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Ten Things We Still Don't Understand About Humans
ParticleGirl writes "New Scientist has an article examining 10 human features (bugs?) that we still don't understand, like blushing, laughing, and nose-picking. There are some interesting, speculative evolutionary explanations listed for each. '[Psychologist Robert R. Provine] thinks laughing began in our pre-human ancestors as a physiological response to tickling. Modern apes maintain the ancestral 'pant-pant' laugh when they are tickled during play, and this evolved into the human 'ha-ha.' Then, he argues, as our brains got bigger, laughter acquired a powerful social function — to bond people. Indeed, Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford has found that laughing increases levels of endorphins, our body's natural opiates, which he believes helps to strengthen social relationships.'"
What's not to understand? It clears the nose!
The desire to be first
Women.
01110000 01010111 01101110 00110011 01100100
... the New Sensationalist seriously as a science magazine.
(Fine, mod this flamebait. I've got Karma to burn and I really dislike that rag.)
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Good thing psychology figured out the rest of the puzzle, huh?!
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Yes. When God created us, we were all black. Then the devil came along and caused some of us to degenerate and loose colour.
... smell my finger!
(explain that one)
Memes could explain some of them. Some could be pure cultural (i.e. kissing, superstition, altruism) and others could had helped that we evolved this way (your odds of mating could had been increased if you had the ability to do some of those things).
Teenagers are not a biological issue at all, but a societal one. And one pretty easy to understand. Actually allow a smooth transition between childhood and adulthood, rather than making laws to restrict and "protect" teens until they hit that magic age of 18 or 21 or whatever, and while the problems won't go away, they'll become no worse than those of other young primates.
I adore this post.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
... as any fule know, is associated with a reduced defence mechanism and is therefore a sign of insanity.
Simon (pulling some strings)
Physicists get Hadrons!
I want to know why noses run (secrete clear liquid) when it's cold outside.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
#11: Why, when faced with a dialog box saying, "installing this program will stomp on all your registry keys, watch every move you make on the internet for reporting back to our central databases, and possibly kill your dog, but also display a cute little dancing monkey" they'll say, "uh, sure! go ahead! i'd like to see that!".
Example: Altruism.
It actually seems pretty obvious -- a community which was altruistic would, in the long run, have a higher chance of survival than a community which wasn't.
Another example: Superstition. I love this bit:
Religion offers another possible evolutionary benefit of superstition.
So... how is religion not superstition? Now you've got two mysteries, instead of one. And the same explanation still holds:
Our ancestors would not have lasted long if they had assumed that a rustle in the grass was caused by wind when there was even a small chance it was a lion. And it is worth making false-positive mistakes to get these relationships right.
Basically, religion and other superstitions are maladaptions of our ability to recognize patterns -- and an acceptable alternative to missing some pattern. Better to be paranoid than to be gullible -- better to be afraid of the tiger that isn't there than to be eaten by the tiger who is.
I suppose these aren't proven, but I do find this pretty weak, even for a "top 10" list. It's not "mysteries" so much as "cases which are not yet airtight".
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
picking your nose when you read this? I was - it scared me to think that scientist still haven't figured out why I am doing it!
boogers = nostril bugs = grooming -- meaning, clearly, nose-picking should be socially acceptable.
Sure there are traits that might arise due to evolution.
But there are also traits that may arise randomly, perhaps, e.g. Eye color. The fact we have 2 eyes on one side of our body, and not 2 eyes in front and 2 eyes behind, for 360 degree view.
Perhaps because the trait was coincidentally accompanied with a different desired trait. And the random, meaningless trait wasn't harmful enough to get selected out of the population.
Not that we want to know the why of what they do ... and pity anyone who ends up with that as a research assignment. "Today, I have to interview this really big asshole - no, not Rush Limbaugh - and if you thing THAT's shitty, you ain't seen nothin' yet!"
We've all heard the joke about how to get on the front page of Digg. /. it was an article on 10 failed mouse designs. Today it is 10 things we don't know about the human body.
Your article title should be "Top X {Reasons|Ways|Games...] To [Pick Up Girls|Make your own Fusion Reactor...]"
Yesterday on
"Indeed, Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford has found that laughing increases levels of endorphins, our body's natural opiates, which he believes helps to strengthen social relationships."
Pretty sure this has been common knowledge for years/decades.
Some of these seem obvious, I am not a researcher or professor not am I involved with any sort of grant so I could be completely wrong but... Blushing - When we become excited or anxious blood rushes faster to the face that it is pumped away so the increased oxygenated blood causes the reddish tint, seems like this one is more of a why does our heart rate increase when we are excited or anxious? Pubic hair, we have hair around every part of the body that has more sensitive skin, head, genitals, inside of the nose, etc... Most of us don't have hair on the palms of our hands (you know who you are you unclean slashdotters) because that would interfere with tactile sensation needed for more dexterous tasks Teenagers, apes don't have someone constantly trying to sell them a look or mood. Teenagers don't invent fashions and trends marketers do. Then a popular teenager decides that what the marketer said about it being cool must be true and their peers all wanting to be cool too follow. I am pretty sure my grandmother was not "emo". Again it seems like the question here is why do humans feel the need to follow the crowd. Superstition - Somewhere along the way someone had a bad experience that they linked with another event (most likely coincidental) and they shared that information, and just as stories are retold superstition is passed along as well. There have also been some early studies showing that belief in superstitions may be a mild form of OCD. Nose Picking, if your nose is clogged up you pick it to open nasal passages. Like any other behavior this can become habitual to the point of it happening unconsciously at inappropriate times.
Laughter, art, pubic hair and kissing are the only things that stand out on the list as possibly unknown. Art is probably the most complex and "advanced" of all human behaviors so it will only have a highly complex answer. I have this feeling that laughter is not unique to humans and is probably based at some level on a physiological/neurological response to a number of mental states such as relief, happiness, perception of incongruity (irony), and a few others (for some people pain which is where we will probably have the best shot at figuring out that actual mechanisms...). At least in males and probably females this would probably be the product of the overlapping expression of two (maybe more) genes, one receptor that triggers localized hair growth when it receives a signal from another molecule (probably testosterone?), thus, when humans hit puberty and start developing secondary sexual features high concentrations of pubes form in the crotch because the signaling molecule is in such high abundance there (just a guess...). Kissing? Hell if I know, maybe a delaying tactic developed by females to see just how committed and patient a male was.
Nose picking? DUH??!!?? Ever seen a fly groom itself or a monkey in the mirror? The monkey always checks its teeth. No one likes boogers, they are irritating, thus, remove the irritant. Same as picking at scabs.
Puberty? Tons of animals have it, its just another stage in development which just so happens to involve major rewiring of their neural circuitry and reformatting of their bodies. Not surprisingly, they tend to get a bit testy during this phase.
Blushing? Vasodialation caused by a hormonal release triggered by embarrassment AKA a type of fear.
Altruism? Pretty good explanations out there based on group selection theories and group size + competition.
Supersition? Our brains continually look for causes by default and when they don't find an obvious one they will make the next best connection based on the associations available in the brain. Very hand if someone comes up with a single universal cause for everything (god anyone?).
Dreams. Ok maybe not very well understood experimentally, but lots of animals dream. Neurons have to keep firing or they loose their connections, at some point during the evolutionary process a state developed for neural networks at rest were they started to replay their most recently experiences and integrate them in to the structure of the brain. Basically dreams are the time when the brain does upkeep and integrates its most recent experiences and solidifies the most memorable ones. Probably where we do most of our associational learning.
(Full disclosure: NON EXPERT, but this is /. so you know that already)
It has to be one of the most bizarre and unexplainable forms of human behavior.
...to incest, which is bad for the gene pool.
When our primate ancestors stopped leaving the cave as soon as they could and started staying home with their parents until later in life, what better way to avoid interbreeding between offspring and parents than to make teenagers hate/piss off their parents, and do whatever they could to impregnate/get impregnated by someone else?
That's nature saying: "Get away from these same-gene carriers. Get out, and get wild. Multiply now!". And when they do, that's positive feedback for the evolutionary push. Interbreeding would reduce the probability of survival of the group in the long term (and short term, if <disgusting attempt to joke about people locked in basements removed>).
Still haven't heard a reasonable explanation on that one.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Better to be paranoid than to be gullible -- better to be afraid of the tiger that isn't there than to be eaten by the tiger who is.
Religion gets the gullible paranoid about an invisible, all seeing judgmental sky tiger.
You can't take the sky from me...
You pointed out nicely what I was about to post. Here are the links I was going to add though:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=teenage
http://www.answers.com/topic/teenager
http://www.home-school.com/Articles/PlattTeenagers.html
As resource bases contract and the world goes back to a solar economy, expect the teenager to disappear.
I wouldn't agree on this though.
Teen and teen-age are a western 1st world invention - now in use globally.
Unless entire western... no... HUMAN civilization disappears COMPLETELY - the term and the stage of human development it describes will remain distinctive from childhood and adulthood.
And I am talking going back to hunter-gatherer stage long enough that current languages are changed and forgotten.
Even then, upper classes WILL continue to pamper their young long after they (the "rulers" and "thinkers" - not the kids) stop writing dictionaries and regulating language. Teenagers would continue to exist in tradition among the upper class even if no one remained who could remember the word any more.
The only way it may be replaced or removed from use (other than what I said above) is if it is further broken down to early and late teens.
Into something like earleens and lateens. Or prims and seconds. Or juniors and seniors.
But, for something like that to happen you would need a HUGE social difference to appear. Globally.
Like for example giving 15-16 year-olds a right to vote or something similar.
Just like teenagers first appeared when kids globally started being sent to school despite hitting puberty (instead of being sent to work in mines, fields etc.) - a new stage in the society would have to be created first.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Chin aside, every part of the head has some plausible function. But how about the chin? Chins baffle me.
. . .certain things certainly doesn't. . .uh. . .strengthen social relationships.
Can someone here tell me why the smell of the person you might be crawling in bed with smells bad? Last time i checked you should kick out the funky ones. Scent is one of our best senses. I like it myself :-)
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
This article is just dumb. All of those things are explained fairly well, if not completely. And except for dumb nose picking which clears the nose you idiot author, all of them are about sexual selection/sexual success.
I'm sick of people having problems with traits that are handicaps. Yes they are handicaps, that's their function, to truthfully communicate that your genes are successful despite having those handicaps.
That explains hair, teenagers, dreams, art, superstitions, kissing, probably blushing. And of course, human brain. You should just put that on the list as well, as it is the main sexual ornament in humans. And that would explain laughter/humor as a part of a process of communicating health/strength/size of the brain.
Stupid.
"Even Darwin struggled to explain why we would evolve a response that lets others know that we have cheated or lied"
Diversity is good within a species, as it strengthens the species as a whole when times are hard - like a new disease, sudden diet changes due to changes in food supply, habitat changes, strength to resist poisoning, etc..
Maybe blushing is there to help diversity be maintained in the long term?
A non-blushing individual could have a massive social advantage within their group. This gene line could spread through a population relatively quickly compared to other mutations, possibly having such a detrimental effect on diversity that a whole group or even species could get wiped out by a sudden environmental change.
Someone who doesn't blush possibly could be very dangerous to our and archaic humans' social mechanisms.... When it comes to individuals communicating, blushing lets the one party know that the subject of the conversation is important to the other. This can induce empathy in the blushed-to, and when we find people that are like us it is a very strong bonding force. Blushing forces feelings out into public, feelings that could stay inside if it weren't for the blushing - it provides a short cut to letting another how you truly feel.
If a human didn't learn that blushing lets other people know what really matters to them, they could keep things secret much more effectively. That would bring them social power in some situations. They'd grow up being able to never involuntarily let others know what really touches them, and this could make them a right nut-case.... blushing keeps the ego in check in this respect. Not blushing is the wrong sort of advantage for the species.
Now then, how blushing isn't fully compatible with the modern world where routine non-face to face contact occurs is left as an exercise for the reader. Bonus marks for comparing this to non-human entities, like corporations, governments, or religious establishments.
Brought to you by the use of recreational cannabis. Dangerous stuff, makes you think (and waffle)!
The answer to these questions is the same as the answer to "Why does a dog lick itself?"... Because it can, or in this case because we can. We sometimes evolve to be able to do things but more likely than not, a freak of evolution has enabled us to do something else. So we did not evolve to do something rather we do something because evolution has brought us far enough to do it. Or in other words we work with the tools God provided.
I'm convinced nose picking is done as a sort of anal obsession with "perfection." It's in the same bracket as when people fill up with gas and try to exactly hit exactly to the nearest full currency unit (not such a big thing in the US due to prepay, but elsewhere it's common).
There are a lot of weird behaviors people do as a way to ensure regularity and "correctness" even when such correctness isn't required and even if it takes more time. Picking scabs, picking your nose, etc, seem like attempts to "perfect" the body to me.
Kissing? Hell if I know, maybe a delaying tactic developed by females to see just how committed and patient a male was.
From a "psychology of language acquisition" course I took back in the early '70s:
Apes and (some?) monkeys have a social signal called "pout face": It consists of puckering/pursing the lips in the direction of another individual, and signals that the sender is attempting to be friendly. It looks very much like a human's extreme solicitation for the other individual to kiss the sender (though it is not).
Perhaps kissing in humans as early pair-bonding and sexual foreplay evolved from this "Hi! Be my friend?" signal of our primate ancestors?
Alternatively: Some herd herbivores, such as camels, do kiss - to share saliva containing necessary digestive bacteria with other members of the herd, in order to help each other build and maintain a healthy digestive tract. This is especially necessary for getting cultures established in the newborn, to enable digestion of forage and thus weaning. Perhaps kissing babies performs a similar function for humans. If so: Courtship behavior often contains elements of treating the potential partner as one would a child, to show the partner that you'd be a good parent. Thus kissing as courtship would follow from kissing as a good child-care action.
A third possibility: Some diseases have different outcomes depending on what tissue receives the initial infection. Example: Smallpox. Before "vaccination" (injection of the related "vaccinia" (cowpox) live virus, which doesn't generally kill people and confers cross-immunity) was developed, "innoculation" with live smallpox virus insured that the infection started in the skin (usually survivable) rather than the lungs (usually fatal). The mouth has a VERY active branch of the immune system, as a defense against food-borne pathogens. Perhaps, when one is starting to come down with some infections, giving the other members of the family their initial infection in the mouth, rather than risking it take root in the lungs, increases their chance of survival.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Sleeping.
Why do we have to spend somewhere between 4 to 10 hours at a time in a defenseless state? What is the evolutionary rational for this mode of behavior?
There was a really good story not too long about about a theory of why dreams evolved. Basically, it says that it's practice for real-life situations. I know, sometimes they're crazy, how is dreaming that you've managed to go to school in just your underwear practice for real life? Although you may never actually go to school in your underwear, you do experience the same sensations in real life--embarrassment, fear, love (and lust), terror, and so on--that you experience in these crazy dreams. They prepare you for the real life stuff that happens to you.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Modern apes maintain the ancestral 'pant-pant' laugh when they are tickled during play, and this evolved into the human 'ha-ha.'
Really? Where is the direct evidence to support this claim? Any research I can read? Citations?
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
I recently discovered a general list of unsolved problems, which I find fascinating. It's like a summary of the current limits of science and human knowledge and understanding.
TFA was ridiculous.
Can you name ten things on your present vehicle that make no design sense whatsoever? I'd imagine you can without breaking a sweat, and on something that was designed by human hands. Now take a biological organism, something that thru a process of winner-take-all competition somehow managed to develop into a dominant form: would that form be perfect? Would every piece of the puzzle fit perfectly together in an ordered tapestry? Does the operating system you are currently running still have vestiges of long-unused or obsolete code that do things they were never intended to do but not fatally destroy the final work?
Natural selection does not require perfection. It doesn't even require mediocrity. It only requires that there be something lower on the ladder than you are. But as long as we're asking, what happened to my awesome prehensile tail?
What the heck is a 'sig'?
but I bet she was a beatnik
One more thing scientists can't seem to understand is the remarkable ability of some humans to throw chairs
WHY?
We most certainly are going back, probably a lot sooner than anyone would guess. That's what happens when you have a bunch of delusional selfish drugged up middle agers ignorantly trying to push around a smaller, younger generation who never learned to listen to authority. I can't believe the baby boomers actually expect the younger generation to support them in their old age! I want some of that they're smoking! (actually I don't, look what it did for them!)
Why are fart jokes still funny?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I don't get it. Does this mean we need to do opium to make friends?
There are women who indeed see through the bullshit. Most of them learned it however the hardway. After being used a dozen times even the biggest idiot will learn. Unless a woman can see through bullshit when she is a teen, there is nothing special. A woman of 30+ really should be able to tell when she is being lied to.
The problem for women is that our society still raises them with a lethal combo of:
A, love conquers all. Beauty will tame the beast (who even in the disney movie is an asshole) and so it doesn't matter how lousy guy he is, your love will save him.
B, Happiness is a boyfriend. No woman can be content alone, if you are single then you are miserable and therefor it is better to be with someone who makes you miserable because that way you can be miserable AND cleanup after two people.
C, Men have to make the first move. 80% of women prefer to be chased.
This makes women extremely vulnerable to "the pose" as you call it. Especially C. If a woman waits to be chased, then the only she can ever date are the chasers. And who is more likely to be out chasing the most? A so-called "nice" guy or a user who just wants to nail as many women as possible? And of course, B means that even this man who she should be table to tell is only going to use her is better then nothing and A tells her that if only she loves him, he will change.
It is a neat package and coronors around the world tag and bag the results of it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The neuroscience lectures at mit opencourseware tend to agree with you overall. Dreams are thought to be at least in part an integration and memory procedure. They may also be a way to replay circumstances that might soon again occur and are difficult and perhaps threatening. My own theory is that they are manifestations of the brain synchronizing it's various modules which are thought of as widely distributed and massively parallel processed. If the large number of brain modules, thought by some to be as many as 200 in number, are to a high degree self contained while necessarily interdependent than dreaming may be a synchronizing of modules currently undergoing high usage and of more fundamental, often used interdependent modules. This would be the more so if the synchronization processes keyed on recent real world events. Therefore some aspect of dreaming would be giving downbeats and directions much like the conductor of a symphonic orchestra in preparation for the next day's waking performances. Although it doesn't explain flying dreams which I experience in great number. I once had a lucid, early morning dream wherein I was sitting in a movie theater watching a movie I was starring in. There was thus a disturbing but exhilarating of experience three distinct mode of consciousness.
Yes. When God created us, we were all black. Then the devil came along and caused some of us to degenerate and loose colour.
And of course, most white people try to re-gain as much color as possible. Or the sunbed wouldn't have been invented.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I don't think there is an evolutionary advantage against noses that need picking. Sadly you can still find a mate even if you pick your nose all the time.
Or the wigger.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Is that you can't fix 'stupid'.
Sig this!
why are we niggers and white? wasn't there only 1 color in the beginning?
Whiteness is the mark of Cain, Adam and Eve were black.
Yes I kid.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Rule 34
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but black skin is apparently more susceptible to frostbite.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Laughter increases the feeling of mirth in people who hear it.
Mirth itself is harder to explain, but it appears to serve a number of purposes, from a defense mechanism against hopelessness to stress relief to social reinforcement (teasing, mocking).
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
At a moment of social discomfort or tension, the weaker individual(s) will fake a laugh to signal that he is not a threat and does not want trouble. I.e. this signals that he is not in an agressive state.
Just watch around you, smiling is often also used in this way,
Laughing also often means "I'm in your social team", i.e. when someone tells a joke that is socially humiliating for a certail group of people, you may laugh to signal that you consider yourself not a part of the humiliated group.
Watch "Cocky Comedy" by David Dengelo where he puts laughter in a social context.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
This might explain why pubs are so popular and many main-line churches are not. People in pubs tend to laugh together. In some church communities, people rarely seem to laugh.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
There is now a good explanation of laughter:
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/as-sa/editors/origins.html
The Ontic-Epistemic Theory of the Comic developed in this new book might be summarized as follows: normal human cognition is subjective and anthropomorphic, which is to say people are all but incapable of seeing external reality without re-interpreting it according to their values, beliefs and judgments. We see the world, not through 'rose coloured glasses,' but through multi-coloured and ever-changing lenses of which we are almost always unaware - and which modify and even distort our perceptions in various ways according to what our culture teaches us to see in any given situation. So, not only is the selection of facts we perceive in external states of affairs very limited -- by various forms of filtering, selections and simplifications -- but we also add a great deal of cultural baggage to our perceptions in order to give everything in life a social significance, and a human orientation.
Perception is very nearly always directed and shaped by social considerations, yet it would be impossible even to believe in cultural values, or to live in a society based upon them, if it were obvious to everyone that such socio-cultural institutions were merely arbitrary constructs first dreamt up and later passed down and acculturated into each new generation, without really being there at all. Normal human social cognition thus also serves, as one of its most fundamental and crucial functions, to erase the distinction between the different types of entity that we collectively consider 'true' or 'real.' The physical object must never appear more credible than, or even distinct from, the mental one. A man's social status must not seem any less real than his body, and when we mentally associate concepts of status with an actual person we see, for instance, in a policeman's blue uniform, we must not view this as a disguise, because the social state of being a true officer of the law, a mere mental object, must be inseparable, and indistinguishable, from the individual policeman himself, a real biological organism.
The comic then, that which causes laughter, according to Marteinson's theory, is the perception of an 'unravelling of the seams' between external facts, intuitive notions and cultural concepts, all of which are normally levelled and rendered equivalent in anthropomorphic perception. Social being and material fact have different criteria for truth and falsehood, and this is what is revealed by the comic. Laughter, then, is an instinctive reaction to an epistemological checkmate, in particular an event which shatters and fragments perceptions into the different ontic classes of objects that normally comprise them. When this occurs, social reality as we know it momentarily ceases to have the emotional and epistemological value of being real, and the physical world in its cultural poverty is all that is left standing in perception. The cultural intensions the laughing subject had equated with his or her intuitive notions of the concrete state of affairs pass from a high degree of acceptance to a perception of falsehood. Laughter in fact serves to restore normal socio-cognitive perception and to facilitate the forgetting of the comic stimulus. Very frequently, these stimuli involve concepts of social identity, and other aspects of the perception of social roles. For this reason, this book considers laughter from the point of view of the ontology of social being.
I can't speak for anyone else, but usually the only reason why that happens in my own case is if there's something in there that has hardened and is sticking into the wall of one of my nostrils, and it itches, or even hurts.
So to remove the pain, I remove the source of it. ;)
11. Religions - God?
There seems to be a "need" to believe in an all-knowing being who controls everything without any proof. And there is, conveniently, no way to prove the existence using a scientific method.
Think of all the human effort that's been wasted over the ages due to this.
I love to laugh.
Play Ball! Pubic hair is a semaphore.
My occupational health nurse suggested to me that endorphins, being our body's natural opiates, would help me enjoy life more. She's a fitness nut, if you're interested.
Why did she give me such a strange look when I suggested they should sell endorphins in powder form?
C'mon, it's the only reason these drug addicts spend an hour a day exercising.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
LOL... I don't know if the AC knows this, but what he's saying is that black people haven't evolved since then. Yes, we all know black people resemble monkeys more than any other race. Admit it. The fact that their skin is black is only "icing on the top".
Nope.
What he's done is to use a lot of University-Speak to explain why things are funny. I can do that in one line:
"Funny is when two perceptions of reality disagree." --Every single case of 'funny' I've ever seen boils down to this rule. Which I came up with myself. Please feel free to share it. :-)
But why funny things cause our muscles to auto-react by bouncing around inside us, causing our diaphragms and vocal muscles to emit those weird expulsions of chortle and giggle. . , and why it feels so awesome. . , that he hasn't explained. And neither can I at the moment, (though I remain optimistic that one day I'll figure it out, or more likely, read somebody who has).
-FL
Finally, we have a reason for the war on drugs. The lack of social relationships makes people easier to control because they don't gang up on The Man.
Many human behaviors and characteristics which are hard to explain by evolution, have an alternate, better explanation from the creationist perspective.
You illustrate precisely why special creationism is worthless. The method of science places constraints on our models of the universe that allow us to know when we're wrong. Creationism is not subject to any constraints; the shoulder-shrugging "God made it that way" "explanation" explains nothing at all precisely because it unconstrained.
The corallary to your insinuation that some things are hard for evolution to explain is that there is nothing that can't be "explained" by claiming it was "created [by a deity] that way".
Nobody has ever found a culture or ethnic group that does not practice some form of religion.
1) I think you're making that up. Or, perhaps you're just considering a broad enough definition of "some form of religion" to include everyone, making the definition meaningless. Many modern European "cultures" and "ethnic groups" practice no form of "religion". I do not practice any form of religion, and there are many like me; do we not constitute a "culture or ethnic group"?
2) Just because it's popular doesn't make it correct. Stop using this argument.
The Bible tells us...
The Bible "tells us" many things, including that its claims are completely reliable. That's the intellectual equivalent of "because I said so!", and obviously does not constitute an argument that its claims are correct.
They can if they want to observe God's creativity.
That's begging the question! There is no evidence that there must exist any god at all, and are many reasons to believe that there is no such god.
Some scientists actually do appreciate God's creation.
Well, they believe it is that which they are appreciating, anyway.
God considers atheists to be fools...
So monotheists, and their "holy" scriptures, often claim. But we have only their word that they are correct. Polytheists and their "holy" scriptures claim that the gods consider atheists to be fools, and again we have only their word on the matter; no evidence that it is so, and much that it is not.
even though he...hopes they would turn from their folly.
A being with such supposed power need not merely hope. If he wanted them not to be fools, he was either mallicious or incompetent at "creating them such that they could not believe".
The wicked person plots against a righteous one and grits his teeth at him.
Perhaps, but people can be righteous without being Christian (or even theistic), theists (and, of course Christians), can be be wicked.
The Lord laughs at him because he has seen that his time is coming.
So the Bible claims.
Godless fools say in their hearts, "There is no God."
So the Bible claims. This is a transparent crowd-baiting tactic, well within the capability of a below-average author, that only works on the weak-minded and cowardly: "Only idiots disbelieve me. You don't want to be an idiot, do you? Do you?"
So, let's see just how effective that tactic is, even when the claimant thinks it's true:
Only idiots believe in special creation. You're not an idiot, are you? Are you?
I searched this article specifically to find a discussion about dreaming.
Thanks for the link. I have been pondering this myself and concluded that dreaming have to be mental "what-if" simulations allowing faster reactions when situations arise in real life.
I lost my sig.
Women are banned from driving cars in Saudi Arabia
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Simple .. To recharge ourselves, to put our body functions in a deeper relaxed state to heal and be strong after ... Just like a battery needs ...
did I just saw a cat ? or was that a glitch ... ?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I read once - or maybe imagined it - that some research showed that the optic nerve was very sensitive to anything in the field of vision that looked like eyes. There was a description of an experiment to do with circles and dots on flashcards and timed responses I think - I've had a quick search, but can find nothing, does anybody recognise that description? I also think I recall the suggestion that this was evolutionarily beneficial, as it gave advance warning when a predator or enemy was watching you.
Human women have two comparatively large (even more noticeable on the Internet), round breasts with dots in the middle. Your eyes point at these things before you even realise that they're there. Why is that? My explanation is that it's an evolutionary adaptation that takes advantage of the eye's 'eye detection' mechanism. Human breasts are large fake eyes that confer additional fitness on the possessor by causing males to look at them before they look at females with less apparent 'eyes'.
Original research. You read it here first.
1. reduce friction between skin surfaces in tight spots. same reason you have underarm hair
2. retain pheromones for sexual attraction and cues
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
and why waste it? its not a waste product
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well add Jerry Louis to the list as well. The French love him but they are about his only fans.
http://xkcd.com/435/
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
I think things occur for those reasons. Let's face it, bodies have a need to be free of mucus in order to breathe, but laughter can be a response to many factors. One involuntary when one is tickled. Two as a way for masking uncomfortableness which is more in the area of emotions (which really can't be explained from a biology standpoint.) Three, laughter is also a sign of intelligence in that the understanding of it can denote an absurdity or see another view. My .02
Laura Betterly Yada Yada Marketing Firm
Because they have small fingers/claws....
-Clio
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