[blackshoe]

mikeh, on 2014-February-22, 15:01, said:

The development of the bicameral mind.

Fascinating. I was unaware of this. Like Dawkins, I'm skeptical, but i'm hedging my bets.

It does occur to me that if the development of consciousness is the result of a genetic mutation, the taxonomy of humans needs a little reworking - it would seem that the arrival of modern homo sapiens sapiens was not 50,000 years ago, but 3,000. That ought to stir up a few Catholics (not to mention others)!

[kenberg]

mikeh, on 2014-February-22, 15:01, said:

The main problem with answering the OP is the somewhat ill-defined nature of 'event'.

....


Here's another one, and one that I find fascinating.

The development of the bicameral mind.

This idea argues that until about 3000 years ago homo sapiens was intelligent but lacked consciousness. I don't have time to set out my layman's understanding of this idea, but google the bicameral mind and you will find that the notion, although it sounds weird, cannot be (or at least has not yet been) shown to be incorrect, and it explains a very great deal about ancient literature and beliefs, as well as affording a possible explanation for such things as schizophrenia.

Now, even if true, it is far from clear that the development of consciousness, to the arguably limited extent that we are conscious, is an 'event' either, rather than a development.

Also, the jury may still be out on whether this is a good thing. Some years back I saw a fun play called Wrong Turn at Lungfish. You can probably guess the premise but to save you the effort the idea was that evolution made a serious error sometime back.

[sharon j]

what about the concept of trade or commerce?

[Vampyr]

sharon j, on 2014-February-23, 09:00, said:

what about the concept of trade or commerce?

Well, the purchase of the islands of Manhattan and Staten Island by the Dutch certainly had a big impact on history, but as an "event" it is not too significant because it was inevitable that Europeans were going to take over the East Coast of America one way or another.

[onoway]

sharon j, on 2014-February-23, 09:00, said:

what about the concept of trade or commerce?

This is actually an interesting idea. Go back further and consider. Trading with or having interactions with other tribes or groups which did NOT involve clubbing each other on the head would indeed have had an impact. What a concept.

Many species drive the male young away so as to prevent too much inbreeding in the group but that seems to be a fairly haphazard situation. Formalizing such arrangments in ways other than raids would presumably lead to cooperative efforts between groups in other areas as well. Such arrangements lasted down well into "modern" times and indeed may exist yet in places which still practice arranged marriages.

Trade in other areas as well would seem to suggest a beginning of some sort of economic model, though I am out of my depth in those waters. It would also seem to suggest an interest in other than the here and now which is where most other creatures appear to live, and could have given rise to what eventually developed into science through the introduction of things outside the group's experience.

Even back then, there were probably people who wanted to investigate further and others who screamed the equivilent of "witchcraft, bop (him, her, it) on the head or it will cause the end of the world as we know it!"

I think Sharon has a very good point. Again it sits somewhere on a continuum, but then most things do, it seems.

[Cthulhu D]

kenberg, on 2014-February-22, 19:11, said:

Also, the jury may still be out on whether this is a good thing. Some years back I saw a fun play called Wrong Turn at Lungfish. You can probably guess the premise but to save you the effort the idea was that evolution made a serious error sometime back.

It has made a number of them, and this is definitely demonstrable because evolution can get 'stuck' in a local maxima that prevents reaching the absolute maxima. Consider your eyes. Your eyes have the nerves coming out of the front of your retina, which loops then back through your retina to behind your eye. This creates a blindspot in your vision that your eyes compensate for via a variety of tricks. (It's also wired up to stuff on the back of your brain)

Obviously this design is totally dumb. The optimal design would be a design like a squid, which has the nerve cluster leaving the back of your eye and thus no blindspot.

This shows that evolution isn't some perfect force - there is no way for your eye to turn 'inside out' so evolution's sequential changes will never get to the most optimal design. It also shows intelligent design is totally bunk because intelligent design has not been deployed here. This has probably happened because the eye has involved in two different ways.

[onoway]

dustinst22, on 2014-February-21, 13:45, said:

It's an interesting subject for sure, but unfortunately this subject is being sensationalized by the media and people are buying into it. The general consensus amongst the scientific community is that food from GM crops poses no greater risk than conventional food. I think it's far too soon to predict what the long term affects of GMO's will have on food production.

Dustin I didn't answer your post directly as it is off topic but it has been bothering me that I let it pass. I will happilly discuss your conclusions as they are imo and with evidence, absolutely wrong. I'm not sure if anyone else is interested in this topic but if you want to start a thread on it I will certainly engage with you on it. I would be most interested to see exactly what you have to offer in terms of GMO's being established as safe and sustainable agriculture, as there is a whole lot of evidence to the contrary.

[mike777]

blackshoe, on 2014-February-22, 15:54, said:

Fascinating. I was unaware of this. Like Dawkins, I'm skeptical, but i'm hedging my bets.

It does occur to me that if the development of consciousness is the result of a genetic mutation, the taxonomy of humans needs a little reworking - it would seem that the arrival of modern homo sapiens sapiens was not 50,000 years ago, but 3,000. That ought to stir up a few Catholics (not to mention others)!

NOt sure how you define consciousness or even what standard you measure and compare it.

Likewise GMO....how do we define and measure and compare it?

oTOH if all of this is somewhat spiritual ok....that is fair


Philosophy need not only be limited on how the world works and where we belong in it.

[dustinst22]

onoway, on 2014-February-24, 00:04, said:

Dustin I didn't answer your post directly as it is off topic but it has been bothering me that I let it pass. I will happilly discuss your conclusions as they are imo and with evidence, absolutely wrong. I'm not sure if anyone else is interested in this topic but if you want to start a thread on it I will certainly engage with you on it. I would be most interested to see exactly what you have to offer in terms of GMO's being established as safe and sustainable agriculture, as there is a whole lot of evidence to the contrary.

Hi Pam, here is a good article on this: http://www.forbes.co...tions-weigh-in/ and this http://www.slate.com...cary_story.html

Or if you care to read more on the sources:

http://ec.europa.eu/...mo_research.pdf

http://www.genetics....t/188/1/11.long

http://www.aaas.org/...d-falsely-alarm

"While every major scientific regulatory oversight body in the world, including the National Academies of Science and the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, has concluded that genetically modified foods pose no harm not also found in conventional or organic foods, the public remains deeply suspicious of them. A survey published in the same newspaper the day before Harmon’s piece ran found that 37 percent of those interviewed worried about GMOs, saying they feared that such foods cause cancer or allergies.
Those fear-based views are regularly reinforced by popular lifestyle magazines and the echo chamber of the Web."

"Since GMOs were introduced into the food supply almost 20 years ago, there has not been one documented case of any health problem in humans—not even so much as a sniffle—linked to GMOs. The American Medical Association, whose physician members would have long ago picked up on a GMO-allergy connection, definitively rejects such speculation. “Bioengineered foods have been consumed for close to 20 years, and during that time, no overt consequences on human health have been reported and/or substantiated in the peer-reviewed literature,” it has stated. That scientific consensus has been endorsed by every major science oversight body in the world."

I won't post anymore about this as it's off the topic and really shouldn't even be a consideration as an answer to the OP's question.

[Vampyr]

dustinst22, on 2014-February-24, 13:06, said:

I won't post anymore about this as it's off the topic and really shouldn't even be a consideration as an answer to the OP's question.

Someday GMOs could turn out to have a big impact on human history, by providing the means to feed an ever-growing population on an ever-dwindling amount of arable land. Now, whether this is a good or a bad thing is not at all clear.

[onoway]

Vampyr, on 2014-February-24, 13:30, said:

Someday GMOs could turn out to have a big impact on human history, by providing the means to feed an ever-growing population on an ever-dwindling amount of arable land. Now, whether this is a good or a bad thing is not at all clear.

Ok I am going to start a thread on this.

[paua]

onoway, on 2014-February-16, 06:45, said:

The question came up as a result of insomia but still...What events for which humans were responsible has had (is having, will have) the most profound effect on world history?

It started out as one event but that seemed to be impossible to decide so allowed for a couple more. I was wondering if anyone else would come up with the same events as I did.

Inventions and discoveries aside:
Defeat of the Spanish Armada
Waterloo
Battle of Britain

[Zelandakh]

paua, on 2014-February-26, 14:31, said:

Defeat of the Spanish Armada
Waterloo
Battle of Britain

Add Agincourt to the list. And perhaps Stamford Bridge, Quebec, Rorke's Drift, El Alemein, Balaklava and Goose Green too. Plus Culloden if you are not Scottish . Just don't mention Hastings, Orleans, Yorktown, Singapore or Isandlwana! Naseby could be put in both lists.

[onoway]

possibly the development of a navigational system based on the stars. Those go back a very very long time, although again were developed in various parts of the world independantly.

[nige1]

onoway, on 2014-February-16, 06:45, said:

The question came up as a result of insomia but still...What events for which humans were responsible has had (is having, will have) the most profound effect on world history? It started out as one event but that seemed to be impossible to decide so allowed for a couple more. I was wondering if anyone else would come up with the same events as I did.

Possible candidate areas: Astrophysics, Geology, Genetics (Mendel's genetic theories, Darwin's evolutionary theory, Discovery of the structure of DNA by Rosalind Franklin & Co -- I agree with onoway that the decisions to allow genetic and software patents were insane), Palaeontology (radiometric dating, stratification), Archaeology, Anthropology.

IMO, however, the events that had the most profound effect on world-history (unleashing floods of information, gradually breaking the monopoly of kings/conquerors/media moguls) are:

• Writing.
• Printing-press.
• Internet (Historians owe an enormous debt to whistle-blowers).

(4, 5, 6 Film, Radio, Television)

[Al_U_Card]

nige1, on 2014-February-27, 17:58, said:

IMO, however, the events that had the most profound effect on world-history (unleashing floods of information, gradually breaking the monopoly of kings/conquerors/media moguls) are:

• Writing.
• Printing-press.
• Internet (Historians owe an enormous debt to whistle-blowers).

(4, 5, 6 Film, Radio, Television)

Perhaps Mathematics as much as Writing (architecture and engineering)and electronics as a more general lead-in to modern communication. Let's not forget the discovery/use of fire (cooked food/diet/survival:energy availability etc.) as well as psychogenics (religion and philosophy...lol).

Not to forget the natural forces that pushed humanoids out of Africa and that led early civilizations to expand and explore.

Oh, did I mention that spending essential resources and wasting inordinate amounts of time on changing the weather was a current issue?

[Scarabin]

Perhaps we should consider the founding of the great library at Alexandria?

[PassedOut]

In my view, the development of science has had the most profound effect on human history by far. To encapsulate this into an event, I'd have to go with William Gilbert's publication of De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure, which induced Galileo to name Gilbert as the first scientist.

Of course the universe would never have existed without the Big Bang, which now seems on the verge of confirmation: Scientists say they have extraordinary new evidence to support a Big Bang Theory for the origin of the Universe.

Quote

Theory holds that this would have taken the infant Universe from something unimaginably small to something about the size of a marble. Space has continued to expand for the nearly 14 billion years since.

Inflation was first proposed in the early 1980s to explain some aspects of Big Bang Theory that appeared to not quite add up, such as why deep space looks broadly the same on all sides of the sky. The contention was that a very rapid expansion early on could have smoothed out any unevenness.

But inflation came with a very specific prediction - that it would be associated with waves of gravitational energy, and that these ripples in the fabric of space would leave an indelible mark on the oldest light in the sky - the famous Cosmic Microwave Background.

The BICEP2 team says it has now identified that signal. Scientists call it B-mode polarisation. It is a characteristic twist in the directional properties of the CMB. Only the gravitational waves moving through the Universe in its inflationary phase could have produced such a marker. It is a true "smoking gun".

"Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today. A lot of work by a lot of people has led up to this point," said Prof John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a leader of the BICEP2 collaboration.

The sensational nature of the discovery means the BICEP2 data will be subjected to intense peer review.

This might not be confirmed, but the scientific method, first outlined by Gilbert, is at work to provide answers that we can have confidence in.

[Fluffy]

It had been a long time since I didn't understand a word from a scientific text, but it happened again .

But this is another moment where I remind how amazing it is that our species is concious of this things, after all we are just little beings who have never left our tiny solar system (well, Voyager 1 just recently left the solar system), and we are just made of molecules because of a lot of luck.

It saddens me that sometime a meteor or whatever will end our existence, and these achievements will be lost forever.

[mike777]

Fluffy, on 2014-March-17, 15:05, said:

It had been a long time since I didn't understand a word from a scientific text, but it happened again .

But this is another moment where I remind how amazing it is that our species is concious of this things, after all we are just little beings who have never left our tiny solar system (well, Voyager 1 just recently left the solar system), and we are just made of molecules because of a lot of luck.

It saddens me that sometime a meteor or whatever will end our existence, and these achievements will be lost forever.

Keep the faith Fluffy. We may have a few more decades or so to send out a few brave souls off Planet before the big one hits.