What are we evolving TOWARDS?

Factually incorrect. We actually understand quite a bit about chimp communication, whether thru vocal calls or body postures. To say there’s no evidence for or against the poetry assertion is just silly. Give us some evidence “for”, and then we can talk. One doesn’t go about scientifically disproving random hypotheses.

Again, factually incorrect. We have over 30 years of observation of chimps in the wild by several independent groups. We have a pretty good idea of their capabilities and limitations.

By the same logic, a person who grew up in China and speaks only Mandarin Chinese will not be capable of grasping computer science because we ran a test on them in English. If there has been serious research done into chimp linguistics, then please do point me in the right direction, I’d be very interested. We haven’t really gotten past the whole “they make noises and gestures to communicate and this noises and gestures mean this and that”. We have very little idea about sentence structure, grammar, scope, etc.

Let’s see if I understand leandroc76’s objections.

On the one hand, the earth is supposed to be 4 billion years old, and in that time it took 3.5 billion years to evolve mulicellular life, then another 200 million to evolve life on land, then 65 million for mammals to evolve to their present state since dinosaurs went extinct.

Why didn’t the first life forms on earth evolve into intelligent beings?

The answer to this question is that the first life forms were extremely simple bacteria. They couldn’t evolve intelligence since they didn’t even have brains. So it was nothing but mats of bacteria for billions of years. That bacteria was evolving…some photosynthized, some evolved to use oxygen, they evolved new ways to digest food, but it was all bacteria. For a billion years or more. If a person is lucky, they might live to be 100. Now think of a thousand years, 10 times that long. Back to the middle ages. Now think of 10,000 years, back to the very beginnings of agriculture. Now think of 100,000 years, back to the first people that were really human, but were hunter gatherers with only stone tools. Now think of a million years…and our ancestors then weren’t really human, but Homo erectus, with half our cranial capacity, not much different than bipedal chimpanzees with a penchant for using sticks and flakes of rock. Now back 10,000,000 years, when our ancestors weren’t even bipedal. Now 100,000,000, one hundred million years ago, a million times longer than the oldest humans have lived. Our ancestors then weren’t much different than shrews today. Dinosaurs everywhere. And 1 billion years ago there wasn’t any mulicellular life.

Loooooong time spans. So…with all that time, why doesn’t evolution proceed more quickly? Why didn’t the first dinosaurs evolve big brains and start using tools and invent agriculture and gunpowder and computers? Well, because there isn’t usually a selective advantage in being smarter. Brains take a lot of energy to produce and maintain. If a species doesn’t need a brain they quickly evolve smaller brains. There is no ratchet that makes creatures evolve larger and larger brains. The only ratchet is the one described earlier, in that you can’t get any dumber than a bacteria. So the only direction to move is “smarter”. But there isn’t usually any particular reason to become smarter.

So you have bacteria for billions of years, and dumb animals for hundreds of millions of years. Then along came primates. Primates are smarter than most animals, but why? Well, they evolved larger brains incrementally to help them solve problems…jumping from branch to branch, climbing, finding dispersed food sources, etc. They didn’t start evolving bigger brains so that one day they’d be able to pilot rocketships, but rather to catch more bugs, find more fruit, avoid more snakes, jump farther and climb faster. But those large brains weren’t just bug-finding single purpose modules, but could also be used for other things.

Large brains make more complex social structures possible. You can recognize other members of your species as individuals, and remember their past actions. You can cooperate with them, or compete with them. The better you are at social interactions they more successful you become. But before you can even begin this process you need a brain that is already very very large by the standards of most species. A monkey has a brain much larger than most animals their size. Monkeys are successful, but they aren’t the most successful animals in the world. They didn’t rule the earth with their large brains 10 million years ago, they just did their monkey thing, catching bugs, eating fruit, climbing trees. Some monkeys might not need larger brains, so their brains got smaller, most were adapted to their particular environment and so stayed the same, and a few were more successful with larger brains and got smarter.

But again, they didn’t get smarter with any other purpose than being a better monkey or ape. A smarter monkey could do different things than a dumb monkey, but dumb monkeys weren’t less successful than smart monkeys, in fact on average dumb monkeys were more successful. So to get a creature as smart as a human you have the equivalent of getting heads 100 times in a row from a coin flip. Sure, given a long time you’re bound to get a run of 100 heads. But how long should you expect to wait? Hard to say. It isn’t like waiting for a linear process to where you can measure the current rate and give an estimate for when the process will reach a particular value. To evolve something as smart as a human you had to start with bacteria, then wait till multicellular life formed, then wait for animals, then wait for them to move on land, then wait for them to live in trees, then wait for their major predators to go extinct, then wait for them to evolve to eat fruit as well as bugs, then wait for them to develop complex social structures…and none of the new advances could be predicted from looking at the preceeding species.

So at some point you have Homo erectus, which stayed at the same brain size and level of technology for a million years. Why didn’t they immedieatly evolve into modern humans? They just didn’t, modern humans weren’t the goal when Homo erectus evolved from Australopithecus, Homo erectus was. Then for unclear reasons about 100,000 years ago modern humans evolved? Why then and not earlier or later? There isn’t any real answer to that question. If it happened earlier, we’d still have the question of why particularly then, why not even earlier, or later, or at all?

So 100,000 years ago we have modern humans. So it took 100,000 years to evolve from living hunting and gathering and using stone tools to building skyscrapers and piloting spaceships? No, of course not…since there are modern people even today who hunt and gather and use stone tools, living a lifestyle essentially identical to the lifestyle those first humans did 100,000 years ago.

Technological progress is not inevitable, and it isn’t a ladder. Inventions get made, but they don’t always get adopted. In a hunter-gatherer band people have to learn to build and use a tool every generation or the technology will be lost. Since pretty much every person has to learn all the technology that the band uses, there’s only room for so much. You can learn a new design for arrows, but you can only learn to make so many types of tools, and a tool that isn’t used for a generation is gone forever.

For 90,000 years human technology was essentially static. Sure, we had technological change, but these were simple changes…new types of stone tools, new fishing techniques. And the new techniques might be improvements, but they weren’t radical improvements. We might find evidence for a new tool type…nets, or bone needles, or what have you, but the technology tool kit of a hunter-gatherer is inherently limited.

Then along comes agriculture 10,000 years ago. Why then and not earlier or later? Well, that was around the time that the Ice Ages ended. Climates had changed. Perhaps that had something to do with the precise time. But the real answer is that it just did happen then, and if it hadn’t happened then we’d still be hunter-gatherers. So how did we get from agricultural villages to cable television? Agriculture doesn’t mean more food exactly, but it does mean more storable, transportable food…and more importantly, more expropriatable food. Farmers can’t move away from aggressive neighbors, they’ll lose their farms and starve. So the only choice is to fight back or see them take your grain. If you fight back you need soldiers, those soldiers need food, so you have to give them your food, or the soldiers from the other side take your food anyway. Pretty soon the difference between the soldiers from your village and the soldiers from the other village isn’t much, they all take a percentage of your food in return for not hitting you with their swords.

But surplus food means artisans can specialize. Butchers, bakers, candlestickmakers, etc. Ah, so why didn’t this specialization lead to an explosion of knowledge and the beginning of the industrial revolution thousands of years ago? Because artisans didn’t have much incentive to share their knowledge, there wasn’t an advantage to sharing a family’s secret method for making blue glass, so the method didn’t spread. Some inventions are simple enough that anyone can copy them given an example, so there was some technological progress, but it wasn’t linear improvement, it wasn’t universal improvement, and it often went backwards.

Then sometime around 500 years ago we have a change…the beginning of the modern era. Why then and not earlier? Why then and not later? Why in Europe and not in China or India or MesoAmerica? Hard to say. We know the industrial revolution happened, but why? A good first look might be Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” which asks this particular question. But if we were going to be sitting on a message board asking this question it had to have happened already, so asking why not later is kind of answered. As to why not earlier, there wasn’t any particular reason. The earlier agricultural civilizations weren’t striving to achieve an industrial renaissance, there was some progress but not enough for most people to even have the idea there was such a thing as progress. Progress happened over centuries, not people’s lifetimes. Empires arose and fell apart, but for most people their lives didn’t change much.

And during all this, the move from agriculture, to industry, to the Straight Dope, there was no detectable evolution of human intelligence. A hunter-gatherer from the Pleistocene was just as intelligent (on average) as a modern hunder-gatherer from New Guinea, who is just as intelligent as a modern subsistance farmer from Central America, who is just as intelligent as a modern industrial worker from China, who is just as intelligent as a suburban service worker from New Jersey. There wasn’t any physical evolution going on, just cultural change.

Does that answer some of your objections?

Screw them! I want my intersteller spaceship. leandroc76 says we used to have them so where are they now?

To give him credit, he’s already acknowledged that he was misunderstanding things. See post #63, and my post immediately above.

Chimp communication, not linguistics. But if you want to debate this, open a GD thread. I’m done with this topic.

There has been an enormous amount of research done on linguistic capabilties in apes, and there has been no definitive evidence that they actually do use grammar.

Humans are evolving toward the same state to which every other creature evolves: Extinction.

At some point, there will be a change in the earth’s environment that will come too quickly to permit the successive generations of humans to adapt and Homo sapiens sapiens will become extinct. Whether some group of descendants of H. sap. sap. will have undergone changes that will allow the later group to survive as a separate species has yet to be determined.

Ok, this is my last post on the subject in this thread. It’s turning into a debate. I tend to feel strongly about these things and that interferes with my rational assessment of it. However, I do know that people tend to default to assumptions that make them feel better about themselves that produce science that is accepted one day and seems utterly ridiculous the other(See racial/gender studies of the 19th and 20th centuries)

It seems that we have evidence that apes use grammar - we use grammar. The assumption should be that there is some point in the past some of our ancestors developed grammar, the other assumption should be that at least some other of species have developed grammar by now. We have evidence of this for Homo sapiens only. The conclusion should be that we should look harder, or we are too stupid to understand it, not that we are the only ones with grammar. If it is true that humans are the only species with grammar, then that is a pretty amazing fact and should be studied very carefully before it is accepted as gospel. It is the most counter-intuitive conclusion, but an easy one to make seeing how anthrocentric we are.

There isn’t evidence that non-human apes use grammar.

Why?

Why?

There has in fact been pretty intensive research on the linguistic capabilities of animals, much of it based on the hope that sophisticated capabilities could/would be found. Although apes, monkeys, and dolphins have all been shown to have quite sophisticated systems for communication, none have been shown to have grammar. That is, it has not been for lack of looking that it hasn’t been found.

im sorry this has turned into yet-another evoilution vs creationist debate… thats not what i meant. i could have made a few mis-statements /replies, but lemme get this straight, im NOT against evolution. there ARE a few things uncomfortable about evolition, but i strongly beleive thats the best explaination we got.

Would you care to elaborate? Based on this thread, you may have some misunderstanding of what evolution means. If there a factual or scientific aspects of evolution that concern you I suspect they can be addressed.

Stuff happens.

In case it was hard to pick up aong the rest of the posts, (and I am not saying something new that others have not already tried to say), evolution is not directed. My flippant post a few posts back is, despite its facetious nature, quite true.

There will be various changes in genetic structures over time, but there is no way to know whether they will help or harm our species as we know it. What will determine our successor species (if there is one) will be some combination of traits that will make those descendants better able to reproduce and survive.

If, for example, there is some trait that would help humans survive a particular lethal and pandemic disease, the appearance of that disease could eliminate most of the population. If enough people died, the survivors would not be able to maintain current technology. If the survivors were mostly unfamiliar with techniques for hunting, fishing, farming, or hunting and gathering, those people would mostly starve within a short period. At that point, the group(s) who were best able to adapt to the world as it then existed would be the founders of the next species and if some innate sense for finding food was more important than the intelligence to perform higher math or develop thoughts in complex language, it is possible that those intelligences would not be highly selected traits and the next species might develop different characteristics.

Alternatively, humans might (as some predict) get a sufficient grasp of genetics that we will, effectively, bring natural selection to a halt, “designing” all future generations until we trip up and go extinct.

Let’s assume that your objections are completely valid based on this complaint, which you’ve said is your only one. (The timeline.)

You are saying that the vast majority of human progress occured in the last 3000 years, so it’s crazy to think humans just hung around doing nothing for the 3 million before that.

Well, the same could be said for your 3000 years. The vast majority of human progress can be said to have occured in the last 300, so isn’t it equally unreasonable to assume that humans sat around doing nothing for the 2700 years before that? And yet, that’s pretty much what happened.

Technically, the vast majority of human progress really happened in the past 75 years, what with the advent of computers, the space program, plastics, composite materials, etc…

Actually, the vast majority of human progress really happened in the past 15 years, with genetics research (mapping the human genome, cloning, stem cells), the internet, cell phones, the GPS satellites, etc…

It is interesting to note that no matter what amount of time you look back through, most progress occured in the last little bit of that time. Human progress is a fractal.

I have headache trying to understand that…

Someone came close to giving me a ‘plausible answer’, stating: “Scientist today don’t agree…” I’ll live with that.

Just to let you guys know, I have a full time job, I am closer to being 30 than I am to being 29. I grew up in an Episcopal Church. That’s a Protestant Church, it’s still a Christian church.

Religion aside, I have always disbelieved in Creation, Sin or not, and disbelieved in Evolution.

As far as my “pit stop” theory, I can only fabricate a story based on pre-imaganitive ideas, based on stupid sci-fi movies and books I have read. The post about being dropped off by aliens was meant to be facetious.

You are certainly free to believe in anything you’d like.

If you’re beliefs are based on a misunderstanding of evolution (which it appears to be) you can gain a more complete understanding here and at Talk.Origins. Your “timescale” issue is really a non-starter, as it is based on several seriously incorrect ideas about evolution, time, and culture.

Welcome, enjoy, learn.