An Owl?

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Xotica, Feb 12, 2012.

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  1. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    Pakistan (Listeni/ˈpækɨstæn/ or Listeni/pɑːkiˈstɑːn/; Urdu: پاکستان) (Urdu pronunciation: [paːkɪˈst̪aːn] ( listen)), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (Urdu: اسلامی جمہوریۂ پاکستان) is a sovereign country in South Asia.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan

    Islam has no notion of karma and interspecies serial reincarnation.
     
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  3. aaqucnaona This sentence is a lie Valued Senior Member

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    Indeed. Painted exactly the picture I had in my head - hey look at that I can rhyme! LOl.

    But stuff like fear - of heights and predators is instinctive, which is what I wonder about - how are instincts and behaviours genetically determined?
     
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  5. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Rhyme? Where? If you mean "indeed" and "head," those are two different vowels. "Indeed" rhymes with "seed" and "feed." "Head" rhymes with "said" and "fed."
    We're wandering off into material more appropriate for the Biology or Psychology subforums... But instincts are programmed into our brain cells by evolution. Any animal that doesn't have the instinct to flee from a large animal with both eyes in front of its face--without stopping to think about it--won't live long enough to reach sexual maturity and reproduce. A newborn giraffe will clumsily scamper away from a hyena, but will calmly stand and graze next to a much larger rhinoceros.

    The same is true of any animal that will nonchalantly walk off a cliff.

    All animal behavior is complicated, but for vertebrates, insects, molluscs and other phyla of animals with a centralized brain, it has taken hundreds of millions of years for the programming to evolve to its current level of complexity. Each new neuron configuration was the result of natural selection--or in the case of recently domesticated animals like dogs, very unnatural selection. (We have bred dogs to be much more gregarious than wolves, to prefer scavenging to hunting, to have smaller brains which can survive on the lower-protein diet of a scavenger, and to accept a human as the alpha in the pack.)

    Configurations which induce behavior that enhances survivability were passed down to the next generation; those which induce behavior that makes survival difficult or impossible were an evolutionary dead-end.

    The psychology of our own species is much more complex because our forebrain is about ten times as large as that of our closest relative, the chimpanzee, and vastly larger than those of other animals. There's just so much more room for thinking in our brains.

    We can identify many instincts in our own species that are not clearly related to survival. These are not all behaviors, just ideas and beliefs that occur in nearly all societies in nearly all eras. Legends, rituals, visual images in our art, Carl Jung calls these archetypes. Perhaps they were once survival traits in an era whose dangers we can't imagine. Or they could be random mutations passed down through a genetic bottleneck.
     
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  7. Lilalena Registered Senior Member

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    Without paying customers, these people would have no business, and ALL the birds would be free. In short, REFUSING to pay or participate would allow you to enjoy a more meaningful type of karma.

    Not when it involves capturing and possibly maiming or killing alive things.
     
  8. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    * * * * NOTE FROM THE MODERATOR * * * *

    Me-Ki-Gal has been banned for 3 days for two posts which violated so many forum rules that I had to simply delete them: Trolling, posting meaningless content ("incoherent" might be a more accurate description), insulting another member, responding to a previous ban in inappropriate and inflammatory language, insulting the Head Moderator who performed the ban.

    Technically, he qualifies for a longer ban period and this one may be extended.

    This may be the very first time I've had to ban anyone in the Linguistics subforum. Normally this place has all the excitement of the drawing room in a 19th century London gentlemen's club--without the liquor.

    I wish it hadn't happened and I hope it doesn't happen again. I'm pretty loose with the rules here but some simply must be enforced.
     
  9. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    Note from Administrator: Me-Ki-Gal has been banned permanently from sciforums.
     
  10. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    Are birds more important than people?


    Do you eat meat?
     
  11. Lilalena Registered Senior Member

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    You didn't, or possibly, just couldn't, address my main point directly: that you get the same desirable result (setting birds free) by not participating. That actually you get a more meaningful result, by not participating.

    Until you become able to answer the point directly, there's no point in going further with the discussion.
     
  12. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    * * * * NOTE FROM THE MODERATOR * * * *

    This discussion has gone too far from the original topic. That in itself is not something I usually care about. But now you're getting snarky with each other, and I have no patience with that.

    This thread is closed.
     
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