Anomalistic approach to the practicalities of the paranormal

[Q]

that is a common, if not a romanticized, myth. it has changed the evolutionary trajectory, as it has changed many times before, by introducing new environments, new stressors, and ultimately it selects for slightly different genes.

Yeah, Nintendo thumb is a really suck ass environmental stressor.

wrong. i am taller, healthier, quantifiable smarter, cooler, and have a longer life expectancy than the vast majority of my ancestors. as evidenced by the threatened well-being of indigenous communities, hunter and traditional lifestyles are not inherently "stronger" in modern times in competition with urbanized societies - what is strong or weak is entirely relative.

if you are talking about weakness in terms of loss for example, you might be (mistakenly) referring to excess body hair, inefficient muscle mass and bone density-strength ratios, arguably antiquated cultural knowledge (e.g. how to survive off the land), outmoded traditional lifestyles, an inefficient polygamous societal structure, or maybe something else that could be called a loss if one is to take the untenable position that he or she is better equipped to determine what is strong and weak with regard to survival of the fittest than nature Herself is able to do.

Healthier or not is debateable. You are definately not stronger than your ancestors. (again, we're talking collectively here.) And because you know how to program your DVR to record "The Sopranos" doesn't make you smarter than they were either. And just because they more often than not didn't live past 60 doesn't mean they were weaker per se. You have to look at quality of life. Are you really "living" by spending your last 15 years on oxygen, pumped full of meds and shitting yourself?

The threat to indigenous societies isn't a reflection on their weakness, it's a reflection on their opposite being overwhelmingly viral. IE: The King Tiger was better than the T-34, but it's easier to mass produce shit, so the T-34 came out on top. Whether you believe it or not, humanity (on a grand scale) is 12 hours without power away from the jungle. Turn off the lights and close the Walmarts, and you'll see hundreds of years of societal evolution dissapear like that for the majority of the herd. On the flip side, nothing changes for the indegienous societies, because they aren't built on supposeds and maybes.

unfortunately, most people don't have that capability, or, specific to this instance, dont have the capability to read and comprehend what I said in the first few paragraphs.

You're so sure I was responding specifically to you?

[Fansy]

Yeah, Nintendo thumb is a really suck ass environmental stressor.

lol. your response is "what the environment selects for is invalid and what I think it should select for is valid."

Healthier or not is debateable.

sure it is, if you want to deny that we live longer and stay healthier longer than any of our known ancestors.

You are definately not stronger than your ancestors. (again, we're talking collectively here.)

neaderthals were extremely strong and physically robust too. strength at the expense of smarts obviously is not what nature selects for.

And because you know how to program your DVR to record "The Sopranos" doesn't make you smarter than they were either.

...because when i said i was smarter, it had nothing to do with modern brain physiology or cranial capacity or any other genetypical or phenotypical trait that the environment has continually and demonstrably selected for - instead my argument hinged on my ability to program my DVR.

And just because they more often than not didn't live past 60 doesn't mean they were weaker per se. You have to look at quality of life. Are you really "living" by spending your last 15 years on oxygen, pumped full of meds and shitting yourself?

...because my argument hinged on living past 60, and then, of course, that the last 15 years of most people's lives are spent on oxygen, meds, and shitting in your pants?

The threat to indigenous societies isn't a reflection on their weakness, it's a reflection on their opposite being overwhelmingly viral. IE: The King Tiger was better than the T-34, but it's easier to mass produce shit, so the T-34 came out on top.

lol no. it is not about numbers. nowadays it might be about numbers. there are many things that have transpired in global history of colonization and the expansion of civilization and urbanization to make "indigenous peoples" and their "plight" what it is...and swarming the locals with superior numbers was never a method of any colonizing force that I know of.

Whether you believe it or not, humanity (on a grand scale) is 12 hours without power away from the jungle.

i disagree, but its a moot point. you'd have to come up with a scenario in which a sufficient number of humans could not have even sporadic access to any kind of power indefinitely...which would most likely not happen because if one critical industry failed, or part of a critical industry, there would be a transitionary period, but eventually another would step in to take its market space.

and tons of humanity right now, if not the majority, live without power and clean water on a day to day basis. they have lived like this for a long period of time. how does your doomsday scenario explain them?

Turn off the lights and close the Walmarts, and you'll see hundreds of years of societal evolution dissapear like that for the majority of the herd. On the flip side, nothing changes for the indegienous societies, because they aren't built on supposeds and maybes.

lol dude you're conflating modern civilization and its social trappings and customs with evolution. there are real physical, genotypical changes that are continually made to our collective genome. what is different about humans now and 1000 years ago is not just culture but 40-50 cycles of reproduction and therefore gene-level differences in what the environment has selected for. and there are very very few indigenous societies that are not dependent on the larger nations that have engulfed them at this point to maintain their current lifestyle.

anyways, you're just repeatin your mad max wet dream without acknowledging and explaining away fundamental problems of your "i'm right and the environment is now wrong" view.

for example, how can you create a scenario that prohibits people from having access to power? critical information? water and food? and make it a global scenario so that other nations can't come to its aid? and then show how if this same disaster happened to a more "natural" group of people, they've be unaffected.

the problem of your argument is not that crises cannot happen, but that you are implicity asserting that there is some kind of real probability that 1) a crisis would be so severe that everyone would resort to raping and pillaging each other on the large scale and 2) that in such a crisis it would be better to be an atavistic caveman throwback of some sort than a modern human with the physical and mental capabilities of a modern human

oh yeah i saw this movie. its postman, waterworld, mad max, live free or die hard, war of the worlds, etc etc etc.

You're so sure I was responding specifically to you?

no. and i guess its silly of me to assume that it was if you respond to my content in a thread i started. pedantry wins again!

[Q]

neaderthals were extremely strong and physically robust too. strength at the expense of smarts obviously is not what nature selects for.

You don't even have to go that far back. I'd wager the average Roman or Spartan was not only physically stronger, but more intellectual than your average modern man.

...because when i said i was smarter, it had nothing to do with modern brain physiology or cranial capacity or any other genetypical or phenotypical trait that the environment has continually and demonstrably selected for - instead my argument hinged on my ability to program my DVR.

See above.

i disagree, but its a moot point. you'd have to come up with a scenario in which a sufficient number of humans could not have even sporadic access to any kind of power indefinitely...which would most likely not happen because if one critical industry failed, or part of a critical industry, there would be a transitionary period, but eventually another would step in to take its market space.

See: Katrina

and tons of humanity right now, if not the majority, live without power and clean water on a day to day basis. they have lived like this for a long period of time. how does your doomsday scenario explain them?

...And they live closer to the type of lifestyle that their ancestors did. But you already knew exactly what I'm talking about.

for example, how can you create a scenario that prohibits people from having access to power? critical information? water and food? and make it a global scenario so that other nations can't come to its aid? and then show how if this same disaster happened to a more "natural" group of people, they've be unaffected.

the problem of your argument is not that crises cannot happen, but that you are implicity asserting that there is some kind of real probability that 1) a crisis would be so severe that everyone would resort to raping and pillaging each other on the large scale and 2) that in such a crisis it would be better to be an atavistic caveman throwback of some sort than a modern human with the physical and mental capabilities of a modern human

oh yeah i saw this movie. its postman, waterworld, mad max, live free or die hard, war of the worlds, etc etc etc.

Ask yourself why every global financial crisis has been followed by war.

[Fansy]

You don't even have to go that far back. I'd wager the average Roman or Spartan was not only physically stronger, but more intellectual than your average modern man.

what? what romanticized version of european history do you pull this shit out of. seriously.

...because when i said i was smarter, it had nothing to do with modern brain physiology or cranial capacity or any other genetypical or phenotypical trait that the environment has continually and demonstrably selected for - instead my argument hinged on my ability to program my DVR.

see above

i saw your above shit.

1) even if held (ridiculously) to be true, it's 1 anecdotal example out of hundreds to thousands, representing less than .00001% of our ancestry in the last 20 thousand years.
2) its a ridiculous assertion. compare average lifespans, diseases and pathologies from the physical anthropological record, typical education of those societies, the average human lifestyle then and now, etc etc etc.
3) furthermore, your example is not of an indigenous people as we think of them today. your examples are urbanized elite and lay well within the confines of civilization and carry the associated social and cultural baggage; they equate to the well-to-do and elite of our modern day world. e.g., socrates and most other students of philosophy and art would no more survive in a dog eat dog "jungle" than a guy who works in an office job today. e.g., or, modern day well-trained soldiers would survive just as well if not better than the spartans and roman soldiers of then.

so, if your point is "people used to be smarter." no, you are wrong. scientifically, empirically, theoretically - patently - dead fucking wrong. whether your argument concerns the knowledge available to people or the biohardware which they have to make computations regarding that knowledge, you're just fucking wrong dude. any intro to physical anthropology 101 will teach you that, and it will be supported by fields dealing with the theory of knowledge, evolutionary development, evolutionary psychology, and many more fields of knowledge that axiomatically grant to their practitioners a progressed and accurate evolutionary understanding of what typical human life consisted of for the last 100,000 years and how our culture, behavior, and biology has changed over that time period.

if your point is that the people in the examples you listed above could better survive in "the jungle", whatever the jungle is, no! you're probably talking about specific classes of those societies, no doubt, that you have somehow conflated with the entire citizenry of those societies themselves. but the average roman and the average spartan were peasants who died of any number of nowadays-treatable diseases at the age of 25-40 (usually spending the last 5-10 years of their life suffering through a disease), and weren't nearly as evolutionarily honed, in intellectual capability and immuno capability, as most of humans of today.

See: Katrina

because katrina turned new orleans (i guess) into a jungle? seriously? if that is the kind of "jungle" your doomsday scenario predicts...o god, i'll grant you that, but forgive me if I dont get alarmed at your trivial fear-mongering. the new orleans of today is recovering and a very livable place. it is not and was never lost to the wilds. shit happened, but nothing that many people didnt survive, including many old and sick people, children, women, etc.

sure, many died, but that vast majority of that was from the event and not its aftermath. your example of katrina as an example of a power outage that caused mass hysteria and jungle-esque survival of the fittest conditions within our society sucks.

and tons of humanity right now, if not the majority, live without power and clean water on a day to day basis. they have lived like this for a long period of time. how does your doomsday scenario explain them?

...And they live closer to the type of lifestyle that their ancestors did. But you already knew exactly what I'm talking about.

no dude. i have no clear idea what your points are, because it seems youre arguing abstract ideas (ideas that havent even coalesced in your own head) but using words that have quantifiable, real-world meanings and thus, tragically, your arguments can be empirically supported or weakened.

for example, maybe your argument seems to be a personal one - how i'll personally be scared or surprised at how fucked up things get if we lose power for 12 hours,

or instead a general word of advice to the BFC community at large, that our society teeters on the brink of jungle madness, and by virtue of asserting it you think either we all don't know this, or that we do but we aren't alarmed enough,

or instead some other vague rant that romans and spartans and guns are cool, but nintendo and modern society is for pussies, because being a hunter or gatherer is awesome and tough even though people who live this lifestyle FAIL badly in the modern world.

so i am trying to pin down your argument. most of its points seem to be truisms (modern society is built on social constructs), subjective alarmisms (you should be scared like me), or inapplicable, nonsense rants (evolution should behave the way i want it to behave and not the way it does, then we would be "tougher").

Ask yourself why every global financial crisis has been followed by war.

o, and another random, point of infinite indefinite clarity within your argument:

what the fuck is "jungle": civil strife or something else?

why are you bringing up war: are you now taking your broad, unspecific rant to international politics and relations?

how is your original argument of losing power for 12 hours and what I took issue related to or supported by alleged war after financial crisis? i never argued this, and i didn't originally argue 90% of the red herrings you bring up in subsequent posts...like this last one.

Q, i know you probably have some good things to say, but you need to actually explain what you're trying to say concerning the original point i argued, and support it, instead of throwing in more half-baked, vague statements that I don't care about, aren't related to your original point, and only distract from whatever you are trying to say.

unless you are just ranting, and/or being purposely intangible and unfalsifiable. then you are doing a good job.