A passage from Carl Sagan's book written 25 years ago
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“Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”
But the full quote from Churchill has more timely insight:
“We must always look forward, but we have to understand our history in order to not repeat the mistakes of the past. I have seen too many instances where people continue to pursue wrong courses of action because they do not take the time to think critically about what has happened in the past.”
The human race is very predictable in their unpredictability.
Churchill was a historian. He once said about world war ii, "history will think highly of me, for I intend to write it."
He did. It's the standard first thing to read when studying the war.
But also for example over 1 million "free" Soviet citizens starved to death just after the war in their own destroyed country.
Which is talked about even less.
http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1947-2/famine-of-1946-1947/
Mostly outside camps.
Moving from inception towards death...what are the implications for the sustenance of life if one always looks forward towards death?
What if ones comprehension is based on adaptation to what one perceives; and not upon believing suggested his-story by other? How is it that his-story always misses the main actor of ALL reality...ONEself?
What if flow represents the natural order, and forms ignorance thereof causes the problems? What are the implications of ignoring that which is (form within flow) for that which was (past), and that which might be (future)? Could doing that cause a present based on self imposed stress; originating from self imposed loss (past) and hope/fear (future)?
What if flow represents continuance for the form set into it, and also defines the direction (from beginning towards end)? Also; could it be that action is defined by response to aka form to flow aka momentum to motion aka resistance to velocity?
25 years ago it was only one minor worry among many. People ignored it, and we are today living the consequences.
However I think the bigger threat our parents failed to recognize in time was the Internet linking the globe. (specifically social media and cheap mobile devices). Instant worldwide communication of whatever random thoughts people had to everyone else destroyed the communications firewall that prevented mind viruses and negative culture from spreading too fast.
PC culture starting dying with the advent of the Web. We should have taken the opportunity to spread American exceptionalism to the rest of the world. Instead Americans dumbed down their interactions with others in order not to offend sensibilities and to be friendly global citizens, and imported their watered down rights, lack of individualism, and bad policies into American society. The generation coming up now has no love of free speech, and people who escaped communist regimes now find that authoritarianism is creeping up in the last place they expected it would.
The USA exported the values of Equality and Universal Democracy to the rest of the world. You might call this Exceptionalism, I call it a war crime. Progressives need to learn to stop forcing their bullshit values onto everyone else and leave other cultures alone to solve their problems as they see fit.
Totally agree. Nearly every single multicultural rape and murder in the past sixty years can be directly blamed on the exportation of America's "allow yourself to be conquered in the name of diversity" bullshit, and that's a lot of rape and murder.
If I coated the earth in a magic dust that turned women into mindless automations without any threat assessment capabilities, I would be rightly blamed for all the horrible shit that happens to them when they blindly walk into dangerous situations en masse. But that is quite literally what globalism has done, except instead of a magic dust it's a memetic contagion.
Frankly, you'd be better off listening to Horoscopes than CNN. The Horoscopes are just fraudulent bullshit, but it's not designed to actively hurt you.
He should know. He helped create this.
If you really look into it, people have been discussing the problematic trend of society for well over a century. There were guys discussing the problems of the civil rights movements back in the 1800s and those problems have come true. People discussing the issues with liberalism and its leading to Cultural Marxism in the 40s-50s-60s. Western civilization has been in a decline for well over a century.
Except it's not crystals and horoscopes but the words of unelected bureaucrats and pop scientists bought and paid for.
Sagan's just a dogfuckerophobe, etc.
It's actually more of a 'too much information available, too many people to care' situation. We are a collective memory society. One person remembers something, another person remembers another part of it, together, we recall the whole of it. Memes unite us in their simple, relatable message. It may seem we are all dumber than shit, but it's just how we uber-ants are.
I often forget how long it's been since I read all that stuff like this.
There's a difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution.
Micro-evolution (a bird with a slightly longer or slightly wider beak, or a different color fur) is almost certainly a real phenomenon. It requires a single, slight change. Minor variations in genes combined with artificial, natural, or sexual selection can happen in a generation, and can be cemented in a relatively small number of generations.
Macro-evolution makes no sense at all, when examined through the lens of mathematics.
The odds of a hummingbird evolving from a seed-eating bird or an insect-eating bird are astronomical. Not only do they need to develop the new beak, but they also need to develop a new digestive system that can process nectar efficiently as a primary food source. The hummingbird must out-compete other birds while preserving each useless mutation across generations until all the necessary ones (fast metabolism, sugar-optimized digestive system, small size, nectar-drinking beak) are in place, while expending the energy required to support what are, for that intermediary, completely useless genetic features.
If one examines the number of possible DNA mutations and compares the immediately-lethal ones to the ones required to form a new organism (never mind the merely-pointless), the probability of successfully mutating is astronomical - and then the first member of the new species needs to be so wildly successful as to create future generations, either through a second astronomical chance occurring in a second member of the species, or for those traits to be sufficiently dominant as to dictate the form of its offspring.
To create the platypus through random chance mutation, we would need a new word to express the size of the denominator.
Micro evolution IS macro evolution... Just over a longer period of time.
Everything in life can digest sugars. There's actually rules in bird-watching not to give white bread to eagles and hawks, because it's bad for them... Because they'll eat it. And like it. Because it's simple sugars. On the converse side, deer and chickens will eat mice, even though its out of their usual, it's a good source of protein.
So here's one of many possible hummingbird paths: Standard bird begins: Flies okay-ish, two eyes, two wings, one beak, two legs, you know what "bird" looks like.
"Bird" does not spontaneously transform. As you say, the beak gets slightly longer. Why? Flowers attract bugs. Bugs are good protein. Longer thinner beak means get to eat more bugs hiding inside half-closed flowers. Minor variation cemented over a couple hundred years. Flower needs bugs to pollinate, though. So flower that attracts more bugs, becomes dominant. How? More sugar. Sugar is the basis of all life... Somewhat. "Long-Beak-Bird" that can drink some of the sugar while also eating the bugs gets more energy, more energy = good. ALL life digests sugars. In fact, all life transforms what they eat INTO sugars, so just taking in nectar, which is close to sugar, is great. So Long-Beak-Bird would like to get extra nectar while eating bugs, but the nectar-rich flowers spray it all over the ground when they land on them. Smaller long-beak-bird needed. More agile long-beak-bird needed. Some are fine, and they branch to a different evolutionary branch. Others continue to mate with smaller and more agile mates that live longer since they get more nectar.
Small-agile-long-beak-bird still isn't a hummingbird, but it is closer than "bird". Lets introduce a problem to the environment: Bugs running out. Maybe the world got colder, maybe a new predator arrived, maybe too many small-agile-long-beak-birds bred and ate too many bugs. SALBB now have flowers with excess nectar, since the bugs aren't eating it, but less bugs. The ones able to keep flying with less protein are more likely to survive to mate. And being agile becomes even more important, since with the flowers overflowing with nectar, you get a lot more from them if you don't dispose of them... And being even smaller still is important with less protein to keep your bulk up. The ones able to process the sugar better survive. Others either die off, or branch to a different evolutionary branch. SALBB now primarily eats nectar, minimal bugs. It's also tiny, not small. Tiny-Agile-Long-Beak-Necter-Bird, TALBNB. But it needs one more notable trait before TALBNB becomes Hummindbird. A bird that can slow itself in flight is better at flower sipping than that one that can't. (crash into flower slower, less nectar spillage) A bird that can slow itself MORE is better than one that can only slow a little. A bird that can briefly slow momentum to the point of stopping for a moment mid-air? Even better. Hover? It's the same thing, just better at it. Hover... backwards? One that can mildly go backwards even just a tiny bit and slowly is hugely better at getting to new flowers on a branch, able to progress along an entire tree branch of flowers instead of taking a flight for each one. If they can go backwards faster, though, they can dodge predators with it.
And now you have an omnidirectional, agile, tiny, long-beaked, nectar-drinking bird. A hummingbird. All through micro-evolution. Whether or not that's the path "Bird" took I don't know, but off the top of my head I could see that path existing through only minor changes and a couple thousand generations.
What you're missing in all of this is each of those variations would take more iterations to reach a 50% probability of arising by pure chance than the total number of generations.
"Oh, just stack up a billion billion-to-one-odds mutations" is not a rational explanation when there have only been a million generations.
"Thing with longer beak can reach things it likes to eat better than thing with shorter beak, even if it is just 0.01mm longer each generation" is hardly "billion-to-one odds mutation".
That's like saying "tall people tend to have tall kids, and dwarfs tend to have dwarf kids? Billion-to-one odds! Billions-to-one! Tiny asian parents have seven foot tall black kids all the time, the odds of a tiny asian parent having tiny asian kids is zero! ZERO!". Longer-beaked birds tend to have longer-beaked chicks.
Not a single fossil of a transitional species ever found.
No explanation of cambrian explosion
micro and macro are not the same. that is just a stupid statement.
Embarrassing to see this upvoted here lmao
Aww, you didn't even CARE about my wonderful theorization of hummingbird growth!
Sure they have. God of the gaps argument, yawn. Every single fossil is a transitional fossil.
When lots of ecological niches open, things grow into those niches. That is how you'll have two very different species occupying the same niche in different locations: The niche was open, so something wound up taking it.
Micro and macro are merely levels of scale. Microeconomics done ten thousand times is macroeconomics. Microevolution done ten thousand times is macroevolution.
But you're not here for a good... "faith"... conversation. Ah? See what I did there? ACKNOWLEDGE MY PUN!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuIwthoLies
I just want to know how we go from Dire wolves - the canine Chuck Norris - to an ass scraping ugly demon spawn called the pug, complete with breathing issues and stumpy legs.
Yes, pugs do the ass scraping thing and no it wasn't my "dog".
Dire wolves died off with the rest of the megafauna during the last ice age. Smaller members of the old species required fewer scarce calories to survive, so everything big got small or died off.
As for the wolf > dog > abomination path, artificial selection is significantly faster than natural selection. If you look at the Russian fox experiments, it took about 50 years to create a domesticated breed of fox. That's a single human lifetime to change the nature of a creature - in another hundred years, they might be able to create a fox that doesn't stink, and then it would be pet-ready.