“The Hidden Evolution”

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bpathos

bpathos

Blind Pathos
Registered Senior Member
When the word evolution is used it conjures pictures of monkeys and cave men. What if we are evolving and have lost the significance of it because of its scale? That is, what does a blood cell know of a brain cell unless it’s exchanging oxygen? Single cells in our bodies don’t have the conciseness to know the big picture. Even a neuron can not know what thought the whole brain is manifesting, or does it. As Marshall McLuhan suggested that we constantly create “extensions” of our body…. What of the mind.

We share one giant immune system (the CDC and AMA) and other systems that aid our survival as a species. Our social glue has enabled the evolutionary leap several times only we don’t know just as a cell in the body didn’t know when we began to think. Perhaps “Group Conciseness” is in operation. Our situation is tied to our information gathering and storage.

Humans start out from the memory found in the DNA, RNA, and biological levels of information. One would live a life and accumulate personal knowledge that would be pasted poorly from one person to another.
Not until speech was incorporated into our list of accumulated knowledge did we begin to start the real path that has led us to present. The same leap was made when writing was added, only it accumulated our knowledge through time and space. That is, one person could write down things that could be read after he was dead and copies could travel faster than he. The acquisition, storage, and distribution of information while is constant. The printing press made the info available to more people faster and saved the info in redundant copies so a new level of permanence was achieved. The phone moved the voice further. Wire, tape, vinyl, and eventually digital storage material made our libraries of experience into Human Memory that is the shared Species Experience every child inherits.

We store information essential to our survival and all of the other species. The knowledge of one person added to another and on and on, connected to the power of the internet had raised us to a new level. The entire system requires the glue of social trust and interaction. This “Group Consciousness” is more like unconsciousness. This may be the reason we don’t see the next evolutionary leap as we become a sort of multi-celled organism, like the fish in the water… never discovering water.
 
A kind of group consciousness seems to be happening in the fall of the Northern African countries, just as it did and spread for the fall of communism.
 
bpathos said:
That is, what does a blood cell know of a brain cell unless it’s exchanging oxygen? Single cells in our bodies don’t have the conciseness to know the big picture.
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There may either be more to it, about which I have some ideas, or that it is simply that mindless evolution via natural selection affected stable platforms of organisms leading to new and improved stable platforms. Note that this is NOT a series of random chances happening all in a row. Chance is not the scientific alternative to Intelligent Design; natural selection is.
 
bpathos said:
That is, what does a blood cell know of a brain cell unless it’s exchanging oxygen? .
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Information is never exchanged using oxygen

bpathos said:
We share one giant immune system .
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No we don't.

bpathos said:
Humans start out from the memory found in the DNA, RNA, and biological levels of information. One would live a life and accumulate personal knowledge that would be pasted poorly from one person to another..
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No we dont

bpathos said:
as we become a sort of multi-celled organism..
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We already are..

Complete rubbish. Learn some biology.
 
I've observed we do act like a sort of "hive ape"...we run on pieces of paper instead of pheromone markers, like the ants and bees use to make their colonies...and I think it best to think of corporations as organisms. Well, it's at least instructive to do so.

Want to hear a scary story about the CDC and contingency planning failure? Sure you do.

There was a level 3 containment lab in the basement of our medical center here.
Our city is really prone to flooding. We also get hurricanes/tropical storms.
Well...during tropical storm Allison, we had a spectacular flooding event in which water came up about 17 FEET in about an hour and a half.
Flooded the level three containment lab that some idjit thought ought to be in the basement...washed a lot of the materials and experiments in progress into the local watershed.

Except I was in a class run by one of the people who works as a guard for the new facility two years ago...and it is not and never has been a level 3 CDC lab.
It is a level 4 lab-the highest level of containment there is for the most dangerous diseases there are It ALWAYS HAS BEEN.
...meaning they kept and continue to keep stuff on hand like viral hemorrhagic fevers, malaria, ebola, dengue fever, etc-really contagious and deadly stuff.
In a city of 4 million, in an area that's quite tropical, and in a basement level of a building... in a city that's prone to flooding events. And when it flooded, all the really dangerous materials they had onhand went into the local watershed.

At least the new location-a guarded secret-is in a much more flood-resistant location.
 
Ultra - Can't argue that kind of logic.
So, what kind of biology would you recomend? Lamarkism, epigeneology, cellular regeneration, or nano bio-chem?
 
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bpathos said:
When the word evolution is used it conjures pictures of monkeys and cave men. What if we are evolving and have lost the significance of it because of its scale? That is, what does a blood cell know of a brain cell unless it’s exchanging oxygen? Single cells in our bodies don’t have the conciseness to know the big picture. Even a neuron can not know what thought the whole brain is manifesting, or does it.
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I do have a proposal, about life, but it is yet in the vague stage, and would certainly not constitute gospel. I like to look at things in all ways, even if it isn't my first choice. Want to see it?
 
I have for several years been saying on SciForums and elsewhere that civilization is a superorganism and we are its cells. There's no standard definition for "life" but it satisfies most of the criteria in most of the definitions--none of which require that all their criteria be satisfied.
  • It regulates its internal environment.
  • It has an organized structure.
  • It has a metabolism: consumption of external matter, conversion of energy, creation of more of its own substance and production of waste.
  • It grows: the creation of its own substance exceeds the production of waste, although this growth has not been monotonic.
  • It responds to external stimuli, including changing into different forms.
The most succinct definition of life is "a sustained local reversal of entropy," and civilization is certainly that.
 
Originally Posted by Fraggle Rocker
The most succinct definition of life is "a sustained local reversal of entropy," and civilization is certainly that.
Originally posted by Origin
that is a terrible definition of life.
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It is? how so?
I think it only misses one word, and that word is "apparent"

Things improving over time, and going from simple to more complex and separated is an apparent (illusory) reversal of the second law of thermodynamics.
It requires energy input-lost energy, hence the illusory part.

But most things deteriorate over time, like a giant clock unwinding. Life actually evolves through natural selection-actually getting better over time.
 
bpathos said:
Ultra - Can't argue that kind of logic.
So, what kind of biology would you recomend? Lamarkism, epigeneology, cellular regeneration, or nano bio-chem?
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At the absolute very beginning. Learn basic biology such as respiration or cell structure and function. Or simple transpiration at first. go onto photosynthesis, and cell membranes, and organelles. Follow this course for a few years, and then you can throw in biochemistry, organic chemistry then genetics then cell biochemichemical pathways. then you'll need to learn statistics, especially binomial distribution and Chi^2. Then, you'll know what you're talking about. It's a fascinating journey. ;)
 
I've given it a lot of thought. I don't think you get the point. I don't have any elitist path for you to follow as you provided. There must be some special quality needed to disscuss ideas here. Your comments non-constructive. You don't seriously address any points. As for your last comment... no one needs your permission to think. I have my own journey and while it may not meet your requirements, I am neither bitter nor rude as a result of it. My point here is... share your knowledge instead of trying to lord it. The world is full of educated people who have less than an antagonistic stance when presented with something they don't aggree with.
 
@ bpathos.
Who's that addressed to?
If it's to ULTRA then it appears it's you who doesn't get the point. You asked him a question: he answered. And quite sensibly.
 
ULTRA said:
Complete rubbish. Learn some biology.
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I imagine, from your response - which I am sure was considered and thoughtful - that you view Margulis with suspicion and Lovelock with derision. It is always intriguing to see individuals impose constraints on themselves.
 
@ Sciwriter,

You've made me curious because of the passages you highlighted. If you are going to suggest cells have their own consciousness and engram memories then L.Ron Hubbard beat you to it when he wrote Dianetics.
 
Originally Posted by Fraggle Rocker
The most succinct definition of life is "a sustained local reversal of entropy," and civilization is certainly that.
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Originally posted by Origin
that is a terrible definition of life.
Click to expand...
chimpkin said:
It is? how so?
I think it only misses one word, and that word is "apparent"
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We and all life are entropy machines. People always seem to miss the real point of entropy. The easiest way to define entropy is waste heat that can not be captured to do useful work. We are very inefficient machines and as far as civilization goes the amount of energy put into making anything is huge and tons of waste heat goes out the tail pipes up the stacks or is radiated by our bodies.

We don't reverse entropy.
 
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Then you should change your user name for a start.
How is science NOT reality?
 
Dywyddyr said:
Then you should change your user name for a start.
How is science NOT reality?
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Perhaps you are reading the name wrong.

You assume it is mr. smart

It might be mrs. mart.

I don't know which it is; just saying...
 
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