When I read some of the posts on AT, I imagine apemen banging away at keyboards. We're getting there.
I believe that we have started to see intelligence in technology, which really is just an application to help us not think. All the scientific knowledge (save for things like medical advancement) that we have obtained is pretty useless when you see it for what it is. We went to space, and brought back rocks. We can solve for X in an algebraic equation. Well whoop dee doo. X=52...so what? What are you going to do with that knowledge...apply it to a bigger but equally useless equation. We're vastly losing our connections with what's real in our world, things like nature, and God. God being the biggy here, so despite our "advancements" all we've really done is spin our wheels.
Your belief's would be wrong if based upon brain cavity volume. In fact, the brain capacity of earlier humanoids was slightly larger than ours currently.
I believe the size peaked at something like 1600cubic cm, we currently have an average of 1300-1400 cubic cm.
Look at the pyramids, it took an incredible understanding of many things such as engineering, mathmatics etc to do that. Not to mention their association with astronomy, people were still extremely intelligent at that time. Until very recently, people have been trying to figure out how they built them!
Something evident the general skull size of ancient humans, and how ours relate is the fact that we have to have wisdom teeth removed because our jaw structure has become to small to accomodate for the extra teeth.
Originally posted by: SammySon
I think that my biological anthro. professor said that -exact- statement.
It's a huge connection the fact the our heads use to be bigger. That, and if one wishes to look biblically into the matter. Look at some of the intellectual Old testament accomplishments like the Arc for example. A man engineers and builds a boat that houses two of each animal...talk about an innovation.
Originally posted by: Haller
Originally posted by: SammySon
I think that my biological anthro. professor said that -exact- statement.
It's a huge connection the fact the our heads use to be bigger. That, and if one wishes to look biblically into the matter. Look at some of the intellectual Old testament accomplishments like the Arc for example. A man engineers and builds a boat that houses two of each animal...talk about an innovation.
hooo boy...
As soon as you dropped the bible references, your credibility flew out the window. Mixing fabricated history (religion) and science is a no-no.
Since there is no evidence of the existance of the "arc", I'd say thats a bad measure of human innovation.
Now, if you want to say that the ARCH, pyramids and paper are signs of a higher potential intelligence factor, then I would agree with you.
lol...I figured that would happen. The pyramids (althought still standing) served an almost more rediculous purpose than the Arc. A big triangular house packed with treasure because a king thought he could take it with him into the afterlife through a square chute about 4 feet by 6 feet located in order to access the sun on a specific day. Because they worshipped an astronomical object. Besides, there is more valid historical evidense that supports the Bible's account of history than that of any other theology on the planet.
Thing is, we can prove the existance of the egyptians because their structures are still standing.
There is no hard evidence of the bible being true. In fact, there is less and less as time goes on.
But, this does not need to be a religion vs evolution thread.
Wow. That was hysterical.
God is the same thing as spackling paste. It's used to fill in the gaps in current theories until our own discoveries make its use insignificant.
"I believe in God because there is nothing else to explain how the stars stay in their courses..."
- Maimonides, in his Guide to the Perplexed
"Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis."
- Pierre Laplace, to Napoleon,
on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God
Hayabusa Rider
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People here really need to become familiar with semantics and definitions.
Humans are exactly the same as far back as recorded history. We are NOT smarter, we are exactly the same. The greatest difference is that we are larger due to better nutrition.
Humans are exactly the same as far back as recorded history. We are NOT smarter, we are exactly the same. The greatest difference is that we are larger due to better nutrition.
Will you cut that out, Hay. We know the world is 6000 years old and they used to move giant stones with their minds. What does semantics, whatever that is, and definitions got to do with Jack?
It's scary when Moonbeam's sarcasm and mine begin to overlap.
Everyone knows the Dinosaur bones were just put here to TRICK us into thinking that the world is older than 6,000 years. God's just f*cking with our heads.
/me sacrifices a small Goat Boy to the legacy of Bill Hicks
Hayabusa Rider
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Do me a favor - Ask Jack what he thinks about the points I posit in my first post in this thread. Everyone else seems to have glossed over it in a stupor or something. What I said there runs contrary to your statement that humans aren't actually smarter.
A 5 year old child is smarter than most adults. Not wiser, but smarter. Short of hormonal or nootropic stimulation, you stop growing new brain cells by 6 months old and only get dumber from then on.
I wouldn't define smarter as who has the most brain cells, would you?
A five year old child certainly soaks up information at a much greater rate than a grown adult. That's without contention. I read one study that stated a 5 year old picks up 17,000 units of information (What makes up a unit of information they didn't explicitly state), whereas a grown adult picks up less than 200 or so.
The non-matured mind is certainly much more malleable and flexible than an adults; which is why elementary education is so important. I personally think that the US's system is 50 shades of f*cked, but that's a whole other discussion.
Regardless, I would not define intelligence as ability to absorb information nor how many brain cells are possessed. Personally, I define it as both the amount of information possessed and the ability to utilize that information in a worthwhile manner. By that definition, a savant who has managed to accumulate all the knowledge of the universe but is incapable of using that in some productive way isn't as intelligent as the person who knows enough about automotive engineering to design a revolutionary powertrain concept.
Hayabusa Rider
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Ok, I'll step out of character for a moment and not only be serious, but appear to be as well.
One must be careful when one talks about human evolution. Are we talking about humans as a species? Or are we talking about scientific progress and the increase in the total amount of information known? They are not the same.
Now evolution is loosly defined as the process by which a species adapts to changing environments. Humans have not had time to significantly change physiologically in a few thousand years. What has changed is the volume of information available to any one individual. Ok, we have a lot of data. If we took Gauss, or Riemann at their peak, do you not think they capable of understanding math as we do today? Of course they could. Likewise, Kepler in all probably would do quite well if educated with the materials we have today. DaVinci too. What separates them from us that each generation builds on the last. The people are the same, but they pass something down, an intellectual inheritence if you will. It is as if you took a colony of ants and watched them tunnel. Over time, the workers die and are replaced. The tunnels grow in size and complexity. Now is a later generation of ants superior to the earlier? No. They are building on others work. So it is with people.
OK, MacH5 you asked:
The human body consists of billions of distinct cells. Each of those cells forms a larger system with like cells; skin cells form the epidermal layer with other skin cells, heart cells form the heart, etc etc.(Not germane)
All of those parts work almost independently, with little to no feedback from the other internal systems - The brain certainly doesn't monitor the work of the white blood cells, the heart doesn't get involved with what the skin does, and so on.(Wrong, feedback is intense encluding nervous, bilchemical and physical)
Each of these billions of cells has a job to do, encoded in its DNA strands, and it does it without complaining and without being told what to do.(It's told what to do by gene expression and feedback)
In a sense, our bodies are communists.(True of China)
Society has evolved in much the same way. At first we were scattered across the globe, working independently. (No at first we were isolated in a small group)Now, technology has shrunk the world to a size where we're much more intertwined, our actions have repercussions that ripple out further than before, and we serve as the individual cells in sentient being we don't even know exists -(Huh? Is this science or a romance novel?) The world. Really, you can think of humankind as one giant organism, in which the individual humans are like the cells.(Yup just like a giant amoeba)
We're not to the point where we're totally autonomous and capable of functioning without other inputs, and I have no delusions that we'll ever reach that point. (HUH?) I think the likelihood that a sentient machine intelligence emerges is a million times more probably than humankind ever working together completely and utterly coordinated; I blame our memes.(How would you know?)
Regardless of how far we are from being like the human body, we nonetheless share some similarities.(Glad to report I share quite a few similarities with my human body, an uncanny number actually,)
Regarding the idea of "are we smarter than the people 100 years ago?" it depends.(Well it doesn't depend on all the stuff we just went threw that had nothing to do with anything and actually it doesn't depend at all.))
Have our brains evolved or devolved in the last century? Certainly not. 100 years isn't enough time to experience any worthwhile mutations in biological organisms.(Neither is 6000 years)
Nonetheless, thanks to the fact that human knowledge is cumulative, and technology makes it multiplicative, the amount we know about the universe is growing at an exponential rate. Human understanding about the fundementals of every facet of knowledge has grown a thousandfold in the last century, and will continue to do so.Intelligence isn't information so this is irrelevant.)
Our brains may be incapable of absorbing the entirety of the human knowledge base, (Speak for yourself) but our ability to sift the important information from the unimportant remains intact, and therefore due to the information at our disposal, we ARE smarter than those that came before.(No we just know more. {some of us, that is} We are not smarter.)
The human body consists of billions of distinct cells. Each of those cells forms a larger system with like cells; skin cells form the epidermal layer with other skin cells, heart cells form the heart, etc etc.(Not germane)
All of those parts work almost independently, with little to no feedback from the other internal systems - The brain certainly doesn't monitor the work of the white blood cells, the heart doesn't get involved with what the skin does, and so on.(Wrong, feedback is intense encluding nervous, bilchemical and physical)
Each of these billions of cells has a job to do, encoded in its DNA strands, and it does it without complaining and without being told what to do.(It's told what to do by gene expression and feedback)
In a sense, our bodies are communists.(True of China)
Society has evolved in much the same way. At first we were scattered across the globe, working independently. (No at first we were isolated in a small group)Now, technology has shrunk the world to a size where we're much more intertwined, our actions have repercussions that ripple out further than before, and we serve as the individual cells in sentient being we don't even know exists -(Huh? Is this science or a romance novel?) The world. Really, you can think of humankind as one giant organism, in which the individual humans are like the cells.(Yup just like a giant amoeba)
We're not to the point where we're totally autonomous and capable of functioning without other inputs, and I have no delusions that we'll ever reach that point. (HUH?) I think the likelihood that a sentient machine intelligence emerges is a million times more probably than humankind ever working together completely and utterly coordinated; I blame our memes.(How would you know?)
Regardless of how far we are from being like the human body, we nonetheless share some similarities.(Glad to report I share quite a few similarities with my human body, an uncanny number actually,)
Regarding the idea of "are we smarter than the people 100 years ago?" it depends.(Well it doesn't depend on all the stuff we just went threw that had nothing to do with anything and actually it doesn't depend at all.))
Have our brains evolved or devolved in the last century? Certainly not. 100 years isn't enough time to experience any worthwhile mutations in biological organisms.(Neither is 6000 years)
Nonetheless, thanks to the fact that human knowledge is cumulative, and technology makes it multiplicative, the amount we know about the universe is growing at an exponential rate. Human understanding about the fundementals of every facet of knowledge has grown a thousandfold in the last century, and will continue to do so.Intelligence isn't information so this is irrelevant.)
Our brains may be incapable of absorbing the entirety of the human knowledge base, (Speak for yourself) but our ability to sift the important information from the unimportant remains intact, and therefore due to the information at our disposal, we ARE smarter than those that came before.(No we just know more. {some of us, that is} We are not smarter.)
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