sweet! i'll take that as i sign that i'm starting to 'get it'.



i believe i may have come across these terms during some of my own wikipedia research, and linguistically i can sort of understand what they mean. real technical understanding, however, is a little more elusive. this isn't a request for explanation; i wiki-searched "sticky ends 3'-5'" and got a link for molecular cloning that i'm about to read.



what you explained confirmed my speculations. i didn't post them in my previous thread because they were only speculative, extrapolations of what i did know.

but after your explanation, another thought occured. well, i think it's still too nascent to be a full blown thought. more like this:

if a big part of development is controlled by the mother's genes and biochemistry, then another avenue of bio-engineering more broadly could be carried out by introducing (or removing) proteins to the uterus (or egg) to affect the embryo's development. it also highlights the ways that DNA controlling reproduction could be altered to produce stronger specimens of a particular species.

in theory, of course. the part of that thought that's still nascent is how i could use that in a story.



one of the best reasons i've ever heard to preserve the diversity of life on earth; would you agree, or is it your sense that these enzymatic tools can be found is most life forms, so that it's not a big deal if we lose a few here and there?



not in the slightest. one method by which psychologists learn to understand normal minds by studying abnormal minds, and the same is true of sociologists, who can learn to understand the routine parts of a culture by examining times of crisis, anomie, and disequilibrium. but social scientists can't mess up the lives of people merely for the sake of research, so we're limited to 'natural experiments.'



what this tells me is that the gap in our understanding is a matter of empirical study. we lack in details, not in theoretical understanding. that means it's a matter of time (and investment of resources) before these sorts of things become known. now, the technical side of engineering our own molecular robots is another issue, but it seems from what you've said that we understand the generalities of how protiens act and interact.

for anyone who's been enjoying this thread, i don't plan to keep it dead forever.

i think i've been in digesting mode, so to speak, processing what i've learned and some of the ideas and suggestions that have been raised here. i've also been reading more than usual, which tells me there's a good chance i might start work on the story soon. i always read a lot before i get an irresistable urge to write. i may also use this forum to link some of what i do finally write, for those interested.

however, for anyone interested in keeping the discussion going on its own right, please don't hesitate.

cheers

What are you thinking at this point? An intrastellar war? An alien discovery? Just politics? All of the above?

hi all, very interesting thread.
I'd (obviously) like to chime in on some of the things that have been discussed.

1.1 my favourite idea of a "colony ship" isn't really a ship at all. its a small von neumann craft carrying -mostly- information. and some mining and production equipment and a smelter. perhaps some frozen DNA library, though that would be debatable. it would be small enough to accelerate to significant fractions of C, and with no need to worry about preserving life on board. which saves a lot of space and trouble. once a basic station is set up, a "life lab" with artificial womb (we are fairly close already) could be built. now either eggs could be thawed, or produced artificially, fertilized and grown. voila, the first human. who could learn about the mission from the database. (this is the brief version, i left out a lot of steps required in between)

1.2 what about an exodus (planet earth destroyed)? not a new idea, but how is humanity fundamentally capable to set up a sustainable economy?


2. i think the answer to many of the questions about ecology, food, and terraforming are indeed bacteria and algae. we are but years away from creating "artificial life", a cell from scratch. after that, the possibilities are almost limitless. i think basically everything dystopic asked for is just a matter of time. wait another 50 years or so.
that includes a simple bacterial ecosystem that metabolizes iron and fixes or leeches nitrogen. a different artificial organism might process carbon, etc. etc.
algae can be grown in tubes with artificial light etc., and genetically engineered to produce all the vitamins and nutrients we need. btw, people can be engineered, too.
one "easy" example is Vitamin C. most mammals can generate their own, humans can't. why? a mutation! a mutation in a single gene disrupts the manufacturing chain for vitamin c in humans (cue dramatic music). can be easily "fixed" with gene therapy by a civilization with advanced biotech, and is one of my favourite arguments against creationists . we could probably already do it today, but ethics always get in the way... (100's of dead fetuses and abortions to get one success)

but why stop there? give us a new endosymbiont, and we can cover a large part of our daily energy consumption by photosynthesis, given (artificial) light. if that sounds weird, think mitochondria.

3. please don't say "junk" DNA (alternative: non-coding or intergenic). there are hidden functions in them bases.

4. gene regulation occurs in layers of complexity. the real complexity, however, is in the interactions of the protein world. this is how we can have fewer genes than maize, but be a more complex organism (or so we think)

5. while we do currently "cut and paste" genetic functions from one organism to the next, we will be able to assemble new biochemical pathways in the future. this includes engineering enzyme function.

6. cranial size limitation may be overcome if one is willing to use artificial wombs.
this might create interesting sociological conflicts, too. perhaps the cost prohibits poorer ppl from using it, and the accompanying gene therapy, kind of like in GATTACA- resulting in declassification? it is not that far-fetched.

can't think of more right now- what do YOU think?

Well, I like the idea of the von neumann ship, but it would have to be incredibly sophisticated, and is beyond the realm of what I would define as a "hard" sci-fi. But hey, it's not my story.

There are some other problems with it. You would need more than just an artificial womb, you would need systems to support the child until it is fully developed, and then what? It would have a radically different life than us on Earth, total isolation would probably screw their mental development. You would need parents, but that would defeat the purpose of the artificial womb in the first place.

Secondly, why would we do this? We have been discussing the practicality of colonizing space, and all of our conclusions pointed to an exodus of people, whether dumped into space or fleeing some catastrophe. Again, it's not my story, and our thoughts are by no means the only options, but this sort of colonization doesn't fit the practical uses of colonization we discussed.

I think perhaps it makes more sense to leave out the human-growing lab and just send an automated constructor ship, and then 5 or 10 years later a ship carrying people would arrive with their colony built for them and take over from there.


All this gene stuff is interesting too, but while we may have the capacity to perform such radical mutations/alterations to our bodies within the next 50 years, I doubt that many people would be willing to accept these things (but then again, maybe the only people who would want to live in a space colony would love this sort of thing too. Like sci-fi nerds ). But most people would probably think that they weren't as "human", and refuse to have leaves implanted in their heads or whatever.

However, building on what Antibody said, maybe that there is a source of conflict. Perhaps colonists so alter themselves that they really look alien, and humans on Earth "ostracize" them in pure disgust (quotation marks because it's not like they're not already cut off from mainstream society). Maybe Earth-dwelling humans would simply stop sending supply ships from Earth, and the colonists would have to figure out how they can make do with only their local resources.



I fail to see the connection there, but we will NOT hijack this thread for another God debate. I like this thread.

you don't need parents. the ship could simulate parents, or BE the parent. all of this could create interesting psychological situations, which would be great for writing a story. how does the first crew-member cope with narcissm? perhaps for that reason, several humans must be raised in the first place, as a skeleton crew? what if something goes wrong? etc.etc.




yes, why? but this is the problem of reasoning for extra-solar colonization in general.
it certainly would be the cheapest way to do it.



also a great idea. an what if the colony ship for some reason doesn't want to hand over?




there may not be much choice. another scenario would be that only gene-engineered humans can actually survive in space, or the conditions of interstellar travel (radiation, low-g bone maintenance, high-g acceleration, low nutrient supply etc.)



agreed! evolvers and splicers versus purists...



me, too. let's stay focused.

I'll make this a new post, but it is also an extension of the previous one.

In my mind, the question we have to answer much before we can even think of space colonization is:

"what does it mean to be human?"

i don't know if cybernetics or genetic engineering will force us to answer this question first, but i think we will get there. A third discipline will raise this question, later(?): neuroscience. Just like we do not need to fully understand the inner ear in order to create cochlear implants wired to the brain, we may not need to fully understand the brain to simulate parts of it. therefore, we may end up with highly sophisticated artificial intelligence, with personalities. if you can chat with a computer program, and not notice it is artificial, how should it be treated? how will it demand to be treated?


one more thing:
low caloric/ high vitamin intake ("caloric restriction") will increase the lifespan of a mouse by 50%. while at this time, it doesn't look like it will be the same in humans,
there clearly are genetically controlled aging mechanisms. synergistic effects for gene manipulation/caloric restriction are thinkable.

i guess i'd go with "all of the above, and more." i'll answer in better detail when i've got more time (something like a sneak preview, well, pre-pre-preview really). the new quarter is starting in a month, and my work load is picking up.



welcome to the discussion, AntiBody. again, i'll respond in greater detail later this evening.



i would like at least to respond to this, because i'm not entirely sure i'm on the same page. i discounted disaster on earth out of hand for the sake of my story (which isn't to say that the Earth will necessarily remain a very nice place to live). "exodus" in my mind implies at least a majority of the population leaving. while that's certainly possible, it's not something i plan for my story; rather i plan to keep the Earth around as a power center, though i'll probably have it somewhat ruined by the effects of global warming (whether it's caused by humans or not), overpopulation, toxification of the enviornment, etc.

heck, i think the engineering we'll need to do to survive on our own planet in the coming centuries will give us enough of the technology to live on other planets without much more engineering required.



i'm certainly no fan of censorship in any form, but i agree after a fashion. i don't believe anything serious was meant by the comment (and if something was, as millertime pointed out, there are plenty of theological discussions already under way). please, do try to be sensitive to others. normally i wouldn't be so serious about what i think was probably meant in humor, but this forum is sort of my baby, as well as pretty fertile research ground, so to speak: i'd hate to see one careless comment snowball into yet another circular dialectic.

i do think there's a fine line, though. a discussion about the nature of god, etc., does not belong in this forum, but a discussion about the future of religion or spirituality or belief is fair game. just please be respectful to other participants, and open-minded. i don't think it'd do for anyone to start insulting others out of hand.

of course, i have no ultimata behind these requests, other than the loss of my respect, which doesn't amount to much.

1. yes, therefore 2. and absolutely 3.!

Hey, I'm back. Happy Hump Day!!




Very true. One must remember one thing about Maternal Effects Genes, though. So far, all the info I've found indicates that the MEG work more like a general blueprint or instructions for bike or something. They tell the embryo where all the parts physically go (head here, arm here, heart in this orientation). It's still up to the embryo to be able (genetically speaking) to undertand that signal and build those parts. While we could alter the Mother's MEG to say give us another set of arms, it will be the embryo's DNA that determines the length, strength, etc.



I couldn't agree more with preserving biological diversity. Here's why. The enzymes we wrok with can really be found anywhere. DNA Polymerase, the protein that copies DNA is found in all living things. It has the same function in all living things. Now while I did say that our genes were essentially the same across individuals, as we move across species barriers, we start to find subtle differences in the genes. Thermus Aquatus has DNA Polymerase just like us; does all the same functions. But its different. TAQ, as its called, evolved in hot springs. All of its proteins are remarkably heat resistant where ours will denature (fall apart) at the same temperature. I use TAQ DNA Polyermase in my reactions when I worked in the Lab. I couldn't use human DNA Polymerase (or many; if not most others) as those proteins couldn't handle the temperatures I was running my reactions at. So while, we all have pretty much the same basic enzymes functionally, there are a lot of sublte differences that can be very important.



Very true. Many have noted that Non-coding DNA does have many functions that are related to everything from Translation to RNA creation, to stabilization. One thing that has always interested me is that a some of our (human) non-coding DNA resembles Retroviruses. Pretty cool, huh?



I couldn't agree with you more. Biotech will integrate more subtly into our current medical practices. In fact it already has. The biotech revolution started over 20 years ago. And while we are not injecting humans with Gene X, we are using genetics medically to the benifit of patients. We can use genetics to make organisms that make medicines, like vaccines, DNAses, etc. We can also use genetics to analyze viruses like HIV to create more effective drugs to combat them. Practical gene therapy is a long way away, but I have a feeling its will start out simply enough: fixing medical problems. Most people won't have a problem if theses treatments can be used to cure down's syndrome, or hemophelia. It's when you get more "scfi" (night vision - super strength) that people start to get leery.



Very good question. We will have to face it one day, and It may well be a very polarizing issue.

denyasis, please allow me to elaborate...




There are a large diversity of small changes in the DNA of most genes, that can manifest in single amino acid changes in proteins, which can affect functions like catalytic rates. these are called polymorphisms, and different "versions" of a gene are called "alleles". a certain set of alleles versus another would define a "race". naturally, "race" is a soft definition, as any combination of genes is theoretically possible. One obvious example is the control of pigmentation in our skin. another lactose-intolerance, which is prevalent in asian populations. like denyasis said, these subtle differences can be very important.




I,too, think that is fascinating. Like the impact craters of moon and earth, retroviral footprints and other transposable elements, active or inactivated, are witnesses of our evolution.




to my knowledge, there are at several humans alive today who have been successfully treated with gene therapy for X-SCID (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2878)
all clinical trials have been halted, after one kid in the french trial developed leukaemia. not to forget the patient that died in a clinical trial in the US.

the major weakness of this "first generation" of gene therapy was that it relied on viruses as a vector to deliver the therapeutic gene. the cost of this was that the immune system's reaction to the viruses could not be suppressed completely, and that such loads of virus had to be applied that unprecedented and unforeseen reactions occured. in the case of the young man in the us, blood clotting lead to organ failure.



i think the physical limitations will forbid all-too-extreme feats. tinkering with the human body plan, specifically skeleton would be pretty much like trial-and-error, as all sorts of unforeseen side-effects occur. sounds more like cyberpunk than space opera.

in Clarke's Songs of a Distant Earth, humans scatter colony ships throughout the galaxy because an unspecified defect in the sun leads to its early death. the story takes up when a newer model ship stops off on a successful colony, though this colony had lost contact with the others. in Clarke's story, the human population of this (and presumably other) colonys were 'grown' in much this way, and the first generation are socialized by their ship's AI. the world is in some ways idealic, free of the widespread hate we have, and incidentally free of religion (except for a single Buddhist artifact which plays no significant role: like me and many intellectuals in general, Clarke had a soft spot for Buddhism, which itself is highly intellectual).



i think cost is something hard to predict at this point. it's not just raw materials we're talking here. i think it's hard to imagine how expensive the equipment you describe might be. and how expensive would the necessary AI programming be? what if there's a radical breakthrough in the production of particle accelerators? lots and lots of what ifs.

i try to keep in mind what money represents: work
(well, at least in marxian economic theory, and despite the failure of his thoery of communism, contemporary economists still make use of his theories on the fuctioning of capitalism).

of course, that doesn't tell any of us which engine and ship design method would be employed, and i think the most likely answer is: many of them. our various space probes and rockets rely on different designs that vary based on a number of factors; why would it be different in the future?

of course, under a different governmental model, it might not be so much an issue of cost as one of, "do it or we'll kill you."



my mind is teeming with the possibilities.



sweet! of course, just because it's a good reason to preserve biological diversity doesn't the powers that be actually will   



i'd started looking into research on ageing (senescence), but hadn't wanted to bring it up in here. there's also a researcher out there who has this sort of cash reward for contributions that might help us delay, halt, or even somewhat reverse ageing. interesting stuff, for sure. i want to return to this later (in this or another post, that is; i'm not trying to ask anyone to wait before you discuss it).



i assume you mean to elaborate for my and others' sake - denyasis worked in a genetics lab at one point    he's been filling in a lot of the conceptual gaps i can't do on my own on wikipedia





ah... this is the question underlying my desire to write these books, and i might well have a very different perspective and background in terms of answering it. as i mentioned briefly in my OP, i trained as a sociologist: more specifically, i trained as a linguistic-cultural sociologist in the symbolic interactionist tradition. but i would describe myself equally as a philologist (i double minored in creative writing and Indian religious literature).

but moving on, the primary questions among sociologists concern society, but there are deeper rooted questions regarding the nature of the human condition that underscore all the social scientific and humanitarian disciplines.

Clifford Geertz, one of the most important anthropologists ever, might likely say that to be human is to be entangled in webs of meaning we ourselves have spun. more recent work tries to examine some of the ways that this is biologically rooted, for example, in Homo Aestheticus, Ellen Dissanayake writes:



in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, E.O. Wilson describes humans as the first and only known (to itself) species that can be characterized by "gene-culture co-evolution," and further claims that we are on the brink of yet another level: violitional evolution. he concludes by saying that the direction of such evolution is ultimately an ethical question, and reflects on the nature of ethics.

he questions the extent to which ethics are cultural and therefore mallable, or biologically rooted. some are biological to be sure. incest taboos, for example, are a universal: individuals are almost invariably repulsed by the idea of sexual interaction with someone they were very close to during formative years, which is typically only family members.

as a sociolgist-philologist, i can't help but attend to the diversity of culture. language and symbolic communication isn't just a mechanism of description, it's the mechanism of imagination and therefore action. anyone who's multi-lingual can confirm for you that some ideas simply don't translate. words are rooted in a whole web of culture, associated with unique events that constitute what can be called collective memory.

this writing project of mine is very much a thought experiment. my interest in the hard science of it is strongly associated with making the setting more believable, though it's also a great excuse to learn lots of intersting things (as several people have pointed out, one great thing about being a writer is that everything you do and learn can be substance for your writing).

establishing human socities in entirely separate star systems seems like the perfect fictional method to facilitate the kinds of genetic (and cultural) drift that pique my interest and imagination. i certainly see that there must be limits to our culture that are established by our biology. and there are certainly ethical-cultural limits to how we'll evolve ourselves. if history provides much of a clue, there can't be too much divergence within a single human biome. when one subgroup of humans develops and advantage, the rest either follow suit or die out (are killed off). but if you separate groups of people by light years, such that they can't physically interact with each other without expending great resources, and you've got a recipe for divergent evolution.

and as millertime pointed out, this is also a basis for conflict. however much ideology and propoganda go into wars, i believe they're ultimately economic in nature. i think what we'd see most is a lot of superstition and hatred, and a "natural" kind of segregation. should, however, the resources of one solar system nearly die out, it seems to me it'd be exceedingly easy to justify an interstellar war.

incidentally, though, i don't think there's a reason to believe humans wouldn't want to give up their humanness rooted in current biology. well, let me back up. there are plenty of reasons to believe it, but they don't necessarily mean it won't happen.

first, there are already many examples of ways in which humans want to engineer their own biologies, so to speak. costmetic surgery, body building, etc., can probably be called 'minor' without much dissent. they're more like exagerations of the biology we have. transgender surgery is a greyer area. greyer still is 'body modification' (aka body art, though artistry isn't always a primary motivation).

the subject of my 80-page ethnographic honors thesis was body modification and self-identity. long story short, one of the things i found was that body modifiers felt more natural after altering their bodies (as measured by their sense of mental well-being and integration of their identities). i'm not just talking tattoos and piercings, either. some of the more extreme forms of body modification include amputation (from digits to limbs to... other body parts).

another major part of my work was to disprove the notion that these people have some kind of mental illness, and i hope i don't need to go down that road again here -- especially because it's not central to my point. my point is that, while the majority of people might seem content in the bodies they grow into, all people typically invest a great deal of effort into managing their bodies, more than we usually recognize anyway. i mean, brushing our teeth and getting vaccinations of forms of 'biological intervention' as it were, and my work goes to show that culture bears greatly on the level that to which intervention can be taken.

so, that's sort of my pre-preview, or enough of it anyway. i didn't intend to frame it this way originally, but this is how it ended up. i hope you find all this social science an interesting contribution, even if a lengthy one (i certainly find it interesting, that's why i majored in it!)

...and yea, i'll probably have at least one planet peopled by tattoo enthusiasts   

haven't read it, though i think i shall


point taken.


i think that the matter of religion is key to the self-understanding of a human, and that all sorts of technology may be rejected on "religious grounds". i find it logical that like yehovah's witnesses reject blood transfusions, conservative christians or muslims would reject artificial wombs (ex-utero gravidity? ) out of religion, for example.


there is bound to be independent and local leaps of technology where communication with the next solar system may take tens, hundreds, or thousands of years.



yes, of course. i salute denyasis, i am learning from his/her posts.



that makes much sense to me. i am somewhat interested in human brain function, and we "know" that the human mind is a function of hard-wiring plus formation by environment.



now THIS i get a kick out of. For the longest time, it has been my fantasy that ultimately, the mind, or at least the brain, may be separated from the specific body. hence my affection for HAL2000, Meklons, Borg, Ghost in the Shell, The Terminator, Shodan, the Yor Collective, etc. etc.
I see no reason why it shouldn't be theoretically possible. If we don't wipe ourselves out, the future is all violitional evolution. we can start as soon as we acknowledge it. meanwhile, we have this pathetic tug-of-war between willful ignorance, looking-the-other way and secretive influencing. there is a reason why they say that technological progress outpaces philosophical and ethical consensus-making (coping?)
sorry for the rant. i just had to.




let me ask pointedly: if it is indeed such a taboo, why do we have a constant incidence of incest (about 1% of families)? Incest occurs in families of every description and across all socio-economic groupings. Research indicates that there is little to distinguish between families where incest takes place and those where it doesn't (http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/06a1_incest.html)

umm... personally i find that... disturbing. to the scientific mind, it is also an indication that there is a disconnect between perception and reality. or that the "taboo" is soft.


yes! and presumably, significant divergence would happen in a matter of decades.


yes, but how did you intend to answer the problem of excessive delay? if it takes 100-1000 years one way from system A to system B, how to wage a war? by the time a fleet arrived, it would be obsolete(as stated above) and nobody would be ready for planetary battle.




mental illness... is a squishy term. however, i wonder if you can get significant data on associated differences in brain function and wiring by anything but fMRI and autopsy/ histology. have you heard of "alien limb syndrome"? it is generally accompanied by the estrangement from or personification of the movements of the limb itself. It has been associated with corpus callosus lesions. i can see how someone with such a lesion would feel "better" after amputating his estranged body part.

sorry for the long post.

You are pretty much correct. Perhaps I was vague in my explanation, but I was trying to point out that genetic variation between individuals of the same species is much less than the genetic varation between different species. Hence, why different species are essentialy incompatiable sexually. There indeed is a lot of variation between indivuals in the form of polymorphisms. The common dog is the best example as it is one of the most varied domestic species out there. Same species, same DNA, but a lot of differences.

Also, insofar as the biological sciences and anthropology (My significant other is an Anth major and has pointed this out to me many times), "Race" does not exsist. The term is used rather loosely to describe different ancestries and you will see it in scientific journals and papers, but there is no scientific definition of "Race". It's purely a social construct. The reason being that if you scientifically define a "Race" you can then scientifically compare and contrast different "Races". Humans like to order things (best, worst, etc), and would take that information and twist it to argue that one "Race" is superior to another "Race". Obviously, history has shown us teh effects of racial tensions and hate, and to have people involve "science" to push a rascist agenda would well, be very bad.



Here's a question. Would a drastically different world (and thus way of life) force the inhabitants to abandon thier cultural norms, thus creating an entirely new culture, or would they attempt to shape the world to fit thier cultural expectations?
I like soc and anth, but know very little about it unfortunately.



I think the problem comes down to "What is human?" If we, say put a brain into a robot, is the robot a human? Will we treat it as a human or a second class citizen? What rights will it have?

i totally agree. that's what I meant by saying:



also, i must admit i meant to write: "alleles" instead of "genes". sometimes the typing is faster than the thinking...




precisely my point! I think that is an awesome topic to explore in a sci-fi novel. lucky for us, it seems like dystopic agrees

haha, same thing happens to me too, Sorry for any mis-understanding. I'm really enjoying this thread. Can't really talk about scfi, planetary colonization, and genetics at the police academy Well, I guess I could, but I can see people looking at me really wierd, lol.

LOL, indeed!

whew, i had a busy day at work.



disturbing indeed. the taboo itself is indeed soft and culturally constructed. for example, in the west we include in the category of incest relations with cousins and extended family, but not so in other societies. it's similar to the way art is instinctual, but it manefests in vastly different ways.

the genetic rule itself develops in the child during early development, discouraging him or her from engaging in relations. but if there's a genetic rule that manifests in adults, it's obviously much weaker. most, if not all, incest is committed by adults against children, children who obviously weren't around during the adult's formative years. hopefully that clarifies my (well, Wilson's) point.



i think i've heard of that, but i'm not sure if i've heard it by that name. what i'm thinking of specifically are persons who've suffered damage to their corpus callosum such that the left hand literally doesn't know what the right hand is doing, or the left side of their field of vision will be literally incomprehensible, even though the eye and optic nerves are undamaged. maybe i'm thinking of something else.



well... yes and no. the races we identify are definately social constructions. in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jarod Diamond proposes a biologically grounded notion of race (and goes to great pains to dispel the notion that there are superior races and inferior ones). the races he identifies, in no particular order, or Asians (including Amerindians), Whites (including ethnic groups in North Africa and the middle east), Black (African Bantus), Khoisan ("bushmen" and "hottentots"), and African Pygmies. he bases this on analysis of genes, language and morphology. he does so in support of the out of africa theory, saying that if anatomically modern humans evolved in africa first, then they'd have had the most time to diverge genetically - still not, obviously enough, to be anything like a separate species; and as Denyasis points out, there's still no clear-cut definition of race - and many long-standing ethnic groups are "multi-racial" including highland mongolians (who some believ to be partly decended from greek Amazons) and groups in the Indian subcontinent.



ooohhh what a tough question. either could happen, i'd say: it really just depends on the circumstances. most likley i think both. i don't think it's be possible to create an entirely new culture in one fell swoop (barring a von neumann seed ship), but i also don't think humans will ever be content to leave anything they encounter as is - not as a group anyway - except perhaps through an extremely elaborate set of social mores, and such a group would probably die out without the support of another group who did alter and exploit natural environments. in what proportions it'd occur is also a trickey question.

here's an idea of what i mean. of course, this is hypothetical by hard-scientific standards. there's this idea that monotheism in the west allowed people to exploit natural resources much more than they'd done so in, loosely speaking, pagan times. when the gods inhabited the natural surroundings, humans were loathe to take too much from it. but once the gods inhabited some distant realm - Olympus, Heaven, whatever - humans felt liberated to do whatever they could with all their surroundings.

the problem with the social sciences is that they don't work like the natural sciences. in physics and biology, there's typically a prevailing theory. in physics, for example, there was first Newton. then came Einstein, and even though Newtonian physics weren't thrown out the window, it was awknowledge that they were a gross simplification. then came quantum physics, which further showed that relativity oversimplifies phenomena on nanoscopic scales. but relativity isn't out the window either. and now there's QCD and such, attempting to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics.

ethics get in the way of that kind of certainty in the social sciences. so there are marxians, structuralists, interactionists, functionalists, idealists, poststructuralists, psychoanalysts... and the list keeps on going. in that same book, Wilsom says we should rightly call the social sciences and humanities the "hard sciences" because the subjects of their inquiry are so incredibly complex. proof is hard to come by; we tend rather to have argument (bickering, yes, but what i mean are academic arguments in support of a thesis).



hmm... i'm glad you said "specific." the notion of a mind without a body is absurd to me. a mind needs sensation to be a mind, and sensation comes from the body. but that said, the apparatuses of sensation and processing seem relatively arbitrary to me. though i'm not so sure we could create true artificial intelligence on our current models of computation: our brains aren't wired in a linear, binary way. our mental computation is sometimes binary, sometimes analog, and sometimes... multi-nary? haha.

again i'm coming back to Wilsom. I'd really suggest reading that book! he sort of synthesizes a number of contemporary theories of the mind and say that it seems the brain is wired to produce "scenarios" of reality, more than one at a time in fact. we create various mental representations of what's going on, and one emerges as the most dominant. there isn't an executive area that determines what's most likely or anything like that. there doesn't appear to be a "you" that decides what to do based on multiple reports or authorizes particular actions based on a scenario. simply put, the set of signals that makes the most noise in your brain is the one whose signals translate into action potentials that travel through the rest of the body and turn into action (and also feed new sets of scenarios in the mind). the dominance of a particular scenario is partly a factor of external stimuli at the moment, and partly a factor of the strength of existing neural pathways (links) - so if the "run from loud noises" pathway has been dominant, it's likely that more loud noises will lead an individual to run. but if the loud noise is "surprise!" at what turns out to be a surpise birthday party, the running action might quickly be overriden by the more dominant "must get back at my friends" pathway. kinda trippy to imagine, and humbling to accept. one of the nuerologists he quoted said, "i link, therefore i am."



i think "religion" may well be the most complex of human phenomena. i agree with you, but with some caveats. my minor in Indian religious literature was on paper a minor in the academic study of religion. it's just that it was mostly lit classes, and all of them on India - with the exception of Intro to Religion and another exceptionally fun class called "Wisdom: Literatures of Authority." the fact of my college education that i'm most proud of is that i got a D in Intro to Logic, but an A+ in Wisdom   

at any rate, the big point of intro to religion was that "religion" is a socially constructed category. defining religion is exceptionally difficult: one invariably either leaves something out that we'd want to call religion, or put something in that we don't. i think Frank Herbert did a pretty good job, though, in one of the Dune books:

"Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power, all of it mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is 'Thou shalt not question!'"

defining government by its functions and content presents similar challenges. i prefer to think of all of these simply as "culture" because particular configurations vary so greatly from one to the next.

but i agree that something in many or most religions is a key to, as you put it, 'self understanding.' might also be inclined to call it emotional enlightenment. i'd like to think that i've had bits of it here and there as a product of meditation and contemplation, but it's fleeting (the "dark night of the soul" as St. John of the Cross called it). i think that's the thing people are after when they say they're "spiritual, not religious" because they want to disidentify with some of the historically more distasteful parts of what we call religion (wars fought in the name of religion, oppresive codes of law, etc.) at least, that's how some people view the history of some religions. i have some very nacent ideas about what that 'emotional enlightenment' thing is, and how it could be described more empirically... but they're very nacent. maybe something for a dissertation some years down the road from now.



  well, the question's probably as old as language itself, and who knows? maybe other animals have some sort of sort of question about it themselves. but i wouldn't put my money on us ever knowing.

i'll be honest. i've got the most experience in genres that are in some ways very different than sci-fi. i have tried my hand at SF before, and the product was... odd. i was trying to be too alegorical and intellectual.

i'm most experienced with character study, and both sociological and creative types of ethnography (creative ethnography is sort of like biography, but the emphasis isn't on how an invidual's unique qualities compose him/her, but the ways his/her culture does). i've also ventured into experimental writing here and there. sudden fiction (very short stories) are one of my favorite formats.

actually...

since you've all been helping me work through so many of my ideas, i thought the least i could do for the time being was post an example of my refined writing. it's a sudden fiction (for the sake of keeping my long posts from being WAY too long), and not SF. but i'm pretty proud of it. eventually i'd like to publish an anthology of short character studies thematically related by their explorations of self-identity.

and yes, that is a real copyright at the end; it's not registered, but everything i handed in while in school is copyrighted.

WARNING: contains explicit language. if you are under the age of adulthood in your country, don't read this.



(c) Nicholas Richard Hay
8 June 2005
The University of California, San Diego

very interesting read! thanks for sharing!

my pleasure!

(Takes a moment and looks through all the stuff he missed)

  

Has this become contest for the largest post!?!?!?
Sorry, but they are very large... this is why the athiest threads are split into about five different threads (I think), or at least that should be why...

As I wish to inform you, reading just isn't my thing...
And I don't want to be anoying... but... can someone explain all this gunk!

Sorry to intrude....... sorry....  

yea it is called write so much that no one can follow your point. making you right.

We are discussing various topics, recently genetics and sociology, for dystopic to flavor his novel with. There is indeed a large amount of detail, because one needs a lot of detail to write a full novel. Admittedly, I myself have only skimmed through some of the larger posts because they are getting very technical, but I imagine dystopic needs all the details or leads he can get.

danielost, there is no "point". This is more expository than argumentative.

Dystopic... make a reference to the hitchhikers guide somewhere in there! (a good one preferably) Even though nothing in the guide has anything to do with reality... just please have something in there... plz...

oh, and thanks for explaining that miller.