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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
And the crushing despair that follows when one fails.
Women.
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Sociology is a legitimate science.
Right and wrong. Teenagers are an invention. It used to be that you went from late childhood (13 - 14) into adulthood. There's a reason why many people had little more than an 8th grade education - after that you were expected to join the world of work. Alexander the Great had pounded much of the world into submission by the time he was 20. "Teenagers" as we understand them are a product of post WW2 western culture as a market for commodity capitalism in the face of expanding resource bases. As resource bases contract and the world goes back to a solar economy, expect the teenager to disappear.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Why does your nose run, but your feet smell? That's what *I* have been wondering.
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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!
Kurt Vonnegut sort of agrees (about the reduced defenses) : "Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward â" and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner."
Laughter is certainly not always pleasant, as anyone who's laughed to much will tell you. You know the laughter that borders on hysteria and sometimes ends in tears. It IS a cleansing experience though, your body's safety valve for letting out stored up emotion and frustration.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
The Underground History of American Education is relevent here, if you're interested in one former teacher's account of how forced schooling came to be in the U.S. and where the new concept of "adolescence" came from. Highly depressing; I thoroughly recommend it. It's free to read online. (Not affiliated with it in any way, I just happened to have read it recently.)
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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...]"
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Just because society expected teenagers to work in the past doesn't mean that there aren't significant mental (physical brain) changes going on during that timeframe.
And resources contracting back to a "solar economy"? Turn in your geek card - geeks believe in the power of technology to improve lives. There's no reason to expect that that won't continue.
That's also why the world used to be a much more brutal place. Teenagers and their hormones and persecution and superiority complexes and need to prove themselves need to be contained until they mature a bit. Alexander the great sounds cool until you realize it was a guy with a god-complex (literally) running around with a private army slaughtering people everywhere he went to prove he was bigger and better than his daddy Philip.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
The main evolutionary reaction to incest is the Westermarck effect, which basically means that people usually are not sexually attracted to anyone they spent a significant amount of time around during the first six years of their life. As that usually includes their parents and siblings, it greatly discourages incest.
There are other posts on this thread suggesting that teenage rebellion only occurs in some cultures, so biological evolution does not explain it, although you could perhaps argue that cultural evolution does... but I am not really sure how that would work.
Centralization breaks the internet.