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Evolution Thread
07-22-2013, 10:38 PM
Evolution plays a big part in game.
Intention.. survival.. replication.. these are some of the ideas and driving forces behind how things work.
This thread is dedicated to evolution.
Does evolution or nature have a purpose or end goal? Why go through all this trouble?
Are Apex predators essentially the closest thing to perfection in nature? For example- the lazy lion.
I sometimes get this this sense that there is something that wants to wake up. Maybe it's Skynet or some cosmic consciousness..
EDIT: accidentally posted this in game. Can it be moved to EE?
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Evolution Thread
07-22-2013, 11:24 PM
Evolution is a spontaneous process (unless you believe in the Maker, whereby it's his process of creating and blah blah... ). You can spot evolution in areas other than biology - economy, thought, social structures etc. Everything that develops in an competitive environment survives, and if it doesn't it dies, to be replaced by a new form.
I don't believe apex predatora are "perfection". That would imply that evolution has a finite goal or ending. T-Rex was an apex predator and it turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. Sharks haven't changed at all in the last 400 mil years (you could interpret it as perfect then?).
I think evolution is viewed too much like engineering, both have extremely complex results, but one is spontaneous and other deliberate. There are fundamental differences. Still, the notion does give explanations to a lot of subjects, notably Game.
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Evolution Thread
07-22-2013, 11:41 PM
Yes- it is very interesting. I'm not religious but maybe it can be argued that their is some kind of unconscious force that motivates everything.
Has anyone ever posed the question- what if there is a god, but he's asleep, like Odin.
Or what if there was some controlling force that lost a battle and is struggling to wake up?
To me this is an interesting way of interpreting nature's forces- makes for cool stories.
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Evolution Thread
07-25-2013, 08:50 AM
Btw modern sharks are only 100 mil old even though sharks have existed for 400mil years. I wish the megalodon still existed
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Evolution Thread
07-25-2013, 10:12 AM
Evolution all the way down.
No gods and no magic forces.
You obviously live, possibly procreate, and definitely die.
Rinse and repeat.
Nonrandom selection on random mutations; Heritable variation causing differential reproduction.
C'est ça!
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Evolution Thread
07-25-2013, 11:00 AM
No the Lion is not the apex of evolution. It's going extinct. Probably will be wiped out in a few hundred years.
Cockroaches or bacteria or whatever are the ultimate survivors.
I have no idea what the "point" of evolution is. It's not some force that's leading us towards "perfection" or some "ultimate" existence. It's just what works. You can survive and procreate with all sorts of flaws. You can be 500 lbs and have a bunch of kids who are all stupid and have diseases and they still all procreate.
It's just survival of the fittest, where fittest means, able to reproduce. Not fittest like jacked intelligent rich handsome. Some uneducated illegal immigrant is probably more evolutionarily "fit" than anyone in this forum. Who here has 10 kids?
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Evolution Thread
07-25-2013, 11:02 AM
Although I find human evolution fascinating I don't see this thread going far without either some imput from people who've actually studied and have real expertise in these subjects, or at least the citing of some credible sources.
Nowadays, just about everyone (credentials and sources be damned) is a self-proclamed expert on the specifics of human evolutionary history, the nature human societies in the Pleistocene, and more specifically, it's effects on current human behavior. This is true for militant feminists, MRAs, socialists, self styled PUA gurus, white supremecists, you name it. They all use some vague understanding of pop-evopsychology and pop-anthropology to justify whichever political or social agenda they're pushing. I know this isn't a science forum, but if we're going to talk about science, might as well do it right.