yeah, i agree we are more advanced with thought process, but i was just saying that just because we go against nature, does not mean its a good thing. and yes, i do think selfishness is a bad thing.
Selfishness, like it or not, is what makes the United States, and other capitalist nations, thrive (or you might call it regression in other ways, but I'm talking economic principle). Without selfishness there can be no competition. If you don't put your own needs, future, and well-fare before that of others, our economy goes no where because everyone stays home and thinks that other people deserve the money that they'd be making more than they do. Selfishness is a virtue, and a demonized one at that. Without selfishness, one does not care enough about the one person they can control in the world; themselves. WIthout selfishness, people have no will to make themselves better or improve things on a whole, for THEIR OWN benefit. Selfishness makes the humans go round.
You are very right and brave for saying it, but there needs to be a balance between selfishness and selflessness. If everyone has the survival of the fittest mentality, then the people who physically cannot fight to be the best (disabled, elderly, etc) get shoved aside. Perhaps evolution wants that to happen, but maybe not. The species, overall, wants to survive and increase the population, and whatever the hell we're doing now is obviously working. Also, it's not always complete selfishness that makes people go out and make as much money as they can. People want to take care of their families.
ok, this is what i think.. yes it is mind boggling to think about! but if you think about it , how did we get here, how was man and woman made, there has to be a higher being out there, but how was he made? and what was beyond that, and beyond that....so on and so forth.... i understaind what your saying, but we wont know, i think, until we die, but when we die, we cant tell anyone, that is liveing, because we have died! so that is what i think! :hypno:
I was wondering about if we did evolve, why on earth we would have emotions, society and so forth. It benefits us in no way to have remorse, anger and so on. Animals don’t really have them, sure they are territorial, but they lack real emotions. I was asking a psychology major where all the rules came from, why don’t you defecate in the road, or piss on any tree you see? She says society, well, where did society come from, did one human one day make all these rules up and try and pass it down through all generations? Like I said, if we are just evolved animals and nothing more, why do we have these unnecessary traits [unnecessary to survive] If we keep getting better, why did we loose instinct, claws, tough skin, we seemed more programmed to think than to, fight to live. Not to mention when I was studying evolution back a few years ago, they had animals evolving into others slowly, like a rodent into a bat I think, in the process according to Darwin it couldn’t happen, well while the animal is transforming, survival of the fittest would take place and that animal would die, simply because while mid-way through the process he has wings but cant use them and is slow, in no shape to fight off prey. Also while studying botany, I see so many designs and so many things that are alike, and have systems and are very ingenious, it simply looks like someone or something sat down and mapped it all out, it becomes hard to believe it just happened over billions of years.
Well, this all comes from advanced thought. Many people believe this, too, was a thing that evolved. But anyway, advanced thought gives human beings the epiphany, the realization, that they, generally, have command over the world's resources and the large amount of the plant and animal life on the planet. Because of this "manifested superiority", we hold ourselves to a higher standard than animals, and anything less than what society has set as that standard is considered barbaric, uncivilized, and inappropriate. Every emotion, I believe, is necessary. This is because, again, as I believe, is relative. Without goodness, there can be no evil. Without happiness, there can be no sorrow, because there is nothing to differentiate, or compare a feeling to. Without anger, which may seem nothing but negative, there can be no feeling of love or compassion. We, through this society and civilization, have, in a way, removed ourselves from nature. We no longer need to hunt for food constantly, fear about predators, or living quarters (this is all generally, as a species). This has allowed us more free time to develop society, art, music, literature, language, ect. all things that make up culture and society. We live in such relative comfort, we no longer need these features to survive or thrive. I think you'd find Phi interesting, in relation to intricate mapping of the body or other things in nature.
sickcycle: how exactly would you know if animals dont have "real" emotions? they have, in fact, done studies and found that dogs have a great variety of emotions. i mean, when you come home to your dog, it wags its tail and wants you to pet it, it whipers when it wants food. if you dont think thats emotion, then i dont know what is. like goso said, certain animals have different traits. like an animals advantage might be excellent scent, ours is knowledge. darwins theory of natural selection was tested by the finches, it occured in a short period of time, not millions of years. therefore, you cant really compare the two so closely. i find it illogical to think that "someone" decided to make every complex being on the face of this earth by themself. then decided that humans would be the rulers, while everything else out there is made especially for them. frankly, i dont see the point in dinosaurs then, they dont really fit in the "higher being" theory. anyways, the way i look at it is, if humans became extict, then the world would be orderly, but if anything else became extinct, then everything would be off balance. like when people decided to kill sharks because of a few shark attacks, the fish they ate grew highly in numbers and ate the smaller fish humans eat (then they stopped of course because of that reason alone, another example of human selfishness.. but thats another story). and if there were no humans, there would be no unnatural destruction. actually, humans dont even have any natural preditors, so if we did die out, then the food chain wont even be affected.
Yep Humans are the most unnatural thing in nature. And you made a very good point about the creationist theory. In that way, the human virtue, and vice, of selfishness, it seems more realistic that humans would "create God" to justify their superiority. Then again, is it because of God that the humans he supposedly created are so selfish? God, in reality, is the most selfish being of all, both ways seem to fit in different ways.
By real emotion I mean regret and deeper ones than just anger, happy, sad, the basics 'feel' you get, or ones when you are hurt, pain and such [ones that require you to have a moral code and complicated thought process] Now the Darwin thing I can see a bit better, but still I find it hard to see a fish living for more than a few minutes while growing legs or what have you. In the last paragraph it almost seems like you think humans are pointless, when in fact the reason we don’t interrupt the food chain is because we are set apart, we were made to be rulers over the creation. The last part supports that idea.
I swear by Dawin's theory... We're meant to be the kickass people . Honestly, I think that everything happens is what had to happen, what was meant to happen. And I do believe there's a superior power out there.
you still havent explained how you know animals dont have "deep" thoughts. unless you are, in fact, an elephant, or any other non-human animal, i dont think you can conclude something like that. i dont exactly get what youre saying in the second paragraph. but i suppose ill explain a little theory. say theres one certain species of fish a long time ago. the stronger ones progress into more advanced ones while the others remain the same. so basically they just keep getting more and more advanced to the point of modern fish. the different kinds of fish have special traits they develop to help them live in their environment (thats like the part that darwin tested with the finches on the island). not necessarily. dinosaurs were powerful, they became extict. whats there to say that wont eventually happen to us? who knows, maybe humans could be what went wrong in evolution. or maybe our high level of knowledge was a mistake, like how mutations occur. there could be good mutations and bad ones. it does seem like a good thing, but if you look at the overall outcome, i think its a bad one. i think were too isolated from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Why would we have society? Because our society has made us the dominant species on the planet. I don't see how society contradicts evolution at all. If we had a dog-eat-dog world where we were without order, do you think there would be billions of human beings? I don't. Functioning as a society is a survival trait. Look at other animals, for example. Wolf packs fuction as a society. Horse function as a society. Dolphin pods function as a society. etc. dictionary.com says... so·ci·e·ty The totality of social relationships among humans. A group of humans broadly distinguished from other groups by mutual interests, participation in characteristic relationships, shared institutions, and a common culture. The institutions and culture of a distinct self-perpetuating group. An organization or association of persons engaged in a common profession, activity, or interest: a folklore society; a society of bird watchers. The rich, privileged, and fashionable social class. The socially dominant members of a community. Companionship; company: enjoys the society of friends and family members. Biology. A colony or community of organisms, usually of the same species: an insect society. edit: Jila, I agree with you that we're fucking with the enviorment, but that doesn't change the fact that from the point of view of the species we're doing quite well: lots of babies are being born and surviving long enough to have more babies to continute surviving and have babies...
<s>honestly, i think</s> we are overpopulating the world. maybe having so many babies isnt exactly a good thing either. survival isnt really an issue for humans at the moment.
We are quite overpopulated. And no survival isn't really an issue, but animals (and humans are included in this catogory) don't stop having babies just because they're overpopulated. The sex drive, and more importantly, the deeper desire to have offspring does not go away. Each set of genes (i.e. creature) wants it's line to continue, regardless of overpopulation. And in nature if alls going well things level themselves out--if there are too many rabbits the coyotes feast, increase their population, and eventually there aren't enough rabbits to go round and coyotes start dying off, rabbit population rises again...obviously that's over simplified and ignores other factors, but my point is that nature is supposed to balance out. But humans have no natural predators anymore unless you count diseases (like AIDS), but we've even got enough of a handle on that that it's not hurting the population much. So we just keep having more and more babies the way our instincts are telling us too, and THEY have babies, etc.
oh i know, i was just saying we dont have to worry about everyone having babies that have babies that have babies etc. to survive and also, i meant predators as in the food chain, because all animals are prone to sickness. ive never really thought about insects though. i mean, i cant imagine such a small creature like an ant to even have a nervous system. but whatev, im going to confuse myself. i dont know enough about bugs to conclude something.
oh yeah, totally radioactive. man, i saw people making up new "cool" words like "thats so mega". i was like what the hell? anyways, human life.. yeah.
Well, "overpopulation" isn't really the effect of too many people. It's generally used to display a lack of sufficient resources for said species of people. Here's the good news; there's plenty of resources on the earth to support a much larger population than the one we have now. Here's the bad news, it's overconsumption and the inequality of consumption that gives the illusion of overpopulation. The rich minority consumes the majority of the resources on earth, while the poorer masses get less than is needed to live (check my overconsumption thread for facts). What's worse is that the minority keeps the masses from attaining their riches. But that's beside the point. Generally, what I'm saying is, if we had more equality in the consumption of resources, "overpopulation" wouldn't be NEARLY as big of a problem as it seems. But if you mean relatively, to animals, yeah, it seems kinda rediculous sometimes. Then again, look at insects and bacteria. Even though, again, they work in harmony with nature.
well compared to insects and bacteria, yeah, were seriously outnumbered (i think the insect:human ratio is a billion to one), but then again, you can kill a bug by stepping on it. killing a human is more difficult especially considering modern medicine helped us live even longer.
i think that we were created by God. we are too complex to have evovled from a fish...or a monkey. and about the monkey thing. if we really evovled from them, why dont we see half monkey/half men beings because they are still evolving? i really dont believe in the evolution thing...or the big bang theory or anything else scientist are gonna through at me.