Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Never a First Human Being

[Dexter]

http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/rich ... being.html

This is a great thought experiment about evolution.

You can see why some people don't want to accept it, and if you're not familiar with the science, it would be hard to believe.

And you can pretend that Christianity and other religions are compatible with it, but they're really not. If there is some kind of soul unique to humans, when was it put in?

[youkrst]

great thought experiment

it leaves the hindu concept of brahman looking more feasible than the christian orthodox theology.

i'm interested in which if any religious metaphors from the various traditions end up surviving as time goes by, perhaps they too will evolve or die out.

i suppose a concept that has merit will occur to someone eventually even if it has died out. only it will no longer carry the baggage of the tradition it previously was attached to.

an adaptable non dogmatic approach seems best

but the brahman concept has the "unchanging" part behind (and over, under, sideways, down, amidst, around and beyond etc) the changing part, so that's interesting.

i thought star wars, the matrix and avatar for example all had a bit of "brahman" in them. though none of them were specifically "hindu" movies.

[ant]

OMG! This one was the best reply to the article. It made me laugh my ass off!
HaHaha!

"The entire point of science is lost somewhere in the entrails of “logical” conjecture the moment one tries to defend Dawkins’ thought experiment as being anything more than an exercise in how to think like a naturalist. Implied is the assumption that nature is an objective, arbitrary, non- mental, non- spiritual process we are somehow luckily situated to perceive and interpret from our extremely limited, equally arbitrary glimmer of “empiricism”.

That being said, the thought experiment is not irrelevant because it can’t be proven, it’s irrelevant because human thought produced it. Have we forgotten that human thought transcends and therefore easily detached itself from the intelligence of nature? Oh I forgot. Nature can be awe inspiring and mysterious but not cognitive. I rest my case."


Hahahahabahah! Too funny!
Thanks for the laugh, Dexter.
This post was meant as a joke, right?
Or was this more of a "How to think like Richard Dawkins" exercise?

[Dexter]

Hahahahabahah! Too funny!
Thanks for the laugh, Dexter.
This post was meant as a joke, right?
Or was this more of a "How to think like Richard Dawkins" exercise?

You are easily amused by your own ignorance.

Did you think this was just idle speculation by Dawkins?

I thought you weren't a creationist? Does your anti-science stupidity know no bounds?

You should try reading a book about evolution.

[geo]

OMG! This one was the best reply to the article. It made me laugh my ass off!. . .

How old are you, Ant? I'm guessing about 12.

[geo]

Dawkins always brings out the trolls. Thanks for posting.

By the way, Schrodinger's cat is also a thought experiment.

As Dawkins says, this is a way to envision evolution. Using a human life to illustrate that there's no point we can demarcate the transition from a toddler to a preschooler or adolescent to adult.

Dawkins used a similar analogy in THE DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN (paraphrased here in The Guardian):

Consider this experiment in temporal ingenuity. You are holding your mother's left hand. At the same time, she clutches her own mother, your grandmother, with her right. Your grandmother then holds her mother's hand, and so on into the past.

With each individual allocated a yard of private space, your ancestral queue snakes off into the Industrial Revolution, through the Middle Ages and on into prehistory, until, 300 miles down the line, it eventually reaches the missing link, the common ancestor that humans shared with chimpanzees six million years ago.

Now imagine a similar, parallel queue emerging from that common ancestor, this time following the chimpanzee side of her family - until it reaches the present day. 'You are now face to face with your chimpanzee cousin, and you are joined to her by an unbroken chain of mothers holding hands,' Dawkins observes.

The crucial word in this sentence is, of course, 'unbroken', for at no point on Dawkins's seamless chain of primates does one link differ in any substantive way from the next. There is only imperceptible change, one species eliding effortlessly into the next. There are no jumps in which one animal abruptly turns into a totally different kind of creature, no sudden hurdling of species barriers, an idea that so bothers opponents of natural selection. There are only tiny, unnoticeable transformations

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/ma ... reducation

[sonoman]

An exercise in atheist worship of atheist gods, this time the atheist god pointing out the obvious but doing so because it's another attack on theism that posited a mythical beginning that most all religious people I know recognize as such. But Dawkins has to find something to get at theists so here we have this little tidbit tossed to the worshipers who dutifully swallow the guff and pass it on as atheist divine revelation. What's so stupid about Dawkin's little propaganda piece is that his own holy scientists have been labeling "First Man" "First Woman" for decades, we recall Lucy do we not? and we don't hear a peep out of him about this--only attacking the "unscientific" reasoning..of others, meaning theists, certainly not scientists who are always above prejudicial thinking, never get their results wrong, never fudge experimental evidence to prove a theory, are in short, inhuman gods, fully worthy of worship by mortal men.

[geo]

An exercise in atheist worship of atheist gods, this time the atheist god pointing out the obvious but doing so because it's another attack on theism that posited a mythical beginning that most all religious people I know recognize as such. But Dawkins has to find something to get at theists so here we have this little tidbit tossed to the worshipers who dutifully swallow the guff and pass it on as atheist divine revelation. What's so stupid about Dawkin's little propaganda piece is that his own holy scientists have been labeling "First Man" "First Woman" for decades, we recall Lucy do we not? and we don't hear a peep out of him about this--only attacking the "unscientific" reasoning..of others, meaning theists, certainly not scientists who are always above prejudicial thinking, never get their results wrong, never fudge experimental evidence to prove a theory, are in short, inhuman gods, fully worthy of worship by mortal men.

Wow!

[Dexter]

An exercise in atheist worship of atheist gods, this time the atheist god pointing out the obvious but doing so because it's another attack on theism that posited a mythical beginning that most all religious people I know recognize as such. But Dawkins has to find something to get at theists so here we have this little tidbit tossed to the worshipers who dutifully swallow the guff and pass it on as atheist divine revelation. What's so stupid about Dawkin's little propaganda piece is that his own holy scientists have been labeling "First Man" "First Woman" for decades, we recall Lucy do we not? and we don't hear a peep out of him about this--only attacking the "unscientific" reasoning..of others, meaning theists, certainly not scientists who are always above prejudicial thinking, never get their results wrong, never fudge experimental evidence to prove a theory, are in short, inhuman gods, fully worthy of worship by mortal men.

What are you babbling about? If you think Dawkins is wrong about evolution, please explain.

[Interbane]

What's so stupid about Dawkin's little propaganda piece is that his own holy scientists have been labeling "First Man" "First Woman" for decades, we recall Lucy do we not?

You would only misunderstand this if you had no clue how the mechanisms of evolution would unfold. The first man and first woman refer to the oldest known specimens. Go searching for a quote from any of the scientists who discovered these "firsts", and you'll see that none of them actually hold the silly notion that they are truly the first organisms of a species.

Evolution happens gradually, sometimes accelerated, sometimes slowly, but always along a gradient. A gradient which corresponds to small genetic changes with each generation. What we find in fossil remains are points along the gradient, waypoints on a map.

This post was meant as a joke, right?
Or was this more of a "How to think like Richard Dawkins" exercise?

Do you understand the mechanism of evolution? What are you attempting to criticize? Why not criticize leap years? After all, can we truly pinpoint the position of the Earth in spacetime, considering that not only the solar system but also the galaxy is moving as well as the Earth? Why not criticize the nitrogen cycle? Has anyone actually seen a nitrogen molecule flow through this entire cycle? You criticize it because you lack the capacity to understand physical systems. It may only be a thought experiment, but it's not far off the mark.