Ask and answer stupid questions here! - Page 340

On September 12 2015 02:51 Simberto wrote:

Evolution works twofold, on an individual frame as you have described, and on a species frame. For this first part, lets assume that not aging also means that your species stops changing as you don't reproduce as much. Now, your non-aging genes somehow take over your whole species, and it stops changing (or changes slower than other species). Fast forward a few million years, and suddenly your species gets outcompeted by another species that kept on evolving (maybe another offspring of your original species that was somehow isolated from your anti aging gene), or the enviroment changes in a way that makes your whole timestuck species obsolete. And suddenly your aging gene is just completely gone.

That evolution does not indeed only care about the competitive advantage of the individual, but also works on all sorts of different scales like family, or even species, can easily be seen in nature at a lot of different points. For example, we have empathy and feel bad for others if they are in a bad spot. We might even help them. This is an evolved behavior, that can be seen not only in humans, but in a lot of other animals too. We also feel like this if we are in a situation where noone would ever know. But this is also obviously disadvantageous to the individual that is prosocial and helps another. You could just kill them and take their stuff (looking at this obviously not from the point of view of a modern human, but of an individual a few million years back that doesn't have to work within todays social frameworks). This action would give you more resources, thus increasing your chances to mate some more and have more offspring. And still we evolved empathy, because empathy helped the species outcompete other species.

And of course environmental concerns have everything to do with your genes. Note that i am not talking about modern society, modern human society has not been around for long enough for a period of time long enough for evolution to have any meaningful effect. So an environmental problem directly effects your offspring. If you don't age, you are going to keep the resources that you have aquired (for example the area you live in) to yourself. Now, if you have children at the same rate as a constantly dying and refreshing population, you very quickly run out of room. Which means that your children have nowhere to go. Either they kill you (because you don't die naturally, someone has to kill you to take over your hunting grounds), at which point your not dying just makes everything more complicated and hard for your offspring, or you kill them/drive them off to shitty hunting grounds. Until there no longer are any hunting grounds, at which point you have to kill them. Thus, you would have to either reproduce slower than if you had simply aged and died, up to a rate where you effectively reproduce at roughly the speed that the old immortals die off due to being eaten by wolves, which is slower and thus also slows down your evolution due to having less generations in the same time to work with. Or you just kill of your offspring, don't get eaten by wolves, and completely stagnate. Or your children kill you when they come of age and take your stuff, but that also means that your non-aging actually isn't a competetive advantage at all, it is a disadvantage, because it makes it harder for your children to take your stuff.

And as for some empirical evidence: Almost every species we know of ages and dies. You can now either assume that this is somehow a magical constant that just has to be, but that seems weird and also does not fit with facts like the existence of a very few species likeTurritopsis dohrnii, which do not appear to age at all, or can even age backwards if they like. So there must be some sort of selection advantage to aging and dying.

Maybe you shouldn't be as quick to dismiss anothers opinion as "They don't understand the subject" when your own opinion is based on a very superficial knowledge of the subject matter at hand.

On September 12 2015 15:24 whatisthisasheep wrote:
Is Eve a home wrecker considering she broke up Adam and his first wife?

On September 12 2015 17:22 OtherWorld wrote:

My religious education is near zero but how can Eve not be Adam's first wife if both of them were the first two human beings created by God? Did Adam used to fuck a goat or something? d:

On September 12 2015 15:24 whatisthisasheep wrote:
Is Eve a home wrecker considering she broke up Adam and his first wife?

On September 12 2015 15:24 whatisthisasheep wrote:
Is Eve a home wrecker considering she broke up Adam and his first wife?

On September 13 2015 07:49 whatisthisasheep wrote:
If listening to classical music makes you smart, does listening to Katy perry and lady gaga make you stupid?

On September 13 2015 08:18 Sent. wrote:


both statements are equally smart

On September 13 2015 15:42 OtherWorld wrote:

I think the important thing here is to determine if those statements are correct or false, not smart or stupid d:

On September 13 2015 21:19 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


It's a conditional, so I'm not sure if we're supposed to be evaluating the truth value of the entire if-then statement, or independently talking about classical and then pop music. There's probably no causal relationship with either music-type anyway.

So let's start with the antecedent... what evidence is there that "classical music makes you smart"?

And second, if there was such evidence, why would that mean that the inverse (not contrapositive!) that therefore non-classical music makes you non-smart is true?