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posted by on Thursday March 02 2017, @02:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the food-plus-culture-equals-sauerkraut dept.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams noted that "on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars, and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."

This is an interesting point, and one that's tackled in great detail in Kevin Laland's new book, Darwin's Unfinished Symphony. Other species are indisputably smart; they can learn by example, they can communicate, they can innovate to solve problems, they can use tools, they may even have distinct cultures. But humans are clearly different. Other species don't listen to Baroque concerti or read classical philosophy hundreds of years after the scores were composed or the treatises written. They just don't.

This difference really bugged Laland. He is loath to say that humans are special because that implies some vast, unbridgeable gulf between us and our closest kin. Laland is an evolutionary biologist, and he doesn't go for those sorts of claims. He knows that humans evolved from a common ancestor with other primates through natural selection and other such well-defined mechanisms.

Yet a vast, unbridgeable gulf really does, in fact, come between us and our closest kin. Something huge must have happened to explain how and why we alone have built cathedrals and telescopes and banks and submarines and smartphones and particle accelerators. This is not navel gazing; we are special.

So, with Darwin's Unfinished Symphony, Laland set out to define what that something huge was. He concluded that it was not as dramatic as one of our early ancestors getting repeatedly struck by lightning or bitten by a radioactive spider. Rather, his thesis is that humans alone evolved such a complex culture because humans alone have teachers dedicated to teaching their young. And the reason only we have teachers—people who devote the bulk of their lives to teaching the offspring of strangers not only vital life skills, like how to hunt and fish, but the entire accumulated knowledge of our species over the past few millennia—is because... we have such a complex culture.

Yes, that's circular. We generated culture, which shaped our evolution to allow us to devise language so we could generate an increasingly complex culture—well, that's how feedback loops work.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Thursday March 02 2017, @05:00PM (6 children)

    by Gaaark (41) on Thursday March 02 2017, @05:00PM (#473940) Journal

    Something huge must have happened to explain how we can be so stupid as to pollute and radiate the only planet we live on, then make us race to try to find another planet to live on JUST so we can then go and pollute and radiate THAT planet.

    Something huge.

    Something like being stupid enough to think we are smart.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @07:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @07:13PM (#474016)

    Brilliant! [youtube.com]

  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday March 02 2017, @08:18PM (3 children)

    by RamiK (1813) on Thursday March 02 2017, @08:18PM (#474065)

    Statistically speaking, building up resistances by irradiating and toxifying our environment is pretty smart so long as we're an over-populated apex omnivore that's is otherwise busy on developing the next generation of the iPhone.

    Now, sure it's a dice roll. But the uncertainty of scientific progress in genetic engineering to workaround the demerits of population caps isn't any better.

    Personally, I'm rooting for the zombies, robots and super-mutants so it's a win-win scenario for me either way :D

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    • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday March 02 2017, @09:44PM

      by Gaaark (41) on Thursday March 02 2017, @09:44PM (#474132) Journal

      Zombies and robots and super-mutants? Oh my!

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      --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @01:41AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03 2017, @01:41AM (#474212)

      If you think that random changes amount to "engineering", I don't want to experience your work product.

      building up resistances by [...] toxifying our environment is pretty smart

      It absolutely is not.
      Traits acquired -after- birth are NOT passed on to succeeding generations.
      Lamarckism is pseudoscience. [americanscientist.org]

      ...and really?? [google.com]

      [and irradiating our environment]

      There is no safe dose of ionizing radiation.
      It's all mutagenic and carcinogenic and the effects are cumulative.

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04 2017, @11:43AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04 2017, @11:43AM (#474835)

        An r-selection strategy has been shown to workaround toxification and irradiation for mammals given enough time.

  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday March 03 2017, @03:42PM

    by Bot (3902) on Friday March 03 2017, @03:42PM (#474391) Journal

    Never attribute to stupidity what can be sufficiently explained by malice because THE POWERFUL WANT CONTROL and have always wanted that whoever they are.

    Now, what happens in a polluted world?
    Who can afford living in a pure/purified environment, thrives.
    Who can afford therapy survives, but is completely under control of who administers therapy.
    Who cannot afford therapy, enters the meat grinder. Someone adapts to the poisons and becomes cannonfodder for research/therapy.

    How is this different from any other marketing strategy?

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    Account abandoned.