What are your kids learning about where we come from?

“There is an scholarly industry out there that aims to prove that animals can think like people, but it is not true.”

Well, it depends on what you define ‘like’ as. Like is a very slippery word.

if you read the literature and the science stuff, what you just said makes no sense. they are not trying to prove animals think like men, or not, they are trying to find out the nature of intelligence, how it works, and so forth.

what they are finding is that a lot of it is inherent in the methods that are used to solve the problems. they have natural qualities and principals that cant be separated from them.

so the concept that there is a special human form of intelligence and a animal form of intelligence makes no sense. what you have are groupings of systems that have abilities and confer in sum those abilities to the entities that they are part of.

whats kept this kind of thinking away in the past is that humans are the only animals we can talk to. so the only way to find things out is to come up with clever experiments that isolate some quality so that you can tease it apart and understand that. we do that to everything quite literally.

the ONLY people trying to make some proof of animals are like people are the leftist socialists who have gone green and are trying to recapture eden, and so are trying to find any abstract justification that will make us feel guilty, or allow them to manipulate outcomes.

ideologues are the people your confusing with scientists, and there are a lot more scientists than ideologues, but the ideologues are louder, more public, and so forth.

this is confusing to people that arent really trying to find out an answer, that requires that they spend a few years reading to scratch the surface.

so instead what they do is constantly find other sources that they trust that they then use as a proxy for reading all that. problem is who they choose, and how they choose. they dont like displeasant things, and cold assesments, they sure as hell dont like long tracts, and complex nuance.

and guess what?

all the stuff that sounds fishy is explained to some degree in all that stuff. the world is increadibly complex, and if your not versed in this, your idea of complex is nothing compared to how it really is.

you dont really want to “know” what you want is someone that you trust to tell you in a way that you understand with confidence and think you can believe. you would do a better job of selecting whose ideas you pour into your head when your need real answers. you need to learn more to be able to judge your sources, and therfore not end up being pulled back and forth like taffy.

meanwhile the purpose of all this stupidity is to make religion and science incompatible, and so one of them must go…

of course most people dont understand that it was religion that gave us science. (it came upon the realizeation that reality if made by god was gods work, so if you figured out how it all worked, then you were reading the direct hand of god. without this, we never cared to examine and figure out the principals behind the world!!! yes different cultures invented here and there… and progress was very slow… but once the church men started contemplating and examining reality, since they were fed and had time, they started learning principals. they started sharing their knowlege, and as principals were made into interesting things, the rest of mankind figured out that figuring out things was a grand idea… before that, something novel was only a curiousity… it took this criticla build up of principals and such at the cost of monies from the church and such to create the critical amount of knowlege necessary to prime the pump and get it all going. witout that realization that comes from christian thinking because of the creation story saying god made everything. other religions have specific things that prevent them from making that leap. check through the other religions and you can figure out why none of them did it. the fact that christianity is monotheistic is also important, but there is no space for all of this kind of stuff here)

as to the point i make as to how you are trying to learn what science is doing. look at your choice of source.. was it a peer reviewed journal in the better sciences (sociology is gutted by ideology as is philosophy… but not the other sciences unless they have a political power point to them)

the link you present is interesting… but the bottom line is that they are not going to provide you with the answers you want… while it seems nice and coherent its not really saying much…

and thats because you havent figured out the difference between empiracle, anecdotal, believe, and more.

for instance.. they ARE doing work with animals and electronic sensors on the cancer issue… but anyone thats ever been in a hospice cancer area can tell you you dont need a dog to smell death… just to maybe smell it earlier.

but then he goes to carl saga… and tries to make carl sagan sound absurd.. but at the time sagan was talking they were just starting to work with chimps in new ways and they were learning stuff that at that time everyone was saying they couldnt learn at all… remember washoe? probably not i guess.

here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washoe_(chimpanzee)

now remember when carl sagan was alive and what time he was stating things? the quote is 1977… and so washoe and that work was only 10 years…

what he was doing was marveling that mans intelligence wasnt special… that just like man, given time, the chimpanzees may develope like man… (but sagan knew they might not)

however sagan was not a biologist… he was a cosmologist… so his view was always over eons… after all how many billions of years old is the earth… his view was more expansive and wanted others to see things in that context.

but the point i am making is that thats an opinon and an anecdote and you have to be an idiot to think that such statements from any man are representative of science.

not only that but the author assumes you cant read well..

Carl Sagan (1934-1996) believed that chimpanzees, with proper training, could develop a human-like culture

that sentences sounds like sagan is referring to chimps in the now… but was he?

“What sort of culture, what kind of oral tradition would chimpanzees establish after a few hundred or a few thousand years of communal use of a complex gestural language?” He speculated

but the whole thing was written as dreaming and musing… to most people thats not science but just an interesting thing to contemplate… scientists do that alot… its like a body builder curling all the time… its not indicative of a lot other than its intended to stimulate.

and after the paragraph..

In fact, chimpanzees probably do not have the mental equipment to have language skills anywhere near what Sagan had hoped for.

maybe in a few thousand years they might… maybe in a few hundred they might have “gutteral sounds” a bit better than they have now…and they talk now… but not ma, pa, wa wa…

so what ride did your author just take you on?

whip you here, whip you there, no wonder your confused.
the person is not really making a valid argument..

here is another one.. the problem here is context.. the scientists are making their statements as if others know the work (since they are not actually writing for the public, but the science writers quote them)

Far from narrowing the gap between humans and other primates, the study starkly reveals it.

ah.. no it narrows it…

sounds confusing doesnt it?

well, he doesnt ask what the gap was before and what defines the gap..

to him, the gap is the absolute gap between the two, and he doesnt see it shrinking.. and so he projects his incomprehension and helps you do the same.

the scientists are referring to where people thought chimp ability rested before the results.

so BEFORE the test, the gap was wider, not allowing for any kind of performance like that… AFTER the knowlege was gained, the chimps performed better than anyone thought, so the gap now is smaller.

so is your author helping to clear? or does he have a beef with things he doesnt understand? and that he now has a cause to unravel the charletans he has discovered.

funny how his whole argument in the abstract is the marxian argument that there is no merit and these things are arbitrary and such… after all, he arguments and such are for what? lets abandon science? then what? religion? no, religion brought us to science, even religion wont go backwards.

so he hasnt expanded his vocabulary… his definitions are the simplest… the gap must be the one he sees… and that has to be right…and so the scientists are wrong..

meanwhile he isnt even on the same page… could that be why he doesnt understand. whats intersting is that some people that get this go off and learn… and this person goes off and attacks all of science for no useful purpose… and the only reason is that they cant understand things…

but if you think like that is it any wonder?

does this help at all?

and you can see how such small things need huge pages to explain and literally there are whole bookcases of books that make up an area of science… and other areas need to be known to understand that area better.

this is the game… they can play this endlessly… the gap thing and stretching sagan is just one set. however, by shifting the burden like this, they could get every scientist busy trying to explain things and all would be occupied, but the ones doing this will be just saying a sentience or two and wating for a book they wont read to come back when they will hand another sentence.

how are you as an author and such going to learn to see this fishy game? the science isnt fishy… its these authors… your nose was right… but you were thinking the smell came from the wrong place…

you were talking to someone that stinks, and they told you it was something else they were working with, and you believed them.

“The Darwinian evolution story that is taught to kids in public school systems (at our expense) does not add up.”

Our kids and what they are taught. How about we adults? What were we taught?

Dr Mike Adler (Quadrant Dec 2007) on teachers. “If you can read this, thank a school teacher. If you can’t understand very much, sue your school teachers. They have been taking your money under false pretences for a long time now. They have ensured that most intelligent people haven’t the faintest idea about the most important and exciting ideas of our time and are reduced to brainless bimbos when it comes to core elements of our magnificent and wonderful civilisation. The Maxwell Equations describe elctricity and magnetism and their interaction, and have had an emormous impact on all of our lives. And hardly any of the people who imagine they are ‘educated’ can state them.”

let’s face it, the Maxwell Equations are junior scool compared to quantum mechanics. What hope do we have for being knowledgable about the origins and meaning of life itself when few can grasp how a microwave or a toaster work.

Kids learn in school that a long slow process of survival of the fittest describes how life forms come to exist or cease to be, but that is not true.

read a book on selective breeding… so much science and medicine is based on the truth of that its ridiculous to say otherwise… so let me peak into the link and see what i see..

again.. ignorance is steering you..

i didnt read it all, but i read enough to know whats wrong here.

he doesnt have an understanding of the mechanism.. oh, he has heard it.. maybe heard implications… but he cant put the floating pieces together.

i will do it for you. before i do i will give you a saying

“in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king”

if your smart, you will see that that is a pun… a pun on the situation, and an example of why things seem to appear. (see what taking the time to actually learn can do?)

a creature with an advantage outbreeds creatures with disadvantages.

(that is if you dont have socialist creatures that insure that those with disadvantages outbreed those with advantages)

since a slight advantage can mean a lot of differnce, and they are nearly the same, they are both in exact competition for food. so usually the one that performs less over time disppears…

in people women are hypergamous. they are choosy and select the more successful males when they are young and can get a boost from an older male (and prefering a slightly older male allows her to see how he performs before she chooses. also humans and gorrilas share that the males age slower so they can continue to grow and develop more while those who mature faster develop less as their growth stops first). what this does is set up a system in which each generations women selects the best of her generation to marry (again if socialist and such dont do anything and leave us our cultures and such).

the men who are not up to par, dont have kids… women who arent suitable for marraige for whatever reason, also dont have kids. so the better ones move forward, and the thing repeats.

lets apply that to the appendix… the appendix was disappearing in man, today its fading is probably been greatly slowed by the big decrease in deaths from such.

however, what force could cause it to shrink? starvation. over a long long time, the difference in caloric usage between those with smaller ones and those with larger ones would ever so slightly tune the creatures over time.

its not all that hard to understand… this person is asserting that they should understand it, and if they cant then it must be a hoax, or someting.

its too frustrating… the people you are pointing to are “not even wrong” (quoting a famous physicist)

all the arguments are what one would use to convince the smart and ignorant… people who should know more but dont…

we have new dog breeds (miniatures), and a person cant figure out how something can just appear? and the fossile RECORD is tossed around as if it was some linear thing… its something being built, and the falures or crisis that the guy referes to comes from trying to figure things out first for the credit before sollid evidence is found.

however most of the incomprehensibility is that ideological points do not match physical points… and they trust their ideology more than they trust empiracism… and they dont trust impericism, because they dont understand the process of discovery. they dont discover ANYTHING, so they dont understand that they build on solid information on top of solid information… but sometimes things shift… everything doesnt, and the older stuff is the less it shifts… but if you dont go through things and just read books and so forth… and your looking to pick a fight for an agenda… your not going to understand.

the major problem is that they cant resolve the two. the two are resolvable, and have been for centuries. they intuitively know that for a ideology to be valid (religions can be abstract), it has to operate right in reality. but if they are no willing to adjust ANYTHING that the facts tell them, and are not willingn to reform all the conclusions that change when theat happens, then they get like this. they want a literal interpretation, they wont get it. they CAN abstract it, but they wont reform it. and they drag tons of others that are not even in that quandry into the morass with them.

i give up

No amount of eveidence will convince these wild eyed creationist yahoo’s of the truth of evolution.

For any who may not have run across it yet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_spaghetti_monster

i should have read you first amfortas… for some reason i get suckered trying to help someone understand as if that was their real purpose. sigh