inside of our palms ? why one heart and two kidneys ? why "five" fingers ? why an ass ?
FACT is : GOD created us - and HE IS ONE GOD.
The IQ test has, built into it, the cultural bias of the white, european, while completely disregarding other values.
Oddly, the most exhaustive research on the matter shows no such evidence in support of that proposition.
You can bet that if the IQ test included intelligence and observations on how nature behaves outside of the constraints of 'the scientific method' the Europeans would have their asses handed to them by the native americans, the australian aboriginals, or any other culture that couldn't give two pig shits about European science or technology.
So, presumably, after 40 years of trying hard, somebody would surely have been able to devise a test that native americans or australian aboriginals would consistently outscore whites and east asians on. Ok, where is it?
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Race has nothing to do with intelligence. I can take some African kid, raise him in America by American standards and he will be just as "smart" as your typical American - he will be an American with dark skin and relatives on another continent.
You can? Then you need to explain why the average IQ of American blacks is a standard deviation lower than the average IQ of American whites.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
I am not sure why that matters: on a packet-switched network like the internet, all connections are just abstractions created by a session-layer protocol (usually TCP).
I think you forgot a link. I am not sure if you just wanted the Wikipedia page on BeOS or a link straight to Haiku.
Linux has some tweaks in the kernel settings which are pretty much labeled "use this one option on a server and that option on a desktop". I assume desktop-oriented distros like Fedora and Ubuntu choose the desktop-friendly options. Then again, you may remember the drama over Con Kolivas maintaining a fork with more desktop-friendly options and saying that the other kernel devs just weren't that interested in working on such improvements.
Also, if a modern desktop/laptop computer is swapping out programs, something is wrong. With over 1GB of memory or so, that should not be necessary. You could probably get away with a good amount less memory and still not need a swap file/partition.
Centralization breaks the internet.
Social Science is not a science.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think Richard Dawkins already suggested this.
I guess Hawking entered a particular phase and the humans another one, opposite to him (brain and no body, against body and no brain).
Never mind that you left many OS's out of your comment. There are actually OS's that ARE *SMART* and they truly optimize (pretty much by themselves the work load and they also have an very high I/O thru-put). Non of the OS's you cite can come close. And this has been done with more and more sophistication over the last 50 years that it would make those OS's you listed are arcane and should be set out to greener pasteurs.
Basically, human beings are just means of transport and habitats for bacteria.
These bacteria have been injecting us with their genetics for ever.
If this view changes your idea of 'self', then that must be what they want.
You have just reproduced verbatim an argument put forth by Carl Sagan in "Dragons of Eden"...about thirty years ago.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
What the hell kind of worldview do you have where a scientist tells you how the practice of science actually works, and you tell him he's wrong!?!?
ResidntGeek
mister hawking, it is because of these 'externals' that we do not evolve. The externals take away the reason for evolving
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If one watches children work their video games and examines the effects of clandestine and conventional pharmaceuticals on individuals and society, one can see that we're driving our own evolution now and in some odd directions. Our medicine allows challenged individuals the opportunity to reproduce that they would never have had. ...and just wait until genetic experimentation has chimeras walking the streets. Will they be sexy? Maybe so.
I have no idea where morons like you come from. Sub-saharan Africa has the highest genetic diversity on the planet. Ponder that for a moment. It means that your notion of some sort of genetic "dumbness" is bunk.
But maybe that explains your own stupidity, fear and ignorance. I'd feel sorry for you, if you weren't such a loathesome pile of garbage. Now go find a rock, you useless piece of shit.
What a profound and very eloquent rebuttal. Almost as eloquent as the time many many years ago in high school when Jeff Prout, upon being asked how effective some controversial New Deal programs were in assuaging the effects of the Great Depression, stood up and farted.
The point he is trying to make (or might try to make) is that all humans
are more or less the same. The difference is not in hardware, but only in software.
We are all x86 processors now, and the difference is not in the clockspeed, but
in the knowlegde / programs which are run.
What knowledge we seek, and how we are able to deal with new information is all that
matters. In the end we're are not different from our ancesters, but we have new and
better meme's. The ways in which we are able to filer out the bad meme's will be leading,
not phisical changes.
The person with the right meme's will survive, and getting the right meme's is a matter
of education and upbringing.
And I concur with the random noise idea when looking at the bigger picture.
But when looking at the individual, this noise takes on a life of its own. Using my immediate family tree as an example, I was almost the outcast in grade school because I was a geek before the term was invented. That geek was however, nutured by my mother, who if she couldn't answer a small boys questions, did know where the library was, and a book that might have the answer in it would come home for a few days.
Interested in the physical world from the git-go, then in things electric when the REA eventually brought electricity to the farmhouses of rural Iowa at about the end of WW-II, I wound up quitting school in the 9nth grade to go out and see if I could make a living fixing these new-fangled televisions. And I did.
Now, 60 years later, I am largely retired, having spent the last 28 years as the Chief (and often only) engineer at a tv station. So I'm now doing some woodworking, along with some other things I now have time to do, like a small cnc milling machine & other toys. I have had my fingerprints in things that made the encyclopedias (like the cameras that were on the Trieste in Feb. 1961) along the way, and have managed to collect a C.E.T., a G.E.D., a degree from the University of Hard Knocks. The fact that I've had the party & got the retirement Rolex does not keep my phone from ringing when TSHTF though so I do get 'bonus' work that is also very well paid for occasionally. I rather like it that way as long as I am physically able to do it. It makes me think I might be worth keeping around for a bit yet.
My offspring, while they are mechanically inclined and are generally successful in life, do not share the penchant for things electronic as deeply as I. Computers are today, just a household appliance. They will not build the hardware and write the software for something that will have a daily working lifetime of well over a decade in a tv production environment that I have done more than once.
Am I disappointed? Not really. I tried to give them the tools to survive with, and in today's society, they still need real people to fix the machinery when the other real people that run it, wear it out or break it, and those people, the fixers, will always command a premium salary. And speaking as one of those fixers, the salary has always been generally sufficient if well managed. My home is paid for, I wrote checks for the last 3 vehicles, 2 of which are yet in the driveway. I have no wish to control the worlds wealth as long as I have a warm, dry place to sleep, a good wife and enough to eat. Gas for the vehicles is a plus, as is the time to go fishing as I have it on good authority that the time one spends fishing is not charged against ones time here.
In short, that would seem to define happiness pretty well for me, although today its a day when my wife can breath (COPD) w/o oxygen, or I get a new power tool, hopefully not to be used for trimming fingers since I just did that with a jointer, taking about 1/8" off one. It (the alu guard) makes typing rather error prone though. :(
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Uhm, I thought that was the point of Adam & Eve? Is the symbolism of the "tree of knowledge" and "realizing that we're naked" so obscure that it goes over most peoples' heads?
No, I will not work for your startup
Well, if a pilot told me that most aircraft are actually flown by blind gophers on LSD, I'd tell him to fuck off, too.
Some claims can be substantiated with an Argument From Authority - others can not. That's why when "Dr." Stephen Jones tells me that he's found "thermate residue" in the wreckage of the twin towers, I can laugh in his face and say "that's rust and sulfur, you fucking moron!". The fact that he has the letters "PhD" beside his name doesn't necessarily mean that he has any clue what he's talking about. Some claims are just retarded and wrong (aka "unsupported"), regardless of how many degrees their proponents manage to accrue. That's the whole reason behind the peer-review process.
1. It's an analogy. Pointing out commonalities between unlike things is what's known as an "insight".
2. Evolution does not have goals; it can lead to expansion or to extinction. Pointing out different ways of looking at something is also known as "insight".
Hawking misunderstands the very nature of Human DNA. He looks at it as a mathematician would, as an absolute definable entity and hence lies the flaw in his reasoning.
Human DNA has taken on a massive difference in the last 500-1000yrs, concentrated via the growth of large cities. An organism's definable DNA is comprised not of just one sampled individual but it is also all the other DNA around itself in the population with which material is common to, or could be exchanged, recent ancestors and future bearers of offspring. (it is certainly not information which exists only as corollary and part-agent) Thus a true DNA assay is actually a matrix of probabilities for the discrete genetic data (codons) that can occur for the entire population (impossible) so with this impossibility acknowledged, an error margin for each attribute for the samples population must exist too and so DNA is not just an archetypal series of discrete values representing one individual as Hawking believes.
The implications of this reasoning are that rather than change manifesting in the DNA of an average individual, this change instead has taken place across CITY POPULATIONS, with the distribution of different desirable and selectable traits being concentrated and thus made more prevalent under these different environmental pressures. To satisfactorily understand the change that is occurring in human DNA, envision a genetic map, like a contour map dotted all over with individuals living in discrete phenotype 'altitude' areas as defined by the contour lines. Within these strictures, genes are meeting and amplifying, given that intellect and many other traits are likely to be due to hundreds if not thousands of different genes, all this is happening under enormous and deliberate pressure, a mass refining. The mincer of Pink Floyd's the wall working in an entirely different way.
With the growth and advent of cities, and universities and an educated elite, the requirements of objective analysis need definable and repeatable excellence, I.e. biological as well as environmental talent; thus very real selection has recently taken place for this intelligence. Remember that it being far more likely that 'intelligent' people will form partnerships with people of similar mind-set, career, interests. This has produced a super-set of genes for intellect. Other genes for all manner of qualities exist in other populations, refined to a certain degree by their respective environments in a like manner.
The information bunker that Hawking talks about is important; it is in part the agent through which organisms recognise desirable traits such as intellect in one another. Defining intellectualism as phenotype and genotype is so complex that such defies current analysis, but this does not mean to say that such doesn't exist. Because of our global nature, these genes spread and form more elite pockets, like a benevolent cancer metastasising...
There are isolated areas where this hasn't happened to as great a degree, Ocean islands with little variation or subsistence areas with poor or uncertain climates and disease. This argument has unfortunate political ramifications. If you buy in to the socialist dystopian myth that we are all born the same, then you will be reluctant to even consider these questions. They are illegal.
hawking he should stick to dimensions
nick keesing
They were the first to undertake long migrations
They were the first to produce art as we understand it today (paintings in South African caves dating back tens of thousands of years).
Africans produced, er, humanity.
This is not a figure of speech. If was Africans, more likely not too different from the ones living there today, who first ventured out of the African continent in order to spread the human race all around the globe.
As for Africans having done "nothing" check your Encyclopaedia and find Egypt, also look at some of their art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SFEC_EGYPT_ABUSIMBEL_2006-003.JPG so you can recognize the people who made that possible.
As for IQ tests, you unhelpfully did not provide pointers to support your claims, which is strange since typing "validity of IQ tests" in Google brings a plethora of information, many of them pointing out to the flaws of using IQ to measure intelligence.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Have you seen San people track animals?
They can tell you all about an animal they have never seen by looking only at the tracks they leave in the sand.
This is not the only useful knowledge they have, they are very knowledgeable about the foods available, the seasons, how to find water and all manner of skills to help them survive the harsh environment where they live.
Seeing them in action the last thing you would think about any of them is to consider them stupid. But most likely they would do badly in an IQ test. This is unsurprising if you consider that geometry, set theory and mathematics has never been a major cultural concern for them. There are many tribes around the world famed for their inability to count, nevertheless they have thrived in their environments for hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years.
Putting it another way, most modern westernised urbanized people would be completely hopeless in the environment of the San people, most likely they would consider such a person close to mentally retarded, which would be equally unfair.
Intelligence is not an absolute thing that can be measured. It is a capability to adapt to different circumstances aided by a social context that is familiar. Measuring human intelligence is an exercise of futility knowing that, fundamentally, we all have the same capabilities.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
One tends to listen to people that have proven that they can contribute something useful to our science and culture.
One has to listen sceptically (always) , but appeals to authority are the last refuge of the person without a point.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The only way to stop evolution would be to find a way that everybody had exactly the same genes, and enforce this thoroughly.
We could, for example, stop sexual reproduction, favour cloning and then little by little, prune the clones allowed to carry on, until we would have a species with so little genetic variation as to consider evolution has stopped for them.
But even then ,mutations would be possible due to external factors, and the clones would not be perfect copies, unless you could refer always to a primordial genetic map with somehow could always be re implanted in any new human being.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Many people related to genetics and evolutionary theory had nothing to do with the field when they arrived to it. Not even Darwin himself.
But keep your mind closed, it is really useful ....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What a clever little paki you are! You must know what "anecdotal evidence" means.
Perhaps from a moral viewpoint it is somewhat subjective.
Consider it from an economic point of view. It's hardly meritocratic, is it? A society that arnbitrarily excludes people from serious eduction isn't going to have the most talented people where they'll be the most use.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Really? I'm as good a programmer as Linus Torvalds, as brilliant a businessman as Bill Gates and as phenomenal at physics as Stephen Hawking? Awesome!!!
Parent needs a "-1 Kumbayaa" mod.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The "scientific method" relies upon an initial (and usually unacknowledged) hypothesis. This hypothesis is usually acquired non-scientifically - ie, basic human observation and, more often than not, intuition.
By what definition of "scientific" are you using to determine whether a method is scientific? How is making observations, and using our brains to spot patterns, unscientific?
What alternative method would you propose in its place, that is "scientific"?
Acting on these observations happened long before we had a "method" for it
As I stated, the scientific method was something that was formulated gradually over hundreds of years - the fact that people like Newton were doing it before we formally had a name for the process doesn't change the point.
and I've no doubt Newton, Galileo, and Einstein had to start with an initial "oh, gee, look at that" which was contrary to the contemporary thought of the day.
And? Yes, the scientific method was contrary to the contemporary thought of Newton and Galileo's day. Not Einstein's, though.
As for my initial post, as to how the scientific method is bunk: most of modern science in several disciplines is based off of a handful of unverified (and improbable/impossible) postulations which have been accepted as a verified belief (what scientific communities so often presumptuously refer to as 'fact').
Okay, let's have some examples. Are you just talking about historians and archaelogy, or are you including physics, chemistry and biology in this?
You'll have to explain more about what you mean with glaciers, or the pyramids? What theories are there, that you somehow know to be wrong?
So that's what I mean by the 'scientific method' being bunk. It's very often abused and incorrectly 'used'
Wait, those are two entirely different claims. There's "the scientific method is bunk", and "the scientific method is fine, but scientists often don't use it or follow it properly". Which is it?
You've got to test your theories and assumptions or you're not doing science
Testing theories and assumptions is part of the scientific method. Yes, that's the point.
Yes, I believe in intelligent design
Right, I should have guessed.
that's because I've seen too many counter-examples invalidating the contemporary theories. If those contemporary theories were correct, you would not have to try to shoehorn a new discovery into it
Examples?
If your theory does not cover a condition, you need to find a new theory.
Yes, this is exactly what happens with science. E.g., Newtonian Gravitation being replaced with Einstein's General Relativity.
He's telling you how his day-to-day job works, you moron! Do you know anything about science? The "Scientific Method" is an idealized, dumbed-down version of how science works that we teach to FIRST GRADERS. Stop clinging to it; it's only a poor approximation of how things actually work.
If a pilot told you, in all seriousness, that most aircraft are actually flown by blind gophers on LSD, what the hell basis would you have to disagree with him? How often have you been in a cockpit?
ResidntGeek
Right, why don't you scroll up and re-read my last message. You clearly didn't get it the first time.
Every day. Even without that experience, though, I'd know that he's full of shit. That's because I'm not a gullible fool - unlike you, I know how to evaluate and verify data in order to reach a rational conclusion. I also know how to fact-check; it's not that difficult to ask other pilots for verification, or to verify the facts through personal observation.
Thank you for the many well reasoned comments. I'd like to offer a few viewpoints of my own.
I've recently thought about a few of the major differences between human and our so-called primate cousins that I feel support an intelligent design premise that does not invalidate Charles Darwin's theories on evolution, but does conflict with many of today's beliefs.
One, humans have a physiology that is similar, but in several ways very unlike most primates. All the primates I am aware of, many different species, have long arms and short legs, while humans, a single species, have longer legs than arms. We also have flat feet without opposing large toes, which is another major difference between humans and primates; I can't think of a primate species that has flat feet. How it is that there is only a single species with these specific characteristics as opposed to many different species that share another set of specific characteristics challenges, in my opinion, the theory that we evolved from an ancestor to the chimpanzee.
Two, humans use extremely complex speech forms, far more so than what is used by any primate species, even those we've taught to use one of our languages in some form or other. Some humans have the capacity to learn many a variety of different languages fluently; my father alone speaks at least four languages well enough to hold a conversation, namely English, Norwegian, German, and Russian, but also has a basic understanding of many more. I'm not aware of any primate species with this ability, despite their ability to learn basic forms of a single human language.
Three, humans can be taught to follow a specific set of rules, but are capable of making exceptions to those rules based on the circumstances, while most primates have difficulty with applied knowledge. I remember from a years back, the hypothetical example of a primate (a chimpanzee, I believe) that had been taught to drive; at the scene of an accident, the primate would fail to reason that the vehicles blocking traffic superseded the green light, and would therefore fail to stop. Knowing and understanding are very different things.
My point is, while I've not performed any scientific experiments to prove these things are true, I've nonetheless observed them and learned that there is a certain level of truth to each. Furthermore, if any of these beliefs are, at some point proven incorrect (i.e., someone actually demonstrates a chimpanzee truly capable of understanding the immense complexities of just one, if not more, of our languages) I'm willing to accept the new evidence. That, in my mind, is the true scientific method; making a theory based on observations and the present evidence, but accepting the possibility that other evidence may invalidate the theory altogether.
Lastly, my opinion that Darwin's theories are not hampered by these observations is that his theory was based off the many species of finch in the Galapagos Island region; that they may have, at some point in the past, all evolved from one original species of finch has a logical basis. That humans accidentally developed intellectually from some other species lacks that same logical foundation, and is therefore suspect in my view.
Here is what I appreciate in Stephen Hawking's confessions. Our DNA code was mutating by 1 bit a year but 1 bit of mutation could eliminate many homos ...
Now the world publishes 50,000 books a year
and in a way it can select some of us, !
"hundred billion bits of information in books
are garbage" and will select some of us.
Maybe Hawking wants our children to begin DNA engineering, eugenism, and to resolve the schoolbooks selection
and agressive instinct problems too.
In the posts, the meme polemic
is a holism polemic, the necessary egg about our future.
As we feel the present time and the future
there is a necessary embodiement of physics
that cannot simply fade along the centuries to come.
The sense of facts are our axioms.
The reciprocity shows the same idea,
if our current advances nullify the natural selection
then they will become physically weak in average
so it is a good thing to cure ou DNA from weaknesses
to be embodied heathly. ... memes have no force by themselves.
The sympathetic effect of the Darwinism window,
from XIX to XX, has set a revolution in creationism,
it is located in the future not in the past.
In our spirit we have to move in time now
to preserve what the 19th lay men knew.
(because the were gentlemen
like captain Jenaway's holo boyfriend)
I really think that Stephen Hawking
has to deal seriously whith these questions
for his work on the details of the big bang.
Is it a 2000 years old embodiement open problem ?
Sorry for being or putting in the details.
We are past natural selection, and soon will be mucking with our own genetic code, which will be our [possibly] final stage of evolution. Thus, I came up with the Darwin-ClintJCL Universal Evolution Theory, which applies to all sentient species that reach technological maturity.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com