is what you use. the rest is used to keep the body running

no, that's not what i said at all, and that's not the truth at all. the hindbrain (mainly the medulla, pons, and upper spinal cord) coordinate automatic functions such at heartbeat and body temperature. the hindbrain certainly is not 88% of your brain mass nor activity. a brain isn't even necessary to 'keep the body running', as is evident by animals with complex anatomies but no central nervous system (seastars for example have no CNS, and they not only have dynamic bodies and keep running, but there's growing evidence that they exhibit simple forms of social interaction).

habitually learned movement and other 'instinctual' responses are mainly handled by the midbrain (the cerebellum and limbic system), but it more importantly functions as a relay center (the corpus callosum and some of the organs in the limbic system), and it's very involved in learning.

the largest part of the brain is the cerebrum, and at least in terms of mass, it mainly processes sensory information and constructs meaning by forming connections between direct stimuli and memory.

seriously kid, why don't you read something before acting like you know what you're talking about?

and hopefully to settle the matter of brain usage, here's an passage from the "popular misconceptions" section of wikipedia's article on the human brain:

Well in answer to your first question, evolution will slowly devolve us back to single celled organisms as a direct result of medical science allowing inferior genetics to survive and reproduce. It is one of those things that is sad but true, eventually we will be forced to do evil and discriminate against who can have children, eventually this will be forced upon us and there is nothing we can do to avoid it.

What was there before the big bang.... everything!

I believe the big bang was a result of the initiation of time. Once time began, atoms and energy could interact and as a result the big bang took place!

i can't tell if you're being serious, but i haven't known you to be so elaborately sarcastic so i'll assume so.

evolution by natural selection doesn't work that way, and even if it did, once we "devolved" back into homo erecti we wouldn't have the brain capacity to use medical science and we'd resume normal evolution back to homo sapiens and start all over from there - but not from single celled organisms.

it's not medical science that's halted natual selection. it's been a cumulative process probably dating back to the gradual development of agriculture. as people could feed themselves more reliabily, and especially once some people could feed all people (ie, crop surpluss), natural selection started losening its grip.

modern medicines impact on genetics has been much greater on bacteria than on humans, vz. antibiotic-resistant super-bacteria. these genes for things like sickle cell anemia, on the other hand, go back thousands of years to relatively stable populations.

evolution by natural selection doesn't result in perfect life forms, but rather life forms that are merely good enough to keep breeding while competing with other life forms for finite resources.

certain hereditary genetic defects are becoming more common, yes. but that doesn't mean they're bringing us any closer to being single celled organisms, or anything like "devolution" (which makes about as much logical sense as "reverse racism"). in terms of genetics, it'd be like saying typos in an instruction manual would cause you to accidentally build a sofa when you purchased a dresser. typos might happen, and they might cause you to make an error during the assembly process. but the chances that typos could accumulate to such a level as to give instructions to build something else entirely are slim to none.

finally, putting all that aside, the "slowly" part of "slowly devolve us" is tens or hundreds of millions of years - at least it was the first time around. before we face the choice of eugenics (restriction on reproductive practices), we'll probably already have the ability to correct genetic defects in embryos at the genetic level. at least, i'd put my money on it. as it stands now, we don't mess with human genes (to cure a disease in a living human, anyway; experimental researchers are starting to apply molecular engineering to DNA, though).

the more likely reason we'll have to chose who can have children and how many is the population level. it'd be hard - at best - for the earth to sustain the current population level at its current spread of living standards indefinately. it'd be impossible to support 6 billion people living an american (or otherwise economically developed) middle class lifestyle without a much greener economy. plus, at the current populat growth rates, there will be about 8 billion people on earth by 2020 and 10 billion by 2050, where it might start to level off.

as it stands now, western medicine tries to find ways of ameleorating the proximate causes of known genetic diseases - in other words, the environmental factors that make the defecitve gene a problem. take phenylketonuria for example. in days past, it caused mental retardation and seizures. in a hunter-gatherer society, children born with it would have probably been euthanized by the time they had symptoms. but now that we understand the disease, its effects can be completely controlled through diet in most cases.

does that argue against your point? not directly. however, the disease itself isn't caused by a single defect. according to the article i linked above, "More than four hundred disease-causing mutations have been found in the PAH gene". i did the footwork of looking into the citation, which links to a cite where you can buy the full article; i didn't buy it, but the abstract was available as a demo. it much more clearly indicates that different mutations cause the same disorder.

my point is that we don't know what a "perfect" human gene looks like. we can use our knowledge to week out genes that we know to cause diseases, sure. but the prospect of eliminating all genetic diseases is a much more daunting task. if we need to start limiting birth due to overpopulation, and it's a rational choice, i don't think the science of genetics could rationalize such choices. in think in honest reality, the "evil" will be along economic lines. the simple, cold rationality will be: only those most able to support children will be allowed to bear them. in our society, that boils down to economic class. i don't think the rich are about to start paying for the most genetically fit children; like all people, they want their children to be their own flesh and blood. but who knows what culture might do.

the funny twist is that if things did go that way- richer groups given preferential reproduction rights - the rate of genetic defects would probably increase! just look at blue blood in the european royalties. i can't think of a single society where the richest groups weren't also the smallest (least genetically diverse) and most likely to reproduce among themselves (maintain the power).

shallow end of the gene pool much?

anyway, i believe we can avoid that. how is another question. i mean, we've all got a whole lot of things in common that are at stake. some things have managed to unite very large groups of people in the past, and not always based on the threat of another group.

i don't know a lot about most religions, and i know very little about yours. but i know a lot about buddhism. i don't chose to identify myself as a buddhist, and i don't believe its cosmology literally, but that's about all that separates me from other mahayana buddhists.

i make no mistake that buddhisms and buddhists throughout history have changed and don't represent a single, unified group. it was huge at its peak, and it's still considered a major religion. why? i mean, if some other religion is right, or if they're all wrong, why do the "false" religions catch on?

we are not simply our genes. religious experience can foster something healthy in us. community. ethics, though not always very well. comfort. and there's something more. from what i do know, it's variously called satori, samadhi, moksha, wu-wei, fana, inhabitation by the spirit or rebirth, and i'm sure i missed some other 'major' ones plus countless shamanic rituals, with or without psychedelics. St. Teresa of Avila chronicled it in her memoirs, saying "The soul is dissolved into that of God..." it's similarly described in the hindu isha upanishad:

"Whoever sees all beings in the soul
and the soul in all beings
does not shrink away from this.
In whom all beings have become one with the knowing soul
what delusion or sorrow is there for the one who sees unity?
It has filled all.
It is radiant, incorporeal, invulnerable,
without tendons, pure, untouched by evil.
Wise, intelligent, encompassing, self-existent,
it organizes objects throughout eternity."

to describe it psychologically, it's the dissolution of ego into an absolute. it doesn't come easy. i've experienced it here and there through meditation. i'd say orgasm and death are the only other times that can be observed to happen with remotely similar effects. so why is it that the most extremely religious public figures in the west, not to mention all of our political and economic leaders, seem totally devoid of such experience?

but i can't help but thing it's those tidbits of divinity or whatever you want to call it that have given religions their longevity. not necessarily to those extremes, of course, and not just those things. i think the best definition of religion is: sponge. a religious system can incorporate all sorts of different aspects of human life, systematically or idiosyncratically. sometimes it has strong or direct ties to political power, sometimes it is the political power, but not always. sometimes community is really important, sometimes it's based on adversity and other times not, and sometimes religion is a private practice. i could apply that variously to many more aspects of human life, but i think the point's been made. religion won't go away. but where it is and will go is another question.

i think we can figure good ways to change, and ones that everyone can feel at least okay about without having been decieved, bred or drugged into being okay with it. i just don't know what could possibly bring everyone to the same table long enough to even develop some ground rules.

maybe that's what ascention should mean.

anyway, long tangent. but, that one little sentence that got me going had a lot packed into it. lots of fodder for discussion, at least.

cheers

hehehe good point!

perhaps we can simply start a primative race of humans on another planet and then surrupticiously return for genetic samples every so often to keep us going..... ahem or perhaps we are already the primatives giving genetic samples!!?? lol

this is actually a defense against malaria.

I agree with you. We don't use 100% of our brain at any given instant in time, but we do use all parts AT SOME POINT (maybe within an hour or a day)

I was going to write a nasty response to this European. However, I replaced my post with "gd" (go to page 2 to see it) at the last minute.....

What the f@#$? Are you on drugs? Define "inferior genetics". Is someone who is short and fat genetically inferior to someone muscular, tall, athletic? What if there is a civilization ending plague? Guess who survives? The fat kid!! The muscular guy burns fat so fast with his nice lean physique that he dies really quickly from starvation. The fat kid stores energy so efficiently that he is a fat ass despite consuming only 1,000 calories a day. So, he survives the plague and is only slightly fat now, where as the muscular guy with all the babes is DEAD!!!!!!!!. Now if the fat kid could just hook up with some women... I could go on and on with more examples if you want.

Our medical science enables us to maintain a HUGE AND VAST gene pool!! So called "inferior genetics" (I like to call different genetics) are allowed to survive and reproduce helping to keep our gene pool nice and incredibly vast instead of really narrow like in hunter / gatherer societies. So, in the event our technology fails us and a disease does start killing us, because of our vast gene pool, SOME OF US WILL SURVIVE!

Lets look at history. Why is it that all of the hunter gatherer Native Americans died from disease when Europeans came and not the other way around? Victorian technology enabled a bigger gene pool than the Native Americans had. Also, Europeans had so much immunity from the filth of the huge tech - heavy cities and what not, that the Native Americans' limited genetics and limited exposure to pure filfth from big tech-heavy cities couldn't stand a chance!

Besides, "evolving" like other organisms is for lesser beings like dogs, bacteria, rats, etc. With our medical technology, we can REWRITE our gene pool some day and "evolve" millions of times faster than natural evolution would have us evolve. Technology is superior to natural slection. With atomic weapons, guns, missles, etc., the most advanced "evolved" organisms don't stand a chance!!

Hey, you know what? You can go and be like some Amish who refuse to seek medical treatment. Let me know how your "evolving" goes without medical technology. Me, rather than evolving into a 7 foot super muscular foot ball player type a million years from now, I would rather take my flabby, weak ass into a 10 foot tall technological montrosity of a mech complete with dual plasma cannons and tactical nuke missle launchers. I bet I could lay waste to millions of 7 foot tall "super" cave men.

I guarantee you we won't turn into single celled organsims..

I exadurated, and then agreed with Dystopics point.



Inferior genetics is whatever makes servival or living more difficult. I did not specify any particular inferior genetics examples so i do not know why you did?? you must be on drugs or somthing?

Nope. I have not done a single illegal drug in my entire life. Once, in my whole life I smoked a cigar but I have never smoked standard cigaretts.

My point is, medical technology is very good. It is also good that we aren't like when we were cave men where as a human race, we had a comparitevely narrow gene pool (because certain gene types died before reproduction). Medical technology enables people with those genetics to survive and reproduce who would have died during our cave men years. Our gene pool today with over 6 billion people is VERY, VERY VAST AND HUGE. In the event medical technology fails us, our incredible gene pool will take over, and SOME OF US WILL SURVIVE NO MATTER WHAT because we have an incredibly vast and diverse gene pool.

So, what are your arguments for why medical technology is bad? Didn't you say we would revert to single celled organisms because of our medical technology?

As I said, why do we need standard evolution like other species? Our "evolution" is advancements in technology! Is it conceivable that an organism say the size of a dog could ever evolve to where it could survive a direct nuclear blast? No. Technology wins. End of story. With humans, life has transcended evolving biologically, and is now evolving technologically.

Scenario I: ascension is merely another place of existance where different lifeforms still try to destroy one another. Same old story, just change the background and characters.

Scenario II:
Ascension where one becomes a more intelligent, more moral, closer to omnipotence.
Yes Ascension is logically possible but it has to be more of an internal event first and occurs with the physical event of ohhh.... let say death. Ascension has to be an internal event and not a physical one, because otherwise some ancient benevolent alien civilization would fly around the universe with Ascension ray-guns and ascend everyone.

Logically if there is Acension there must be Decension.

i believe we have another name for these

heaven and hell

The human body is a very finely tuned machine and the tool that has tuned it is death!

Medical technology as you say, allows more people with less well tuned bodies to servive and reproduce. This is a good thing of course but there is a price to be paid and that is of course a slow genetic movement away from the finely tuned bodies our ancestors have given us.

If you look at a human body, it has many vital components all working together in harmony for us to servive. If you look at just one common failing such as the gland that produces insulan, where medical science can fill that gap, then it is easy to conclude, based on the way evolution works that over time, allot of time, we will all loose the ability to produce insulan.

That is just one example, the human body is full of things medical science can patch up.

I hope this explains my point?

Can top you on this... I found my copy of SMAC at Future Shop for $5 with a $5 rebate. Still trying to understand that one. Also bought copies of System Shock 2 and Planescape: Torment for the same deal. Good haul for $15 free!

the bodies we grow into aren't established on a one-to-one basis by our genes alone. the other factor is environment. that doesn't just translate into behavior. take diabetes. some people are genetically disposed to developing the disease, and yes, diabetes is becomming far more common (i've heard that 1 in 4 children born in 2000 will develop diabetes by middle age). however, that doesn't mean the genes have propogated to every person who will develop diabetes, and it's possible for a genetically "perfect" person to come down with it under the right environmental conditions: a diet consisting of a lot of processed carbs, especially sugars.

i have another problem with your point of view. human genes show much less variance than those of many other animals. this isn't because our evolutionary history has honed us to perfection, but because of a relatively recent genetic bottleneck in our history. i personall think this is a bad thing: with less genetic diversity, the chance that something could happen and wipe out the whole species is greater.

i've used this example before in a different way, but sickle cell anemia is a good example here as well. it causes some health problems, but it also helps individuals resist malaria. if this gene weren't present in any humans and malaria was a more severe problem that wasn't isolated to the tropics - perhaps if the disease mutated - it could wipe out the whole human species. in this case it'd be a lucky thing that a fraction of people carry two alleles for sickle cell syndrome: they'd survive. or think about it like this: no one we've encountered has a genetic immunity to the HIV virus. if that virus were to affect us in other ways, it could be a major problem. luckily, it doesn't survive outside of bodily fluid and it doesn't pass through the placential walls to directly infect fetuses (at least AFAIK when a baby is born HIV+ it's usually because of direct exposure to the mother's blood during birth).

greater genetic variation is a good thing. it keeps human beings, as a species, better prepared for mass epidemics, climate change, and - should we ever endeavor to it - colonization of other worlds.

did anyone ever read Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis triology (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, aka Lilith's Brood)?

your attaching arguments that are true but i fail to see how they make what i said wrong?

there are many things that influence human development, and they all play a part, and contrary to your logic, one does not cancel out the other.

i guess i wasn't trying to say that your factual statements are wrong (or entirely wrong), only that i disagree with what should be done about them. you see it as a bad thing, i don't.

don't get me wrong, it's certainly bad for the individual. i'm talking on the level of species survival.

i think it's true that our medical science is making people more delicate, so to speak. as you've said, genes that'd normally be 'weeded out' by natural selection can propogate now in ways never couldn't have before. the longer we persist in this way, more people will be more reliant on medical science to have decent qualities of life. there certainly are dangers to this. should the appropriate industries collapse, all those people dependant on various drugs and treatments would be screwed. at the same time, should a major climatic change happen, a new disease develop, or should we find ourselves in a totally new and alien environment, that genetic diversity will be more of an asset -- "better to have it and not need it..." - yes, individuals will die during such an event, but the species will have better chances. and in the mean time, this doesn't mean that we're spiralling towards "devolution" into an earlier primate; it means we're evolving into cyborgs (biologically reliant on our own technology).

Yes that sounds more like what will probably happen,,, or should i say, 'is' happening??

I don't think the degredation of human physiology as a result of medical science would be of any benefit to genetic diversity tho.

sorry i didn't argue my point as to why this is the case.

your point is that the genetic diversity brought about by medical science could result in the survival of the human race if their is a plaque or whatever might happen.

But that is kinda like saying ok lets give everybody aids just in case a plaque comes along that only aids sufferers would survive!! It is possible to be true, but it is not a valid reason to give up on keeping people genetically healthy.

humans have always kept the genetically inferior around.

if they can't hunt they can plant. if they can't plant they can babysit. if they can't babysit they can guard.

that's not what i meant, not exactly anyway. i'm not saying we should do anything to jeapordize anyone's lives. what you're describing is intentionally introducing an environmental factor to weed out the weak (ever see the final episode of Aeon Flux, "End Game" i think it was called?).

that's just another, massive form of eugenics, and ugenics is wrong. though, it was what you suggested in your original post, that eventually we'd have to do evil and pick who'd breed and who won't. that might be true, but as i said in my initial reply, that choice needn't be based on genetic fitness.

i wouldn't want to unlease a disease on humanity anymore than a huge comet on the earth. but, as the man said, sh*t happens. i hope we'll be able to avoid that sh*t, and i believe we're smart enough to solve many problems.

but that's why included colonization in my list of reasons that genetic diversity is good. eventually we might be setting foot on other planet as places to call home. but the notion of terraforming is optimistic at best. yes, life forms from our planet will be able to help us adapt other planets to our own bodies. but it won't happen overnight. moreover, frontier life is hard. the darwinian natural selection you describe would return in full force on a new colony. i don't dream idealistically about star trek worlds. i think Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Arther C. Clarke's Songs of a Distant Earth are probably the most accurate descriptions of what our first attempts at colonization will look like/ result in. there's no FTL. we get to a planet in another solar system by sublight travel, and for better or worse, we're stuck there once we get there. lots of people will die. the survivors will become something other than H. sapiens. hell, it might even become the basis of a new kind of nationalism (unless we run into discernably intelligent alien life).

it's not like medical science is creating new allels. the traits we have, whether beneficial or neutral or detrimental to a particular life, are genes we evolved in nature. medicine prevents the normal weeding out of the less-than-deadly traits. i grant that it could someday proceed to the point where no one is free of interior genetics and everyone requires medical technology to live, and i think that'd be a bad thing. but that's the point at which we'd have to undertake eugenic science; i think the form it'd take would look most like Gattaca (the title was spelled with gene letters only). we're already on the verge of molecular engineering sophisticated enough to create magic bullets on a per patient, per disease basis. molecular biology allows us to track the protein translations and cascade effects of various genes in our own bodies and foreign attackers. we don't need to mess with the gene; we can counteract the proteins is proscribes. this is also a hell of a lot more profitable, since it creates people with special pharmasceutical, dietary and other environmental needs. as long as capitalism rolls on, that'll remain our trajectory.

and you thought i was an optimist   

Nice post Dystopic,

I would agree more or less with everything you say except;



I do not know why medical science would necissarily vanish in a colony? Of course a colony would have to have strickt rules on who can marry who because of the limited gene pool, i guess they would probably take into account who has less suitable genes while doing that?

thank you   



it's not that we'd lose medical science; rather, it's more like it'd be implemented similarly to combat field medicine: you do what you can for those you can with what you have.

part of it is economics. medical science doesn't do much if there isn't a medical industry in place to bring its treatments to people. i imagine if we were to seriously undertake attempts at colonization, it'd be a bit more than plopping a few dozen people on some rock with a knife, tin cup and and 5 band aids. and technology may proceed to the point that drugs can be sythesized almost anywhere from no more than base elements. but maybe it won't. in either respect, a colonial expedition would have much more limited resources. if the one doctor who knew how to do something important died, if the pieces of equipment for sythesizing drugs broke down, if anything like that went wrong the effect would be exponentially greater than it would on earth.

and there's also the limited number of people available. i think it'd be very likely that we'd see new diseases on alien worlds. not just caused by new pathogens, but also caused by the interaction of our genes with new environments. the scientific community on earth that can brainstorm solutions to such novel problems is much larger than on a new colony. and even if such a colony were orbiting our nearest neighbor, it'd still take 4+ years for transmissions to go from point A to B, and another 4 to get back.

...hehe, i've been reading up on a lot of the scientific speculation about this kind of stuff... i think i'm gearing up to write a hard science fiction story about colonization of space... even to the point of doing calculation tables in excel to figure out time dialation rates for various fractions of light speed.

for anyone interested in scientifically grounded speculation, i just started a forum dedicated to talking about realistic issues relating to space exploration and colonization.

bussard ramjets, cryonic stasis, and exoplanetary colonization

(please don't mind the rambling initial post).