Fermi Paradox

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, Diche Bach said:

Yes, and you may have missed it but "Chimpanzees have culture." Its the new thing in natural sciences: tearing down the anthropo-barriers!  (I love repeating that, it must make the hyper-PC PoMos go ape-poopy given their highly anthropocentric notions of identity, subjectivity, relativity, etcetarativity)

Hell, crows probably have culture, maybe even horses!

I really enjoyed Kerbiloid's posts up above, but I wanted to point out: asteroids do fit the definition of natural selectors quite nicely, even if they destroy the entire biosphere by melting the surface of the planet into a molten lake.

Natural selection is merely the elimination of that which is worse relative to that which is better given any particular environmental conditions.

A bolide impact changes environmental conditions = new rules about what is worse/better.

We should be thankful for this, because apparently we exist because a nice asteroid changing Earth enough to open up some niches for our mammal ancestors to radiate into, thus faciliating the evolution of the primates (but you probably already knew all that . . . it was mostly just for the spectators).

Also, I take 'mild' issue with the notion that the transformation from full-time foraging to full-time farming "took a long time" 10,000 before present (BP) to 7,000 BP doesn't strike me as "a very long time."

Yes, it didn't happen in a couple generations, but 3,000 years is only 35 to 190 or so generations depending on whether you want to define a generation in terms of the maximal lifespan or the time to sexual maturity.

Apes has an culture in the way that they learn from mistake, other apes including the young pick up tricks so you would get some difference in different packs. 
Can obviously not be compared to human cultures. 

[Diche Bach]

27 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Apes has an culture in the way that they learn from mistake, other apes including the young pick up tricks so you would get some difference in different packs. 
Can obviously not be compared to human cultures. 

No.

 

 

 

[Green Baron]

[have no youtube connection here, can't watch the links and don't have the time for this]

Also, the above was about ants and humans and cultivation, not culture like art and so on. If you want to talk about cultural apes that's a different thing. Plus, there is an inflation of the defintion of "culture", a few decades ago neandertals were denied a "culture", right now there shall not be a difference between ants, apes, birds and humans. Ridiculous.

Yes, i am quite knowingly exaggerating here and not taking into account for a different definitions of "culture", depending on time and even the author's intention.

 

Again and concerning cultivation and maybe to get back to fermi: i am not questioning the underlying principles, they are the same for ants and humans. I just won't call them "good" and "bad". Could be misunderstood ... But the application of these principles with a goal in mind make a difference.

Let's move on.

Would a civilization that is left to a quiet development without war, impact, worldwide epidemics, shortage of ressources, whatever quite automatically learn the techniques to apply evolutionary principles in a way to steer the own evolution, plus the biossphere/environment ?

 

[kerbiloid]

That;s easy. Culture is an ability to create virtual reality. Humans can. Monkeys - not.

[magnemoe]

9 hours ago, Diche Bach said:

No.

Yes, ok it was a bit more complex than I assumed, I though perhaps 5-10 cultural behaviors not 50. On the other hand 50 cultural behaviors is not much for humans, it would not be hard to get 50 unique cultural behaviors on this forum compared to anywhere else. 
no its not an sharp line, human ! animals its more like some order of magnitude like the difference between firework and orbital rocket. Looking back on human evolution you probably got an midway point between humans and apes something between homo habilis and erectus. 

[magnemoe]

8 hours ago, Green Baron said:

[have no youtube connection here, can't watch the links and don't have the time for this]

Also, the above was about ants and humans and cultivation, not culture like art and so on. If you want to talk about cultural apes that's a different thing. Plus, there is an inflation of the defintion of "culture", a few decades ago neandertals were denied a "culture", right now there shall not be a difference between ants, apes, birds and humans. Ridiculous.

Yes, i am quite knowingly exaggerating here and not taking into account for a different definitions of "culture", depending on time and even the author's intention.

 

Again and concerning cultivation and maybe to get back to fermi: i am not questioning the underlying principles, they are the same for ants and humans. I just won't call them "good" and "bad". Could be misunderstood ... But the application of these principles with a goal in mind make a difference.

Let's move on.

Would a civilization that is left to a quiet development without war, impact, worldwide epidemics, shortage of ressources, whatever quite automatically learn the techniques to apply evolutionary principles in a way to steer the own evolution, plus the biossphere/environment ?

 

Ants cultivate, had large scale organization, wars and even take slaves long before humans. However this is evolved not culture so any change will take a long time. 

And going back a 200 years tribal peoples did not have culture but they obvious have. No they did not have an civilization as it require cities / writhing as definition. 
Culture is probably the best word for behavior who is passed down by learning and not by genetic. 
Again you have to draw the line somewhere, many mammals like wolfs and lions would probably also have behavior difference between groups. 

Don't really understand the last part, no you could not have an civilization evolving like ants. rate of change is some magnitudes to slow, worse for larger animals the generations is longer so genetic changes is some magnitude slower yet.
On the other hand evolution works on groups, this might be why humans live so long after fertility, having the grandparents take care of the kids let more able hands hunting or gathering. 
Its no Darwinism reason why we live past reproduction however its an major benefit for the tribe. 

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, magnemoe said:

animals its more like some order of magnitude like the difference between firework and orbital rocket.

Humans are monkeys with positive cultural loopback. The more they are cultured, the more they culture themselves.

Somewhere between neaders and us there was threshold.
Like an old motorbike. Dr-dr-dr... Dr-dr-dr... Dr-dr-r-r-r-r-vzhzhzhhh-woooow!...

[Green Baron]

The above ape: You cannot compare behaviour of tamed animals or animals with ongoing contact to humans (Edit "artificial") with those of wild populations (Edit "natural"). This is a common error, an observer effect. Work has been done on that, it's published (mostly in biology and medicine journals).

The pose above is that of a guy in it's lunchbreak, not an apes pose. It's copied from humans.

 

Edit: I don't want to fight with you and i am a reasonable guy. You can convince me, just not with youtube videos ;-) I'm sure you can find reasonably researched and published work on behaviour, together with proper definitions, in the journals :-)

 

Edited September 14, 2016 by Green Baron

[kerbiloid]

"Artificial" is just a high-level "natural". There's nothing but nature. If a human makes a gun to shoot a wolf, it's just a one more natural way of cooking and consuming  minerals available to this species.

Ook.

Quote

The pose above is that of a guy in it's lunchbreak, not an apes pose. It's copied from humans.

Btw, the only true alive thing inside us - a DNA molecule - even doesn't know about clever and beautiful us.
She is absolutely sure that we look like a large warm and dark bag full of a protein solution in a salty water.

Edited September 14, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Green Baron]

No objections, but if you want to understand the natural processes you must filter out the artificial influence. That's what makes the distinction important.

Edit: and that is why people should not rely on youtube and wikipedia but get to the sources of research ;-)

More edit: One day we might have to filter out potential data of artificial origin from a distant star. What to look for ?

 

Edited September 14, 2016 by Green Baron

[kerbiloid]

35 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

if you want to understand the natural processes you must filter out the artificial influence

As we know from wiki (    ), per 1 kg of human biomass there is 140 kg of total biomass.
Food pyramide is usually 10 times per level. Humans are already near its base, and at simultaneously on the top (except human parasites, of course).

Compare to a spider. Spider is usually a small (but not less nasty) pipsqueak, but its web is many times larger, though not s visible (that's one reason why it's nasty).
Or a mushroom. A mushroom is small, but its mycelium is larger than a tree.
Same are humans. That time was long ago, when we were a spot of mildew on a musty banana. Now our mycelium threads every fruit in the world.

Looks like we can no more clearly and reasonably distinguish "wild" from "domestic" nature.
Only "domestic" and "backyard domestic", or "artificial" and "pre-artificial".
This was possible when there were 10000 humans 80000 years ago, but since ancient history - less and less.

Are three and a half still alive giraffes living in wild nature or surviving on human backyard?

Edited September 14, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Diche Bach]

4 hours ago, Green Baron said:

The above ape: You cannot compare behaviour of tamed animals or animals with ongoing contact to humans (Edit "artificial") with those of wild populations (Edit "natural"). This is a common error, an observer effect. Work has been done on that, it's published (mostly in biology and medicine journals).

The pose above is that of a guy in it's lunchbreak, not an apes pose. It's copied from humans.

 

Edit: I don't want to fight with you and i am a reasonable guy. You can convince me, just not with youtube videos ;-) I'm sure you can find reasonably researched and published work on behaviour, together with proper definitions, in the journals :-)

 

Well, I think it would take a whole semester really. I used to teach Evolutionary Psychology, as well as Human Origins, and Sex and Evolution and while none of those courses set out specifically to convince anyone that "Kuhltuur" is a word that describe a natural mammalian propensity to use the behavior of conspecifics as a guide to how to behave, and not only a description of highly derived and sophisticated human stuff, that was always one of the themes in my work.

My old mentor wrote an article back in the late 1980s that is probably as good a place to start as any, but I'll be damned if I can remember the name of it. His name was Mark Flinn, and the title was something like "Cultural learning: the Developing Synthesis from Evolutionary Biology" or some such. He wrote an update to it in the last 5 years or so. If you google his name and all words "culture evolution" you should get some hits.

[Green Baron]

Bybye fermi :-/

Never heard of that guy, but that means nothing. What's "Kuhltuur" ? [provoke] To convince me gimmy more than reminiscences and youtube videos, i don't have the time and bandwidth to watch an hour discovery national geographic channel :-) [/provoke]

I hope we can get away in less than a semester ;-) We're probably not that far away from each other.

My post still stands: behaviour of animals grown up under human influence is different to that of the wild ones. See work on domestication and laboratory animals. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in particular copy dominant individuals, that is naturally built in behaviour. So studying the behaviour of a chimpanzee in captivity or even the presence of a human gives different results than that of a wild one in it's habitat and group. That genius might partly be influenced by humans, and it shows.

I would like to have this understood as "without human influence things would turn out different", and that's what this discussion is all about. Yes, things would as well turn out different without staphylococcus influence ... just different. Samesame, but different :-)

Example for a (possible) difference chimpanzees/humans. Thesis: chimpanzees don't reflect what they are doing. Ok, most humans neither ... http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959438813000287
 

 

Edited September 14, 2016 by Green Baron

[Diche Bach]

Well you're not alone Baron. Most social scientists also continue to reject the idea that nonhuman animals could have psychological or social characteristics that could meaningfully be referred to as "culture" and thus (paradoxically) cling to to a notion of human exceptionalism that is analogous to the Great Chain of Being.

But we digress too much I think . . . back to Fermi and his putative paradox . . .  if there is anything more to be said on that topic.

[PB666]

20 hours ago, Diche Bach said:

Well you're not alone Baron. Most social scientists also continue to reject the idea that nonhuman animals could have psychological or social characteristics that could meaningfully be referred to as "culture" and thus (paradoxically) cling to to a notion of human exceptionalism that is analogous to the Great Chain of Being.

But we digress too much I think . . . back to Fermi and his putative paradox . . .  if there is anything more to be said on that topic.

Culture exist in all social animals. The fact we do animal archaelogy (pack-rat middens and stone-age cultural studies in chimps) as evidence.

Human-like culture means the following.

1. Intense manipulation of the environment (Mega-fauna extinction events coinciding with human occupation) debated but widely regarded as true in some form. (50000 years ago)
2. A remnent of abstract thinking (such as blombos cave in Africa). (90,000 to 200,000 years ago)
3. Composite tools (100,000 to 250,000 years ago - probably earlier)
4. Language - complex (200,000 to 1,000,000 years ago)

Intense manipulation is generally thought be the result of collective behavior (sedentary lifestyles, agriculture, advanced tribalism, domestication of both edible plants and pack animals)
For example the LBK (linear band keramic) is a combination of triticeae agriculture (either is food or as a fodder crop), T1 taurids, a certain style of building (semi - subterranian long house), LB ceramic, certain religious practices. This type of manipulation converted areas of European forest (namely evergreen) overtime into non-evergreen mixed grasslands and farmland. If we were standing in Europe today, have just plopped their by visitors we would remark about the well-developed pine and cypress forests, these forests altered the soil favoring their existance after the last ice age. Humans altered that balance.   We can say that by 8000 years ago humans had fully reached this capability. What really is different today and for humans versus all other humans is that we can do this over so many ecological backdrops, from the coldest places on earth, to the hotest, from the wettest to the dryest, to the highest. In terms of terrestrial exploitation we and our domesticants are living at the extremes of the complex eucaryotes. Humans include as part of their diet more different types of complex animals and plants relative to any other species on earth. We extract these proximally and at great distances and under hostile circumstances (e.g. King crab harvesting).

Abstract thinking is not uniformly agreed to be possessed by all humans, but it is common in every extant human group, and it is generally agreed upon as the seed for the apical progression of art and  technology in culture. It is also involved advanced trading systems, etc. So it allows the progression of complex societies. Prolly as old as the AoA preexpansion in Africa (50,000-100,000 year ago, but likely much older.

Composite tools. For millions of years hominid existed primarily using simple tools, hand-axes, scrapers, clubs, and simple spear. Within the last 50,000 years or so progression to the adle-adle, the adze, the bow and arrow. In addition complex homebuilding allowed people to move from world areas with amicable night-time temperatures to temperatures at night that were well below human tolerances. This had fully occurred by 30,000 years ago, at least the dug-out is in the 50,000 year range, beyond line of site travel is over 30,000 years ago. Complex tools could evolve through mimicry of plants or animals in the environment, but abstract thinking adds to the boundaries. If we can imagine for example what a pyramid might look like without math and geometry.

Language. Again Language evolved, but sufficient human language is old. Other animals can converse, humans probably have the best cognative facility for doing so. This facility evolved looks like on the order of 200,000 to a million years ago.

When we talk about sentiency in terms of exobiology, we are talking about the potential for communicating with us, this generally would mean another species that has

Abstract thinking, Composite tools and Language as prerequisite features. In and above this, to achieve the level of technology to be recognized except at very close quarter would require something link Intense manipulating (Metallurgy, ore mining, deforestation for charcoal, etc).

By realizing this we then set the bar much higher for culture than just any animal culture. It has to be a culture that is capable of fairly rapid technological progression. Otherwise we would probably not recognize them (either we pass them over, or we tromp them over trying to terriform their planet).

 

 

 

 

[Diche Bach]

Well said PB. I don't think anyone who wants to argue that other animals have culture, need to argue that they have "human culture" or even "human like culture."

It is really just pointing out that there is some degree of continuity in the social psychological apparatus which facilitates shared learned behaviors across many social mammals, although the chasm between humans elaborations of that is way above/beyond the "curve" of the other social mammals, with the other extant homininae being a bit above/beyond the curve, and perhaps some exemplars from other families/classes also being "above average" (crows, parrots, certain cetaceans, elephants, etc.).

Linking this back into Fermi: we (well, a significant, arguably "predominant" contingent of behavioral/psychological/evolutionary scientists, and perhaps even a slowly growing contingent of the more "soft" social science varieties) now understand that, social intelligence, personhood, individual identity, even to some degree theory of mind, and the capacity for symbolism and linguistic creativity are not unique to humans. Indeed, most of the psychological "pieces" of human psyche seem to be present to some degree in several animal species. However, those pieces do not form into the potent, self-propelling force that they do in every human child who has some benefit of socialization with conspecifics. Interestingly however, those few poor children who have been denied anything resembling proper socialization (Genie being the key example, but there are others too) are in some respects less humanlike in their psyche than are thoroughly nurtured nonhuman animals like Kanzi the bonobo or Alex the math-doing grey parrot, or Koko the gorilla, etc., etc.

What this tells is that, we may have been "fairly human like" though not quite truly human for a long time. The archaeological record is surprisingly correlated with this idea: the sudden "explosion" of art and tool diversity sometime before 35,000 years ago (the dates seem to have drifted farther back over the years, but still 50,000 seems to be a reasonable contemporary early boundary I think).

Part of the problem with inquiries in this area is that neuroscience and neurobiology are still quite infantile in their models and psychiatry and psychopharmacology even moreso. By the time a functional MRI can be carried around like a camera and can be used more-or-less anywhere these fields will have reached the starting line of their adolescence and within a generation I predict that models of what "minds" are and how they relate to the cells and structures that comprise them will have revolutionized to the point that our current models will seem nearly like medieval superstitions.

Sadly, you cannot say these sorts of things if you are hoping to work in academia; the modal 'tolerance' for revolutionary thinking and for skepticism about prevailing models in general seems to be at an historic ebb tide, though not because people are less curious I think. More so simply because of the bureaucratic and institutional nature of scholarship at this stage in Western history.

So, Fermi: even if there is life on other planets, the fact that our "ascendance" into full-fledged "Ravager of Worlds" level mind seems to have been such a random occurrence (coming as it did many millions of years after we had assumed the general outlines of our current phenotype) suggests that life on other worlds may well keep evolving along as pre-sentient (though intelligent and with the 'rudiments' of sentience) for a long time, perhaps even forever.

So the way I see, what we know about the evolution of life, and the evolution of humanness on Earth suggests that there are two enormous "hurdles" or "eyes of the needle" that stochastism must weave matter through in order for exobiota to evolve:

1. The emergence of ecosystems.

2. The emergence of minds that are fully capable of theory of mind, self-reflection and all the rest that truly distinguish humans from all the other animals of Earth.

[kerbiloid]

Tools are not indicator. Monkeys use tools, crows use tools, even ants use tools, Tells absolutely nothing.

But what the human culture does?
You can see, that almost every kind of human culture creates some reduced virtual reality, visualised in your thoughts (inner vision, if you want).

For example, arts.

Painting/drawing, sculpturing, theater, cinema, computer games just bruteforce your mind, giving a ready-to-use visual image. As a glucose injection for brain: no need to digest, just get it.
Rock painting and ritual dances are the earliest forms of this.
You look at the picture, and your imagination animates it, adds details, puts you inside either as a character, or as an observer.

Dancing is a rudimental kind of theater. Originally it depicted real-life scenes, mostly hunting. Then it lost content, leaving just pure form.
If it's a ritual dance, its direct and only purpose: create virtual reality in your mind, where you are a character doing different things.

Writing is harder for perception, so it's treated as a high-level thing, kinda a grand style, but it's the same.
You imagination depicts the plot, creating details and faces on its own.
But its intention stays the same: it creates your personal virtual reality, percepted as real. The better is writing - the deeper is diving.

Spiritual practices.
In any case they take your mind from the seeable "mundane"reality and put into some trance state, changing your perception of reality.

Foretelling, augury, astromancy, etc.
They don't try to create a virtual reality, as the subject's state of mind doesn't change.
They do another thing, but still the same: they serve to fill your inner picture of future reality with details, to define its plot.
So, they serve you to make your inner virtual reality yourself.

Science.
It's a common name for way to predict future events, basing on the past ones.
Originally it appeared from (foretelling, augury, astromancy ) as a butterfly from a nymph.
While methods were getting more severe, science was moving farther and farther away from primitive rural rituals and superstitions.
But the main purpose stays constant: give you a virtual picture of future reality.

 

Civilization.

So, back to Fermi, a human-type civilisation should face a sequence of phases:

1. Primitive animal phase. No abstract thinking. Object → eat, Pain → run.  Insects, fishes, frogs, most of reptiles.

2. Advanced animal. Cats, dogs, monkeys (except apes). Rudiments of abstract thinking.
Probably very blurry but exactly existing inner picture of non-existing reality.
Say, when a cat suddenly wakes up, looks at you and runs directly along the shortest way to the balcony in another room to get a sun bath.
It definitely follows the prepared route, not just randomly runs avoiding chairs as an insect.

2.5. Apes and pre-humans.
Absolutely sure they have an inner reality picture which can differ a lot from it can see with eyes.
Ability to stay in the virtual reality, getting mentally insulated from the outer reality.
Probably, not very stable and rather primitive. Like a motorbike pedal starter. Inner picture easy comes, easy goes.

3. Humans. An ape with stable imagination.
First avalanche-rate quantum leap.
Humans can keep a solid inner picture of reality, even if it absolutely doesn't correlate with the picture from eyes. Can even absolutely ignore visible picture in favour of a clear virtual picture.
Can make it so clear that it's possible to reproduce it with body. Here appear painting, theater/dancing and so on, i.e. arts.
This allows to make multiple experiments just in mind, without need to go somewhere and do something. Prediction speed rises million times - and this critically and dramatically splits apes and humans.

Arts make possible another thing unavailable for apes: human get posiibility to exchange with their virtual realities.
As their inner pictures follow the same needs and interact with arts, a virtual reality: gets outside from one human and gets reproduced through generations. Starts to live its own life.
This is what we call Culture. A common virtual reality, self-reproducing using human minds as a carrier. A meme succedes gene.

4. TV and internet allow/force the virtual reality to expand around all over the world. Lifespace become more and more virtualized.
From some point there should be the second quantum leap, when the virtual reality will override the "real" one as human mind override human reflexes. Needs to manage, but usually doesn't take into account.

So, while we still continue thinking an ET contact in species terms, there should be a meeting of Borgs.

Edited September 16, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Green Baron]

16 hours ago, PB666 said:

Culture exist in all social animals. The fact we do animal archaelogy (pack-rat middens and stone-age cultural studies in chimps) as evidence.

Human-like culture means the following.

1. Intense manipulation of the environment (Mega-fauna extinction events coinciding with human occupation) debated but widely regarded as true in some form. (50000 years ago)
2. A remnent of abstract thinking (such as blombos cave in Africa). (90,000 to 200,000 years ago)
3. Composite tools (100,000 to 250,000 years ago - probably earlier)
4. Language - complex (200,000 to 1,000,000 years ago)

Ok, a definition we can work with.

Quote

Intense manipulation is generally thought be the result of collective behavior (sedentary lifestyles, agriculture, advanced tribalism, domestication of both edible plants and pack animals)
For example the LBK (linear band keramic) is a combination of triticeae agriculture (either is food or as a fodder crop), T1 taurids, a certain style of building (semi - subterranian long house), LB ceramic, certain religious practices. This type of manipulation converted areas of European forest (namely evergreen) overtime into non-evergreen mixed grasslands and farmland. If we were standing in Europe today, have just plopped their by visitors we would remark about the well-developed pine and cypress forests, these forests altered the soil favoring their existance after the last ice age. Humans altered that balance.   We can say that by 8000 years ago humans had fully reached this capability. What really is different today and for humans versus all other humans is that we can do this over so many ecological backdrops, from the coldest places on earth, to the hotest, from the wettest to the dryest, to the highest. In terms of terrestrial exploitation we and our domesticants are living at the extremes of the complex eucaryotes. Humans include as part of their diet more different types of complex animals and plants relative to any other species on earth. We extract these proximally and at great distances and under hostile circumstances (e.g. King crab harvesting).

Not discussing the details, in principle i follow you, with one distinction:

The cultural development that fulfills your definition is present in the Aurignacien, roughly 45.000y ago. Music (flutes and thundersticks), abstract art in figurines and wall paintings from todays Swabia and southern France tell that. Neandertal were maybe just in the course to develop something similar in the Chatelperronien, but that is not clear and highly doubted by many.

Quote

Prolly as old as the AoA preexpansion in Africa (50,000-100,000 year ago, but likely much older.

Composite tools. For millions of years hominid existed primarily using simple tools, hand-axes, scrapers, clubs, and simple spear. Within the last 50,000 years or so progression to the adle-adle, the adze, the bow and arrow. In addition complex homebuilding allowed people to move from world areas with amicable night-time temperatures to temperatures at night that were well below human tolerances. This had fully occurred by 30,000 years ago, at least the dug-out is in the 50,000 year range, beyond line of site travel is over 30,000 years ago. Complex tools could evolve through mimicry of plants or animals in the environment, but abstract thinking adds to the boundaries. If we can imagine for example what a pyramid might look like without math and geometry.

Sorry what do you mean by AoA preexpansion ? Home-building (stone houses or houses from clay-tiles) is not that old, 12.000 years with goodwill (Cayönü, Göbekli Tepe, Jericho, Tell Aswad ...). There may have been new discoveries recently that i don't know of ...

 

Quote

*snip*

By realizing this we then set the bar much higher for culture than just any animal culture. It has to be a culture that is capable of fairly rapid technological progression. Otherwise we would probably not recognize them (either we pass them over, or we tromp them over trying to terriform their planet).

 

Same thoughts from my side.

 

Edit: @Sigma88 came up with the idea that biological evolution could be universal principle (hope i remember that right). What do you think ?

 

Edited September 16, 2016 by Green Baron

[Sigma88]

4 hours ago, Green Baron said:

@Sigma88 came up with the idea that biological evolution could be universal principle (hope i remember that right). What do you think ?

not sure if you are asking me what I think about the topic or if you are asking @PB666 what he thinks about my "idea"

What I was pointing out is not necessarily that biological evolution is universal, but that in an environment where a lot of processes take place, those processes that are able to reproduce themselves will be more common for the simple fact that once the first is created (by chance) it can replicate itself making its numbers increase over the limit allowed by random chance alone.

so it highly depends on what you consider biological and what you don't consider biological.

what I would say is that

"universally, any kind of self replicating process is favored over just random processes, and the most successful at replicating will be more common than the less successful."

Edited September 16, 2016 by Sigma88

[Green Baron]

17 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Tools are not indicator. Monkeys use tools, crows use tools, even ants use tools, Tells absolutely nothing.

 

Hi,

just for completion the definition of a tool, like seen by palaeoanthropology (and wikipedia too i see at a glance):

A tool is defined by it's form. It must be worked to serve a (possibly unknown) use. A saw, hammer, nail, etc. Ad-hoc use of a stick/stone/gravity/body chemistry is not considered tool use, at least not for humans/hominids. Also chopped stone pre-products like flakes or blades are not considered tools but the base for making tools, like burins, scrapers, points, etc. These are the tools. A tool has a lifecycle and in some cases a proper analysis can reveal its use for certain application.

e.g.: A stone, used ad hoc as a hammer, is not considered a tool because it cannot be identified as such. A stick, used by a raven to poke worms out of the bark, is in a strict sense not a tool.

very basic tool: A stone, of suitable material and chopped to form a sharp edge and another one with marks that identifiy it as a chopstone, are tools -> Olduvan.

I know that there are wider definitions out there, especially for birds and apes ... in a strict sense they are wrong and result from an erosion of definitions. Tool use in animals is rare, there are few examples

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v379/n6562/abs/379249a0.html

http://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-015-0204-7

:-)

 

Edited September 17, 2016 by Green Baron

[kerbiloid]

Happily, our grand-ape-pa and ma didn't know they're doing this wrong and sticks and stones are not true tools.

[Diche Bach]

Anybody who thinks an Acheulean axe "is not a true tool" should try to make one using ONLY materials in the natural environment (no metal, no plastic, no bandaids, no safety goggles  . . . well, go ahead and wear the safety goggles but keep in mind when those flakes peck into your goggles that that might well have equated with "eye damage" for grand-ape-ma & pa)

Pretty sure Homo erectus was better at geometry and crystallography than your average bear . . .

[kerbiloid]

Btw when an ape uses small sticks to pick ants out from heap, the ape first rifles it with teeth and moistens with saliva. It's not just a stick, it's a technologically prepared stick.

[kerbiloid]

One more explanation of Fermi paradox which i humbly suggest.

 

[Green Baron]

 

A handaxe is a tool. It's clearly worked and retouched, though the uses of that thing are unclear, but the use does not matter (see below). Some handaxes could have been abandoned nuclei for tool production. Olduvan are tools, the owner was Homo habilis spp and later. Acheuleen is much younger and of course Homo erectus spp. (the assumed owner of the Acheuleen) did produce tools. I did not include later stonetool industries than Olduvan because i thought you were aware.

I'm a miserable stoneknapper, but a handaxe i can do. And a little upper palaeolithic stuff, but a blade would be an accident :-). Indirect soft blow ... difficult. I once made my own arrowheads for the bow and points of the spear for the atl-atl (upper palaeolithic Propulseur, Speerschleuder, similar to the central american atl-atl.). These days i'm out of practice maybe ... :-)

 

Yeah, some animals use tools. Few animals. Primates, macaques, crows ....

 

I am aware that there are different levels of definition of "tool", so here's one derivation:

Not everything lying on the ground was a tool, tool production and use is the outcome of a cognitive process. Therefore, a tool is not just picked up, a tool is a modified object. A screwdriver is a screwdriver. If turned around to bang in the screw it does not transform into a hammer, it is still a screwdriver. That is why the use does not define the purpose of a tool, the shape does. A tool is the outcome of a cognitive process, a modified object, that serves a purpose in manipulating something in the environment.

On the other hand, if one accepts the notion that simple things become tools just because of their use one ends up with different definitions of tools for humans and animals, leading to the observation that many more animals use "tools" in a much wider sense. This is not a problem for noone if made clear, but these cases will probably not find their way into the journals ....

 

In the above linked text about the caledonian crow this definition is reflected. So yes, kerbiloid, the example of the ape shaping the stick into a form is tool use.

:-)

 

Edited September 18, 2016 by Green Baron