No they don't.

http://begthequestion.info/

Ehh, I'm don't believe in evolution on scientific ground. Natural selection I do, but the idea that natural selecton brough us from near invincible single cell organisisms into the far more easily killed and stupidly more complicated multicelled things.... That I have trouble with. Evolution also fails to explain certain things. Like giraffs. I'm not a zoologist, nor an expert, but this has gone through so many topics I think most of us aren't. Anways, giraffs! Why are there no long necked african horse things inbetween a cammel and giraff to eat the stuff on the middle of the tree? It's been said that there are no leaves on the middle of the tree. That's great! But Then how did something go from a short neck to such a HUGELY long neck without having that "middle" period? That's my to issues with evolution (Again, natural selection -is- proven and I don't dispute it) Also, I don't believe in Genisis' account, either. I'm at the "I don't really know" stage of how life came to be as it is today.

Oh, plus language! That shouldn't have evolved. UG is amazingly silly cause monky grooming and whooping can achieve everything needed for survival. esp. since human revert back to whoops, crying, body language, growls, or tiny single words where voice and expression really carry most the meaning anyways. So yeah, two things evolution fails and are therefore grounds to reject is as accurate (but not grounds to trash it completely)

Also, not everything can be explained through psych. This IS something I know about (it's my major... cogsci (philosophy, linguistics,bio, AI theory, and psych), and being religious I can say many things ARE explainable by religion, even most, but not everything. That being said, there is no hard evidence of god, only subjective, which amounts to nil.

@Namenth possible we could get areference? Site? Book? Author? I'd love too something a bit more official. Yes, I am doubting you, but only cause anyone can say this is my expertise! F3@R m3H!

On that note, if you are gunienely interested in anything I've said on linguistics at least, I can provide some links and journals. The other stuff I can't

Ooh, and I agree peopel place to much faith in science and raise it to religious status too. However not everyone, see the New Mysterians*for a group of scientists that argue some things - the physical properties of he mind, to be precise- we will never understand! Even better, they sound like a secret, evil, organization! Note I have Cog Sci right now and didn't actaully read that link so it might be wrong. If it is, will replace with a better one tonight

Double post FT...L

A giraffe walks into a bar. Bartender says,"You want a longneck?" and the giraffe replies "I have a choice?"

*gape*

Oh-my-sweet-mother-of-Dysnomia. Of all the amazingly intricate and complex lifeforms on the planet, of all the amazing and delicate systems of life, of all the lofty peaks in Mount Improbable whose development and evolution are complex and defy imagination, you pick the giraffe's bloody neck as an example of what couldn't have evolved. You're right, you're not a zoologist, nor an expert. You're not even a moderately well-infromed layperson. Please research your claims, kthx; I'd rather not have to actually explain how giraffes evolved, but hey! I guess I have time on my hands to enlighten you:

Interesting fact: In the African savannah, there are leaves at the reach of every neck length from a horse's neck to a giraffe's neck. Proto-giraffes with longer necks can reach more leaves, including leaves their shorter-necked partners can't reach; ultimately the long neck strategy wins out and giraffe ancestors develop longer and longer necks, until the structural limitations of their bodies or the lack of any substantially higher caches of leaves makes it no longer advantageous to grow a longer neck.

Particularly, giraffes have difficulty grazing; so once their necks are long enough, the only way to go to gain further survival advantage is up, towards higher and higher leaves.

As for mutiple-celled organisms evolving, it's simply a matter of colonies, and then specialised colonies of cells, forming. This happens for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is protection (The unicellular world of protozoa has predators too) and better access to food; competition between those early multicellular organisms lead to early parazoa, at which point the only way is "up", towards higher complexity.


Your bottom is not an accreditated source of information. Evolution can explain the rise of language; there is a definite advantage to people who develop language skills while living in society. It's also reasonable to think language evolved along with large brains which were becoming larger each generation due to better and better access to food and an evolutionary pressure towards high intelligence.

I think it's stupid and dishonest of a scientist to say "Those things are beyond our knowledge! Let's not go there, because that's the domain of Spirituality™!" This is at odds with what we expect of scientists, and it's an insult to people working on those very fields to find the psychological, cognitive and neurological origins of things some people identify as "spiritual".

Most of the stuff I stated could be found in basic introductory books about the Roman Republic/Empire, or the History of Judea.

The documents I am quoting are not part of a book, I have images and transcripts of the actual documents courtesy of the PhD I am working for. My paper in regards to communication will be published in a couple of years, and the PhD is finishing her article and submitting it to American Journal of Archaeology, if you are in a University, you should have access to it, and I will shoot you an email with issue number and page number when we get it.

Plus Nerra, I don't care if you doubt me, this is the Internet, and anyone can make BS up. So doubt in this case is a good idea.

Nevertheless, the scientific community (for whatever reasons) for the most part stays well away from certain subjects. Which means of course, that there's probably many discoveries waiting for us there.

You'll find there's a good deal of prejudice on -both- sides of the spiritual / scientific 'fence'. Unfortunately.

I believe this thread is becoming a bit more acidic in tone than was originally intended. It was meant to be a thread for calm questions and discussion, not for heated arguments.

Perhaps it's about time to allow this to rest for awhile, and revive it a bit later.

Accepted.


Kay, please don't yell at me for not doing my research if you won't. Quick google search A: answers why their necks are long, and B: shoots this explanation of yours down. Now I did my research
www.whyevolution.com/giraffe.html
www1.pacific.edu/~e-buhals/GIRAFFE2.htm

Meh, I'll get to the language later. Although I'll say language is a biological function that has almost nothing to do with intelligence, since you can't learn language without already knowning language.

New Mysterian's aren't duelists. Therefore, they say they don't look to spirituality to answer why we have minds. They just say it's beyond our understanding, at least as we are now. Science has always explained 3rd person objective things. Consciouness is said to be the only first person, subjective thing we've ever tried the explain. That's what seperates it from everything else.
To put it in a different light, they claim our minds are just not "wired" to ever comprehend conciousness. My only reason for bringing them up was to show a group of scientists who don't "worship" science, as they admit it may have limitations.

Mary the Super-Scientist Though Expiriement that helps explain this further. None of it involves spirituality . Again, please don't yell at me for not doing research and not bothering yourself.

Edit:
Oh, okay, more to the topic. Question for the Christians!
It's often said that conciousness/awareness/personality/mind are all things that transcend the physical. If we were to take the duelist aproach (ie: Descartes') then our souls are basically our minds and our bodies/this universe is seperate. This would imply that anything which happens to our physical bodies does not harm the mind/soul. Given this, can you explain the phenomenon where if certain parts of the brain are damaged, the personality can change in very drastic, and predictable ways. Likewise, certain drugs can send poeple into fits of rage, or make angry, stressed people into (more) calm and relaxed people. If the soul is our personality and is immortal/not of this world, how can this be?

Yeah, I was repeating the high school biology textbook because I didn't want to go into sexual selection, which is about twice as complicated as plain ol' natural selection and may cause your brain to hemorrhage.
Yeah. I guess babies are all born knowing their parent's languages, and I guess stupid people can be well-spoken.

Our minds are wired to run after antelopes in the savannah and throw pointy sticks at them. What we've evolved to be capable of is a pretty bad argument; the reality is that human reasoning is extremely flexible, and if something can be studied, then it can be understood. The physical mechanisms of consciousness are here, and they can be studied (Up to the limitations of our instrumentation). Scientists understand the limitations of science in terms of limits to our ability to gather information; for example, we may never know how exactly a particular animal evolved, because said animal didn't leave a sufficiently complete fossil record and is very genetically removed from other species. Or we may never be able to probe very minute scales of matter because we can't gather the energy necessary. Saying that something is inherently incomprehensible and therefore we shouldn't even try is basically being so exquisitely stupid, you have to go right ahead and assume everyone is just as stupid.

Mary wouldn't learn anything new from exiting the room. It would be akin to a researcher who knows precisely the effects of a drug on the brain taking the drug himself - He may experience something new, but he won't have any new information - Unless, of course, taking the drug provides him with information that is unavailable if you don't, but the thought experiment implies that Mary has access to perfect information but not the experience of colour. It just seems, to me, so silly and far removed from real science that anyon serious would be busy actually doing real research, as opposed to making up reasons why we shouldn't try researching things which make people uncomfortable.

Heh, I never said they were right, was offering an opposition to people who said there are people who take science as to much as a religion Anyways Christians! Answer my question posted above! Or someone ask a new one.

don't know if this has been asked and too bored to go and look for it, but...

If we are going to be punished for not following God's rule, why give us free will in the first place?

Language is learned through mimicry. Learning a second is easier with assistance from another language, and harder at the same time.

Take Bob, drop him in China. Bob grew up in England. If Bob can find no one who is from England, and no one else who speaks English, after about a year, he will be able to handle simple conversation, and about five or six years in, he will more or less have conversational language down. Writing is harder of course.

Now if Bob has a Chinese teacher who speaks English, and is in China... he will master Chinese in about 6-8 months.

Language is one form of symbolic communication, where a word equates to a symbol. If you run across someone who doesn't speak English, and you point at a table, and call it a Purple Man Eating Flute, to him, the symbol to use to identify a table becomes the words, "Purple Man Eating Flute" when he is speaking English. Symbol communication can be pointing a rock, then walking over to the rock. This implies that the pointer wants someone to sit there with them.

When combined with the grunts you mentioned before, language begins to form. And becomes more complex, because language opens up the ability to debate an idea, which in turn leads to more complex ideas, which means more complex language. If this language group makes a city, like Rome, then the language has to increase in complexity as society and culture increase in complexity. Eventually, you get what we have today.

That only teaches you the lexicon! You can't form sentence by knowning knowns/verbs alone. Gotta know how to put them together, which is what Universal Grammar, a built-in/innate system of language rules dictates. Lexicon = learned, but the grammar/actaul language is more innate then learned, or so Chompsky says (and that guy is endorsed by Hugo Chavez :/)

@ Corinthian What's the fun in raising kids if they just do what you want without second thought? It's like when someone is being nice cause they want something :/

That's the lamest appeal to authority ever. Endorsed by Hugo Chavez? WTF?

At any rate, listening to a language *can* teach you its sentence structure, grammar, inflections and mannerisms.

Many Christians, and monotheists in general, seem to believe that their God is 'perfect', this meaning that he is all powerful, all knowing, and is 'good', as they define it. My question for them is how they reconcile this with the following logical process:


Without redefining things, how do deal with something like this?

that's the basis of many Christian believes... Do the right thing and you'll go to heaven. Don't you want to go to heaven?

Simple parable;


A man breaks his leg - (good? evil?)

The man is saved from being turned into a slave because of his broken leg (good? evil?)


Because he is now a free man, he is completely responcible to take care of his family, but he can't work because of the broken leg (good? evil? )

Because he can not take care of his family, a man looking to do kindness offers him the job of a lifetime, and pays for his children to go to school as well (good? evil? )

You can continue the story on and on... the basic point is, what you percieve to be good and what you perceive to be evil can change over time. The ability to do evil or good is itself a great benevolence, and in the end, all will be seen as ultimately being for the good. Hindsight is a wonderfull thing.