Posted by: "Thos E M" http://in.f84.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=thosem@gmail.com&Subj=tearlm
Sat Dec 1, 2007 9:03 am (PST)
Posted by: "Steve Schapel" http://in.f84.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=miscellany%40mvps.org miscellanynzFri Nov 30, 2007 9:39 pm (PST)
LOL!! Cheers, Glenys.Yes, I don't know when it will happen, but I'm pretty sure it will besometime after breakfast. :-)Please don't take it personally if I grouse just a bit about this and similar reactions:I'm pretty sure that folks here take seriously the modern scientific view of geologic time and the evolution of life on Earth, as contrasted with the creationist view that history hardly extends farther into the past than biblical times.So how can you be so flippant about the long future stretching out ahead of us? I guess it's a natural first reaction, and I appreciate the humor and playfulness, while suggesting the longest possible view as we set our values and prioritize how we'll spend our lives and fortunes, far beyond our own personal horizons. Isn't that what we wish our corporate CEOs would do when they operate their businesses, or our governmental leaders, for that matter?Climate change has become an immediate and pressing problem on a horizon of decades, but skeptics like Bjorn Lomberg are making essentially the same argument you are making: "it isn't yet clear that anything is changing in the immediate future, and even if it were, it is most likely produced by natural forces beyond our control, so it is pointless to try and do anything about it." And then there are the fundamentalist rapture seekers, who place the time horizon at "the return of the Lord". But please consider expanding your time horizon farther into the future. And then keep expanding it, without limit. Then, I'd claim, you will be pursuing a pantheist spirituality to its conceptual ends.And now, lest you fault me for unrelenting seriousness, a touch of humor:Tom Moore"Eternity is very long, especially toward the end." -- Woody Allen
////////////////////////.................Instead of trying to survive until the Earth becomes uninhabitable,what if we invoke an earlier hypothetical demise of humans onEarth, as Judy suggested earlier? Most likely, the Earth would get onjust fine without us, but would that assure a future dead end for lifein (this part of) the universe? One Amazon reviewer hopes for asmarter successor species. Why should s/he care? I think it could bebecause, despite our shortcomings, we aspire to great things, likepreserving and propagating a way for the cosmos to know itself. Thanks to all for the interactions on this topic. I'm trying to writesomething about this and it is helping a lot to try some ideas out onothers with an interest. Tom MooreCrofton, MD, USA"A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times hisown weight in other people's patience." -- John Updike
////////////////////..............Reply to Tom Moore
Posted by: "schen016@umn.edu" http://in.f84.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=schen016@umn.edu&Subj=thomasschenk55116
Sat Dec 1, 2007 2:17 pm (PST)
Tom writes: "When we appreciate that Earth itself is only a vehicle upon which we are all riding through space, and that we will have to abandon it when its useful life ends, then I think it helps us realize that "the chosen people" will be the ones who learn to conserve life on Earth and plan toward its preservation when Earth is gone."I don't consider the Earth to be but a vehicle upon which we are riding through space. I consider it mother and home. Frankly, if the Mother has to go, I think I would choose to go with her. For me, to go somewhere else would be to be an exile.I love the biosphere, but I am not at all certain that the highest expression of that love is to be obsessed with its preservation. As the Tao Te Ching iterates, Nature doesn't cling, and humans lose there balance when they cling. And we humans are terribly out of balance -- koyanasqasti. Worrying about the far off future is not the way to find balance. I think the best thing we can do for a healthy future is to learn how to be here, now.But Tom, maybe someday people in the future will be very grateful to people like you for the steady persistent work that will one day save humanity -- allowing it to part the Red Sea of space and wonder for forty light years through space to that promised land. And hopefully, like Noah, they will take two of each creature with them. The fact that you care about those potential future people and I don't, I'll readily admit, may make you a better man than I (with a nod to the Yardbirds).Thomas
/////////////////////rgds
//////////////////The point is, evolution is only "directed" in that it favors survival, it does not favor high intelligence or walking upright or use of tools, unless those features aid in the survival and passing on of genes to the next generation. Other animals, for instance mosquitos, don't seem to be suffering for lack of these human-like capabilities.
////////////////////But if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"
First, I am not going to give you the common brush off to your question: "We didn't evolve from monkeys, monkeys and humans share a common ancestor". That's just avoiding the question, and frankly, I don't agree with it. I'm going to assume that when you say "monkey," you not only include those animals called monkeys that are alive today, but also animals that looked and behaved like monkeys that lived millions of years ago. An animal that lived about 40 million years ago, known as Aegyptopithecus, is believed by scientists to be a direct ancestor of humans. If I saw that animal swinging through the tree branches today, I'd certainly call it a monkey.
I'm going to go one step further and assume that you are using the term monkey even more colloquially, and include chimpanzees and gorillas under the general umbrella of monkeys. Technically those are apes, but since they are non-human primates that are indeed decended from monkeys, let's go ahead and let that one by. So below, I'm going to cover a scenario whereby humans might have evolved from apes, while leaving apes still existing.
Before I continue, though, let's clear one thing up. It is natural to think of humans as "more evolved" than other animals, but this isn't true in any scientific sense. We are differently evolved, simply adapted to a different environment. It so happens that our intelligence, and the culture and technology that it spawned, has turned out to allow us an unprecedented degree of success, and the ability to live in environments that our ancestors couldn't. But evolution didn't somehow anticipate this.
The point is, evolution is only "directed" in that it favors survival, it does not favor high intelligence or walking upright or use of tools, unless those features aid in the survival and passing on of genes to the next generation. Other animals, for instance mosquitos, don't seem to be suffering for lack of these human-like capabilities.
interfertile: two animals are interfertile if they would be able to produce an offspring, if they were allowed to mate or were artificially inseminated. If they are both the same sex, they are interfertile if each could produce an offspring with the appropriate sex parent of the other.See this essay for an elaboration on the concept of interfertility, and why I use the word rather than the ambiguous expression "the same species."
Around 7-10 million years ago, there was a population of apes in the forests of Africa, all of which were interfertile with all the others. These apes probably roughly resembled modern day gorillas, chimpanzees or bonobos ("pygmy champanzees"), but were not identical to any of them. Nor were they interfertile with any ape or human alive today.
The forests eventually reached the maximum capacity of these apes per square mile as it could support. Like modern chimpanzees, it is likely that various bands of the apes fought with and killed members of adjacent bands, with winners taking over the territory from losers. Even in the absense of fighting, there is a limit as to how many animals an environment can support, so the number of apes stabilized at this number.
Some of the apes lived near the edge of the forest, where the thick trees give way to the drier grasslands, or savanna. There were still trees, but they were much less dense than in the forests. While these apes were less adapted to this environment than they were to the forest, at least there was less competition from the other apes. The apes who lived in this transitional area gradually adapted to the different environment. Tree climbing ability and upper body strength was less important than ability to move about on the ground, and capabilities like carrying things long distances and throwing rocks at prey or predators were valuable. The savannah-compatible attributes and skills increased in number and degree among the populations living in the transition area between forest and savannah.
Over hundreds of thousands of years, more and more of the apes spread out farther and farther into the savanna. They continued to adapt to the savanna, becoming different in appearance and behaviour from those in the forests, much as coyotes differ from gray wolves today. The apes that lived near the border of forest and savanna looked and behaved like a cross between those living deep in the forest or far into the savanna, much as red wolves look and behave like a cross between coyotes and gray wolves. Like coyotes, gray wolves and red wolves, all of the apes -- whether living in the forest or the savannah -- were interfertile with all the others, as they were still fairly close relatives and therefore genetically similar.
A million or so years later, some of the apes were living over one thousand miles apart, and were separated by more than 10,000 generations -- 10,000th cousins, so to speak. Some were so distantly related that they were no longer interfertile with one another. Had they somehow been put together and tried to breed, they would not have produced offspring. However, they remained interfertile with the apes closer to them.
Typically, those less than 6000 generations apart remained interfertile. So they all were still "connected" by a chain of interfertile pairs. While it might be impossible for two apes that were 10,000 generations apart to have children together, they could have still theoretically shared grandchildren or great-grandchildren, by mating with apes that were only 5000 generations apart, which in turn mated with ones 5000 generations apart. Keep in mind, though, that in reality the degree of interfertility was rarely if ever tested: apes interbred only with apes that lived nearby, which were rarely separated by more than a dozen or so generations.
As time went on, the apes living in the forest became separated by more and more generations from the apes in the savanna. No longer were any of the apes interfertile with all of the others, not even the ones living in the transition territories. As populations ebbed and flowed, various bands moved about, took over territory of others, suffered from diseases and starvation and predation and changing climates -- eventually there became a day that the last "interfertility link" between the forest apes and savanna apes died. This day came and went without fanfare, as interfertility is a hypothetical concept: it is unlikely that any of forest apes had even tried to breed with any of the savanna apes for thousands of years prior to the point it became theoretically impossible.
From this point on, the two lines were completely diverged. There was no turning back, as it was now impossible for any of the forest apes to mix their genetic code with the savanna dwellers. The apes living in the forest continued to thrive in the forest, and were the ancestors of modern chimpanzees and bonobos. The apes in the savanna were our ancestors, and by this point, there is a good chance they looked a lot like primitive humans. They were far more intelligent than the apes in the forest, since intelligence had an especially high value in the savanna. Being able to accurately throw a rock, sharpen a stick to use as a weapon, make a fence or other structure to protect themselves from predators, and make use of animal furs were all extremely valuable skills here, and those that more readily acquired these skills tended to be the ones that produced the most surviving children.
One final point I'll make to avoid upsetting the scientists: the more we learn about the path from ape to human, the more we know just how messy the process really was. I described it as a fairly neat process, one group evenly and gradually splitting into two over the course of a couple million years or so. In reality, there appear to have been numerous partial splits, and numerous different fluctuating populations with various degrees of interfertility (and actual interbreeding) between them. Most splits led to eventual extinction, Neanderthal man being a well known (and relatively recent) example. Certain chance events happened along the way, for instance there is evidence a jaw mutation that reduced biting power allowed the brain to grow bigger. In the forest that mutation was a disadvantage, but in the savanna the additional cognitive power given by the larger brain outweighed the loss of bite strength.
It hasn't even been conclusively proven that we are not still interfertile with chimpanzees: some people speculate that a hybrid may be possible, although personally I would bet against it. It is very likely we would be interfertile with Neanderthals. Likewise, modern chimpanzees are interfertile with bonobos, although there is no interbreeding in the wild between the two species as they are separated by the immense Congo River.
Please bookmark the page, as I'm working on a demo of speciation, written in javascript. I also have plans to turn this site into....well I'm not entirely sure, but it will be something. Email me if you have any thoughts to share. Thanks for reading,-rob
/////////////////SORRY ABT AND FOR HER
/////////////////////wisdom is not about speaking, it is about keeping quiet ! and thats not my cup of tea.
////////////////////////Someone once asked Jean Cocteau, "Suppose your house were on fire and you could remove only one thing. What would you take?"
Cocteau considered, then said, "I would take the fire."
////////////////////Life Extension Update Exclusive
Studies find supplement users tend to weigh less and experience less hunger
An article published online ahead of print recently in the British Journal of Nutrition revealed the finding of Canadian researchers that consumers of nutritional supplements, particularly men, weigh less on average than those who don’t use the supplements. Additionally, a second study reported in the article found an appetite suppressive effect in women associated with multinutrient supplementation.
For the first investigation, Dr Angelo Tremblay of Laval University and colleagues analyzed responses to a questionnaire and dietary and physical activity diary completed by 267 men and 320 women aged 20 to 65 who participated in phase 2 of the Quebec Family Study. Resting energy expenditure and body weight were measured, and body density, body fat, and fat mass were calculated. A subgroup of participants was questioned concerning dietary restraint, disinhibition, and susceptibility to hunger (a measure of an individual’s ability to cope with feeling hungry).
In the second study, 63 obese men and women with no nutritional supplement use within six months of beginning the study were enrolled in a weight loss program for 15 weeks. Participants received individualized daily calorie targets, and were divided to receive a multinutrient supplement or a placebo for the duration of the study.
The first study revealed significantly lower weight, fat mass and body mass index among male supplement users after adjusting for various factors, as well as greater resting energy expenditure. These characteristics were also found among female participants, but were less pronounced. In the subgroup analysis, women who reported that they consumed supplements were found to have significantly lower disinhibition and hunger, while men’s slightly reduced scores in these areas were not considered statistically significant.
Although the second study did not find increased weight loss among multinutrient supplement users compared with nonusers, it did find a reduction in appetite among women who used supplements, which could be useful in helping women cope with the increase in hunger that accompanies dieting and weight loss.
Because some nutrients are involved in the synthesis of peptides and neurotransmitters that control food intake, decreased intake of these vitamins and minerals may interfere with signaling pathways involving appetite. Additionally, suboptimal micronutrient intake could result in signaling to the brain’s centers to increase food intake so that the body’s needs for these nutrients might be met.
“These results strengthen the plausible role for vitamins and minerals in the control of appetite and ultimately energy intake,” the authors write.
TAKE MULTIVIT TAB OD
//////////////////It must have been the engineering community that thought manned flightto be impossible. It wouldn't have violated any scientific principles,even back then. If there is an escape from something as fundamental asthe speed limit set by light, scientists are going to be verysurprised (not for the first time, to be sure). Even if one invokes the possibility of "teleportation, " that has to bejust cloning in a different location, based on transfer ofinformation, so it still can occur no faster than the speed of light.If we do turn out to be wrong about space travel time scales, we areprobably wrong that the sun will evolve into a red giant, too. But wecan see a lot of red giants out there, so we probably aren't wrong. Itcomes down to placing bets on the basis of best science andengineering knowledge at a given point in time. Tom MooreCrofton MD USA"A scientist studies what is; an engineer creates what never was." --Theodor von Karman
////////////////////////Computer Security Day [Nov 30]
World AIDS Day [Dec 1]
Make A Gift Day [Dec 3]
Hanukkah [Dec 4 (sunset) - 12 (nightfall)]
/////////////////////http://www.positiveatheism.org/crt/pin.htm
/////////////////////From Chapter VI: The Yoga of MeditationVI.29. SARVABHOOTASTHAMAATMAANAM SARVABHOOTAANI CHAATMANI;EEKSHATE YOGAYUKTAATMAA SARVATRA SAMADARSHANAH.(Krishna speaking to Arjuna)With the mind harmonised by Yoga he sees the Self abidingin all beings and all beings in the Self; he sees thesame everywhere.VI.30. YO MAAM PASHYATI SARVATRA SARVAM CHA MAYI PASHYATI;TASYAAHAM NA PRANASHYAAMI SA CHA ME NA PRANASHYATI.He who sees Me everywhere and sees everything in Me,he does not become separated from Me nor do I becomeseparated from him.COMMENTARY: The Lord describes here the effect of oneness.
YOGA TO GON-THE COMMUNION
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