çağla wrote:Paralith,
I try to repeat as much as I can, don’t forget that I have a language barrier. So sometimes, I guess, I use some words in their general meaning when it could imply a certain another thing in the context.
By “deterministic approach”, I meant to think about the explained steps in an evolutionary process by completing them to each other –without being aware of- in accordance to replace them in some sort of an order in a whole in my mind. We are inclined to link and complete, create patterns according to our general information of things. While trying to make inquiries on a certian subject, this can be a trap.
Also related to your statement about “questions”, this is exactly what I am trying to do. More than looking for certain answers, I am trying to understand what kind of questions should be asked to understand the way of inquiries and what can be known in a field I am interested in.
For example, I know that the two great questions in anthropology are “What can I know about the world?”, “How can I know about the world?”. But these are defining grand scale questions drawing of a field’s borders. Alas, to ask a real question to learn, you should know about a little in that field. So, what I little understand makes me weak when attempting to ask a question. And trying to learn to think about evolution is very difficult in a different way –even in a little scale-, because of the knowledge’s unique nature in linking a detail to whole.
So I try to make marks in my mind to learn. When I expressed the being bipedal as “a change in great scale” that was what I was doing. It wasn’t to emphasize it’s greatness, but to mark a begining in a process. Because you wrote something important to me -“…Bipedalism most likely did not evolve in order to let us use our hands for other things. ...”- that helped me realise something I understood before, but didn’t come to know as a way of approaching to understand an evolutionary step. Because while thinking, I “completed” that cause to be a reason to create a pattern that would reach a conclusion, without realising and naturally being confused, as it’s also obvious with the basic information and reasoning on the detail, which actually tells there is no cocnlusion of the sort.
Ah, I think I follow you now. Prior to this thread, you had taken a result of bipedalism (more fine motor control in hands) and thought this might actually be the cause of the bipedalism. If I'm understanding you correctly, of course. This is a common error, and something you have to wrap your mind around when you're studying evolution. Each step in a sequence of changes might not have been possible without the previous step; but that doesn't mean the previous step was made only in order to get to the next step.
Anyway, so neutral is probabilistic, because it is already contained/included as far as it becomes negative, which is selected against, and positive which is selected for with the environment and countless other changes “determining” which trait is going to stay and develop?
Yep, basically. It's really quite simple in theory. The difficulty comes in the practice, which is so often the case in biology. Simply quantifying the phrase "the selection pressures imposed by the environment" is a monumentally complex task that has so far only been done in the most simplified ways possible.
I never thought of this way before. On a side note - with a frown on my face- it explains a lot.
Yea. In the past few years I've been harshly criticized by each side for standing too close to the other side. I personally have swung back and forth as to which perspective is most important, only to realize that both are equally legitimate.
I make the distinction from on the result of human alienating itself from nature, mostly its own, because of the things we invented to make our lives easy and comfortable. I don’t think there could be any clear distinction between us and animals under given certain circumstances. Take simple civilisation (Law, food-shelter providing) out from everyday life for a certain time, the time needed to go back to being an ‘animal’, is the same amount of time between two meals.
While using the word “anomaly”, I had in mind two things:
First the old perspective of “being the only animal that is aware of its awareness”. I think on the biggest picture of everything I perceive that as a “certain step” to all things. Think of something like Sagan’s steps. From learning to use fire, to learning to use of radio waves for example. The fact that an animal can evolve to think, developed to make an inquiry in the simplest sense has always been baffling to me Paralith. I cannot enough express my mixed emotions on this. Goose bumps.
It's common for people to think of humans as somehow outside of, above, or alienated from nature. But, all the things we have done to modify our environment and our lives, we could never have done if it weren't for our nature, for our evolved biological capacities. And this ties in to your bafflement about the human brain. I admit, I sometimes feel the same way you do. The human brain just seems to be such a massively, incredibly complex thing, with such a range and variety of capabilities and possibilities. How could such a thing be selected for? But that's just it. If your brain can be said to have one single major function (other than making sure you body keeps running), it is to take in information from the world around it, and adjust our behavior accordingly. Flexibility. Adaptability, within one lifetime, within one moment.
As amazing as DNA is, it can't possibly hold enough information to 100% prepare you for everything you may or may not face in your life. And for organisms without flexible, learning brains, that's all they got. If you don't happen to have the right information in your DNA, you're toast. You can only hope that, in the process of making the next generation, mutations occur that manage to give your offspring better information. The rate of adjustment to environmental changes is strictly constrained by the rate at which you can reproduce. But that constraint is lifted if you have a flexible, adaptable brain.
This is especially valuable for large bodied animals like us with generation lengths of 20 to 25 years. The environment can change a LOT in 20 years! And, what is a better defense against a changing environment, than to take control of that environment, to stop it from changing in ways detrimental to you, and force it to change to suit you better? What more could selfish genes want, but the perfect environment that will always select for them and never against them? I say that what humans have done in the past ten thousand years is very natural, and is probably something we should expect anywhere life exists and has had a long enough time to evolve.
Secondly, after reading about “vendian biota” –I hope I spelled it correctly- I was astounded by the fact that there might have been a completely different life evolved on our planet and couldn’t help but think if; Would it really be completely different? Would there be intelligent animals? Would they be primate too? And after countless questions, I thought as the odds are very low; negligible for intelligent life already in general, it could be seen as an anomaly.
This really applies to any life that might appear - or has appeared - anywhere in the universe. Now, just before this I said we should perhaps expect to find environment-altering intelligence wherever there is life that's been around and evolving for a long enough time. (How long is long enough? No idea.) But I mean that in the most general sense. Something that is, somehow, smart enough to alter its environment on a grand scale to suit its needs. Should we expect this thing to look anything like a primate? Certainly not. There is a three billion year long sequence of changes that led from the beginnings of life on earth to us. Each change effected what changes were possible for the future. Alter what happened at any of those steps, and you alter the whole sequence. And because what steps are taken are determined by the random, probabilistic process of mutation, you can basically guarantee that the steps will be different.
But, it's probably safe to assume that the general, functional goals of life will be largely the same wherever you go, even if the details of how they accomplish those goals vary enormously. Live, stay alive, maintain a lineage that doesn't die out. And as I said above, forcibly altering the environment to suit you and to not kill you is a great way to accomplish that goal.
Some people think that, given the vastness and the age of the universe, that even if the absolute chances of intelligent-environment-altering life evolving on any one planet are low, it should have happened SOMEWHERE by now, and by that we mean somewhere other than earth. Given the vastness of the universe, some people think that intelligent life must have appeared quite a few times by now - enough times that, it's very strange that we haven't yet found evidence of them yet. A lot of the parameters these people use to make these conclusions are themselves guesses, so it's hard to say how right (or wrong) they are.
“Yes, our brains got bigger AND our tools got more complex, but which change drove which? Or are both changes just the side effect of some other driving source of selection?”
May be because of my education, I really don’t know why, but I’ve always been inclined to think –as a hunch- that spatial understanding of any “form” or “shape” of everything around us could be the first source to this kind of development. This is also caused by an architect and an art historian –severely rejected by architects and hated by art historians in his time- who probably was born 150 years earlier in my opinion. Gottfried Semper. It’s out of our subject, but shortly he claimed that even the most complex architectural designs were born -long before any architectural thought was born- from the most primitive ways of ‘making’. Like knitting something from leaves... It just makes sense to me, in layman’s terms.
That's very interesting. I might have to look up some work by this person. At first blush it makes sense to me too, but I don't know the details of this man's idea. Heck, just given the laws of physics, there's only so many ways you can build a wall.