Being human and stuff

[Undertoad]

My sciencegasm in the genetics/paleontology connection left me with a lot of naval-gazing on what it really means to be human.

Our entire notion of race is the result of 100,000 years of genetic change... sometimes as little as 25,000 years. In that time period, the human race evolved where they wound up.

Racial features often differ according to the conditions necessary to live in a particular climate/area. To spend time in the direct harsh sunlight, have melanin protect your skin so it doesn't burn. To spend time in the snow, have squinty eyelids that protect against the harsh whiteness of sun against white.

Are racial differences partly biological? When we mate, in our animal nature, are we selecting for types on the basis that our offspring will survive?

In the whole genus-species hierarchy, humans are sort of unique in that there aren't many different types of us. Sentience - memory - consciousness - whatever it is that makes us unique as a species, is a special and marvelous advantage, evolutionarily speaking.

And to find that we all came from an initial population of 10,000, that just makes us even more special. If you're narcissistic, the news couldn't be better. Homo sapiens is really fucking awesome. We are SPECIAL. The bit of our brains that let us get together and share information and remember stuff? It makes us the best of all the species, and we automatically win.

And by the way, racism is now entirely meaningless; we all came from the same bunch anyhow; if you have the right number of chromosomes, you probably have equal potential of learning, and most of our differences are probably cultural.

[Gravdigr]

Stop making me think. It hurts.

I always thought I was special. Just in a Special Olympics sort of way...

[Cicero]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

When we mate, in our animal nature, are we selecting for types on the basis that our offspring will survive?

Yes- I think it's covered in the Origin of Species. There is a part of us that goes with sexual selection as we believe our offspring will directly benefit, whether we are conscious of it or not. I think it was covered in the Origin of Species at great length. I've been getting into Dawkins lately. Great topic!

Yesterday I got a Borders Rewards card for 33 percent off of anything in the store, and I am going to go pick up the Darwin book on facial features and expressions. Do those particular facial features have to do with sexual selection as well? Is this why our instinct tells us not to mate with people that we find repulsive by facial features and expression alone? We know we aren't just attracted to bodies, face matters....Is this part of trait survival?

I have noticed people in the engagement sections of the newspaper. Some of them, or an odd portion, have similar features- strangely so. I have often wondered at their likeness- in expression and/or features. Is this part of sexual selection? Are we narcissitic enough to believe, unconsciously, that whatever is like oursleves will not only survive, but is the best choice? This going merely on a curiosity of something I have noticed and pointed out several times. Some engagement photos everywhere in most papers show a remarkable resemblance between the partners. Some of this is trumped up so they look like a good couple. But most of the traits I notice that are a good likeness can not be manipulated for the sake of a good photo.

I have also noticed photos of older folks that have been married for 30 plus years. Some of them also have a remarkable resemblance to each other.

Now am I just a total freak or is there something to this phoenomenon?

[squirell nutkin]

Originally Posted by Gravdigr

Stop making me think. It hurts.

I always thought I was special. Just in a Special Olympics sort of way...

This is for you:

[squirell nutkin]

I meant this one, actually:

[Pico and ME]

We are all directly descended from Noahs family (since his people were the only ones to survive the flood). I wonder what they looked like.

[ZenGum]

Some random thoughts:

Regarding the evolution of the various human races, recent articles I've read tend to say that practical advantages of the various racial features would have been insignificant, and the traits are more likely due to sexual selection of the features that culture found pleasing. I'm just reporting back a general impression here, grain of salt all round.

When comparing human races, as well as the physical differences, in is possible that there are some differences in behavioural tendencies. However, the similarities greatly outweigh the differences. Furthermore, the differences within groups are usually greater than the differences between groups.
Moreover, when it comes to the way individuals think and act, nurture is probably more important than nature, and still further, once someone has become an adult, they are capable of changing their behaviour patterns away from those they were raised with or are genetically disposed to. So, genetics in itself is a most unreliable guide to personality.
That said, not all inheritance is genetic. Culture - especially language, but values, religion, habits etc - is passed from parents to children, and shared among communities. Culture can develop in parallel with genetics. While people can greatly change their culture during their life, not many do. So culture can be a predictor of behaviour, and race can be a predictor of culture. So it turns out that genetics - race - can be a moderately reliable predictor of culture, and hence of behaviour, after all. It just must be remembered that it is an indirect connection, and so unreliable.

Being genetically homo sapiens is, in my opinion, of little moral significance.

I think it is much more important to be what I call a person: a creature whose behaviour is determined by beliefs, desires and reasons, and which is capable of having values and engaging in society.
I acknowledge various potentially controversial consequences: nun-human persons like intelligent aliens, and possibly some primates and marine mammals; and more controversially human non-persons like the brain dead, the unborn and even single stem cells. I will just say that our judgments about personhood should be made with generosity, some regard to future potential personhood, and moral caution; and furthermore, legal protection is not confined purely to persons. Animal cruelty laws are an example.

So I think the answer to the meaning of life question is to do with this sort of personhood - doing things for reasons, developing and transmitting culture, doing the things that have caused people to prosper and populate the Earth.

[lumberjim]

[Gravdigr]

Thanks, Squirrel. That made me feel, uh, special?

[Donnie The Retard] Duh, I like tater tots! [/Donnie The Retard]

[Gravdigr]

Originally Posted by lumberjim

She is flat rocking that bass. They all look like sixteen year olds hanging out with Dave, the cool kid with the Camaro and the guitar who's old enough to buy beer.

[Gravdigr]

A friend asked me once to name some of the rock stars I'd like to hang out with for 24 hours. Ol' Dave there was one of them. I still say that, on Planet Weirdo, this guy could be King. There would be uncountable WTF moments, I dare say it could be a complete WTF day. Anything but boring.

[sad_winslow]

For as de-humanizing as everybody accused him to be, after I studied and read a couple books by and about B.F. Skinner and his Behaviorism I found his material to be really deeply moving and reaffirmed my basic belief in constructionism, the idea that we're shaped(or conditioned, as he would put it) by the world around us to make us into who we are.

Skinner himself considered the mind and emotions to be a "black box" - he didn't really care what was going on in there for the purposes of his work. Cognition was not his concern whatsoever. Some call that a mistake, and perhaps to an extent it was, but his focus allowed him to show the great depths to which a living being's actions can and are shaped by environment - whatever that environment is - mostly regardless of "nature", within extremely broad confines of raw physical ability/biological capacity.

Everything around us affects us, changes us. Everything we see, do, read, touch, hear, smell, taste. Many accused him of being cold-hearted, but read his interviews and listen to him speak, the guy was either a Buddha or completely insane, and I think it was maybe a mix of both. He would probably maintain that he didn't "feel" he had "belief" in Behaviorism, so much as the environment of his work provided reinforcement that it was true. And funnily enough, to use a word he would've disliked intensely I suspect, he sounded almost transcendental about the whole thing.

That being said, I think what he neglected to consider was that not only are we shaped by our environments to a tremendous degree, but that we build internal models of our reality based on experience - and then we project those models into the future. Based on those internal projections/expectations, we then adapt our *current* behavior to those expectations in a constantly self-modifying process. Our ability to do that, particularly our ability to do that *consciously*, seems to be extraordinarily powerful compared to anything else we've encountered.

That, I believe, is part of the key to what makes us "human".

We see and experience, we predict, we act on those predictions, we experience the consequences of that action good or bad, we modify our predictions and act, and so on. Those predictions, models, aren't the same for everybody because not everybody has the exact same experiences. Skinner maintained that if we did, we'd all come out more or less exactly the same. It's the small variances combined that give us individuality - like how, generally speaking, most all babies act the same at first, but as experience builds and brain capacity develops, differentiation occurs to finally a fully formed personality capable of modeling and re-shaping.

Hi, you just hit kind of a big point of my studies I hope I've made sense, as I've been coming back to this for a few hours now and it's quite late and my own internal coherence has been steadily plummeting. Bedtime for me.

[classicman]

So what you are saying is that post was "shaped" by your level of coherence....
Got it - Very good points. I think Skinner got that part dead-on. The other factors that come into play like cognition were done by others and when put together with Skinner's work create a more comprehensive picture.

[sad_winslow]

Eheh, yes, in a sense I suppose so

The differences in species are simply orders of magnitude larger than the differences within a species. Any inherent biological differences between individuals of a given species are, as you said, far outweighed by both the biological similarities and the effects of environment and learned behavior.

Behavior and cognition, figuring out how and why we learn to do the things we do, is truly fascinating stuff, and why I decided to go to college ten years later than the average youngling.

[classicman]