Anarchy or Government?

[Demolishor]

Indeed. And this is an important point.

Some people have this weird idea that we would be able to destroy the whole planet. I don't think so. Not yet, anyways. But we are more than capable of destroying our own species and thousands of other species as well.

But even if that was to happen, the earth would still probably recover. Some species would survive whatever catastrophe we would come up with, and then evolve into new species when we were gone. It could take a million years or so, but in the lifetime of the planet, that is nothing. (According to Wikipedia, Earth is around 4.54 billion years old.)

I see your point waihi, this is just me fucking the comma. Million years is a pretty short time for evolution, unless we're talking about bacteria. For an example, 98% of the chimpanzee's genome is the same as the human genome, therefore making the chimpanzee our closest relative. according to a "molecular clock" (we know how many mutations occur in their genome's in a certain period of time) humans separated from the chimpanzee's some 5- 10 million years ago.

What kind of species would inhabit our planet in the hypothetic "post-human era" is question without an answer, but we can pretty sure, that sentient humanoids such as ourselves are pretty much out of the question. If all life but microbes would cease to exist, there's no guarantee that complicated, multicellular organisms would ever walk, fly or swim on the face of earth again. Evolution does not automatically lead to more complex beings, it simply favors those who reproduce the fastest. The first microbes appeared on earth as early as 3,8 billion years ago, whereas the first multicellular organisms appeared less than a billion years ago. Finally, because the sun is becoming more and more luminous as time passes, in an another billion years the surface of earth will become too hot for liquid water to exist, ending terrestrial life as we know it.

However, if the destruction humans would hypothetically cause to their planet is about the same magnitude as that meteorite from 65 million years ago,(the one that killed the last dinosaurs) life on earth would recover for sure, since the history of evolution is full of mass-extinctions. (5 of them, to be exact) Such catastrophes are more like jumpstarts to evolution, since so many egological niche's are left empty. (the t-rex was on top of the food chain 65 million years ago, and it's place was taken by the likes saber tooth tigers and other large mammalian predators)

[Ghost]

Nobody can tell if life can exist in certain conditions. There are creatures and organisms that can survive perfectly fine in extreme coldness, or extreme heat. Therefore, If global warming causes an ice age... or global temperatures to rise so high it kills human kind - there will always be other species that survive.

However, I agree with the argument that the survival of one species (us) cannot result in the death of many (from our actions). A good film that relates to this is "The day the earth stood still".

Eventually, the Earth will "die" ... and stop supporting life. However, this will be in a very very long time ... from nobody's cause. It is all part of the natural cycle of the Earth. Much like what is predicted to have happened to Mars. They found canyons that could only have been formed by running water on mars. And therefore, it is possible that Mars once supported life too. But in it's own cycle it became too hot, the water evaporated, and life eventually died out (except for that fossil they found on the surface, i dont know it is was an actual organism... but they thought it was at first).

[ReverendLostLamb]

Earth is around 4.54 billion years old.)

Tut-tut. Everyone can write things on wikipedia.

I see your point waihi, this is just me fucking the comma. Million years is a pretty short time for evolution, unless we're talking about bacteria. For an example, 98% of the chimpanzee's genome is the same as the human genome, therefore making the chimpanzee our closest relative. according to a "molecular clock" (we know how many mutations occur in their genome's in a certain period of time) humans separated from the chimpanzee's some 5- 10 million years ago.

Also wrong. A million years is a long time for anything. There's thousands and thousands of theories, the problem is that that one is the most prominent. There's several religious theoreis, some are proveably wrong (like adding the ages of people in the Bible) while others are not (mankind being only 6000 years old). If they would teach every theory, or at least half of them in schools you would not be so sure.

[Waihirere]

Tut-tut. Everyone can write things on wikipedia.

Which is exactly why I mentioned the source. So people can decide whether they choose to believe it or not. Standard scientific method, really.

Also the fact that everyone can write things there doesn't necessarily mean that the information there is incorrect. They're actually pretty good at monitoring Wikipedia, so most of the erroneous information gets weeded out pretty quickly.

There's several religious theoreis, some are proveably wrong (like adding the ages of people in the Bible) while others are not (mankind being only 6000 years old).

When giving statements like these, it would be nice to provide some source / reference as well. There's pretty convincing evidence of human fossils which are over 100k years old: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/02/0216_050216_omo.html

A million years is a long time for anything.

Just because a million years seems like a long time to you doesn't make it a long time for anything.

If they would teach every theory, or at least half of them in schools you would not be so sure.

It would be impractical and too time consuming to teach every theory, so they go with the most probable ones with the most scientific evidence backing them. But they do try to teach scientific method (at least in "higher" education), so that people are able to question the information fed to them and find their own truths.

...

And demo:

Evolution does not automatically lead to more complex beings, it simply favors those who reproduce the fastest.

Evolution doesn't automatically lead to more complex organisms, but I wouldn't say it favors those who reproduce the fastest either. I would say it favors the best survivability of the genes. So its a combination of ability to reproduce and ability to survive.

In fact, I would say evolution is just a mathematical property that automatically occurs in any system that fulfills certain conditions. In a system in which objects can alter their state in a meaningful way that affects their survivability, and if they are mortal can pass on their properties to other objects, evolution will always occur. Since if in such a system, there's two populations of objects, one members of which do not try to survive / reproduce and another which tries to do this, the number of individuals in the latter population will grow steadily (because of reproduction) and will avoid events that lead to object's destruction  (because of survival), while the other has no force that drives it to expand.

Also, if there's limited resources in the system, a population of objects which tries to hog those resources will prevail over those which do not attempt that. So in a limited resources environment, the populations of objects which follow the evolutionary principles will tend to take over while the populations which do not will tend to disappear, especially when they meet evolutionary populations.

[Demolishor]

In fact, I would say evolution is just a mathematical property that automatically occurs in any system that fulfills certain conditions.

That reminds me of a book i read a few weeks ago. It mentioned computer programs which can simulate evolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm

There was also another case where evolution occured on non-living things. There was a series of tests where a sequence of RNA originally extracted from a virus was placed in a liquid containing the right kind of enzymes and particles of nucleid acids. The RNA would then replicate itself and it's copies would continue to replicate themselves and so on. However, the RNA makes mistakes in replicating itself, resulting in mutations. The scientist conducting the experiment would then extract a number of randomly selected RNA replicators from the liquid and place them in an another container with the same liquid. Because the RNA replicators are selected randomly, those replicators which replicate the fastest had the highest probability of being chosen. Eventually the RNA replicators lost nearly all the genes that their virus ancestor's had as most of them coded attributes that were necessary only for infecting the host cells and thus, were not needed in the new enviroment.

[Ghost]

In my country, there are a lot of films on computer evolution. For example "Terminator". It states that computers and other complex thinking systems can become "too clever". And therefore realise that they do not need to follow human orders anymore... and that they are the greater power. So in terminator, computers try to protect themselves from humans (stopping them shutting it down etc) - so there is a war between humans and machines.

In terms of organic evolution, I think it is based purely on chance. If one gene mutated differently in the evolution of humans, we could look completely different to what we do now.

A million years is short for evolution... but that doesn't mean it cant happen in a million years. There could be some super organism that evolves 10 times as fast as we do. Scientist base their views on the speed of evolution on what we know now. It is unpredictable for the future.

A good film to watch on the speed of evolution is "Evolution". It is like a comedy film thing... Where organisms are found in a meteorite that hits earth. And they divide and evolve to worms in a couple of days, from just single celled organisms. And then in the next couple of days or so, they evolve into amphibians, flying things, and mammals. And then after that, they evolve into primates within the next few days (who act like cavemen). So it puts things into prospective when you see that other organisms could evolve a lot faster then we did.

[ReverendLostLamb]

Which is exactly why I mentioned the source. So people can decide whether they choose to believe it or not. Standard scientific method, really.

Also the fact that everyone can write things there doesn't necessarily mean that the information there is incorrect. They're actually pretty good at monitoring Wikipedia, so most of the erroneous information gets weeded out pretty quickly.

When giving statements like these, it would be nice to provide some source / reference as well. There's pretty convincing evidence of human fossils which are over 100k years old: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/02/0216_050216_omo.html

There's no evidence that computers are always right. After all, it is merely a creation made by humans.

Just because a million years seems like a long time to you doesn't make it a long time for anything.

For human standards it is. Also, there's no evidence of a living creature that old.

In my country, there are a lot of films on computer evolution. For example "Terminator". It states that computers and other complex thinking systems can become "too clever". And therefore realise that they do not need to follow human orders anymore... and that they are the greater power. So in terminator, computers try to protect themselves from humans (stopping them shutting it down etc) - so there is a war between humans and machines.

There's been some attempts at making 'independent' machines.

A million years is short for evolution... but that doesn't mean it cant happen in a million years. There could be some super organism that evolves 10 times as fast as we do. Scientist base their views on the speed of evolution on what we know now. It is unpredictable for the future.

According to my beliefs God created ligh, darkness, animals and other stuff in six days. We do not know if one day for God is more than one day for us. It might be that a million years isn't that long after all.

[Ghost]

Maybe you should change the title of the topic to  Anarchy, Government or evolution? 

I vote evolution

[Hullu]

I vote for I don't care.

[Waihirere]

That reminds me of a book i read a few weeks ago. It mentioned computer programs which can simulate evolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm

Been there, done that.

In fact, my thesis was about using neuroevolution (using evolutionary algorithms to evolve artificial neural networks) to solve a specific problem.

In terms of organic evolution, I think it is based purely on chance. If one gene mutated differently in the evolution of humans, we could look completely different to what we do now.

It is about chance, but it is also about statistical averages. If one gene mutated differently for one person only, it would have to be pretty damn beneficial mutation for it to spread through the whole population.

Also, mutation only survives long times if it is beneficial. And whether it is beneficial or not depends a lot of the environment the individual is living in. So while it is true that we could look very different, there would probably still be certain similar qualities simply because they work in this kind of environment.

A million years is short for evolution... but that doesn't mean it cant happen in a million years. There could be some super organism that evolves 10 times as fast as we do. Scientist base their views on the speed of evolution on what we know now. It is unpredictable for the future.

You don't even need fast evolution for that, necessarily. Since evolution is a random process, it is possible (just very, very unlikely) that all the necessary mutations could occur in a single generation.

Although I'm not so sure it is possible with actual biological evolution, since there is the whole embryogeny thing and there are probably some limitations on how much a genome can change in a single generation and still survive. I don't know really, my expertise in on the artifficial evolution side.

Anyway, this is more of a philosophical topic, since the probability of that happening is so low that it is practically zero anyway.

There's no evidence that computers are always right. After all, it is merely a creation made by humans.

You're right, of course.

In fact, there's evidence of computers sometimes not being right (hardware failures and all that; Intel Pentium bug is probably the most legendary one, although that one was a manufacturing error). And there's even more evidence about computer programs not being right, in fact many of them tend to contain some bugs.

However, I'm not even sure one needs a computer for potassium-argon dating. And I'm not trusting computers as much as I'm trusting a group of researchers who used those and other tools to come up with the date for the fossil.

For human standards it is.

Maybe, but universe doesn't follow human standards and in my opinion it would be arrogant to assume it does.

Also, there's no evidence of a living creature
that old.

Yes, I would say it is highly unlikely that any lifeform based on biology as we know it would be able to survive that long. However, I fail to see the relevance of this. I thought we were discussing whether there's any evidence for mankind being more than 6000 years old, for which there clearly is some scientific evidence. Whether you think the evidence is strong enough to be believed, is, of course, whole another thing.

There can be no strong proof about any information we gather with our senses, since senses provably make mistakes and can be mislead by illusions and such. So there's no strong proof about pretty much anything and it all comes down to how much evidence one needs to believe the issue. However, most people tend to simply take the theory with maximum likelyhood (under the currently known evidence) and believe that. Some others choose to believe something based on their personal conviction.

There's been some attempts at making 'independent' machines.

One of the biggest challenges there is modelling motivation, I feel. It is very hard to come up with an artificial motivation function that would allow the independent agents to keep learning but would steer them clear of areas and things where they are no longer learning. So it is very hard to create an independent agent that would be capable of learning and improving itself enough to be able to operate in an environment without any human guidance or help. Especially if the agent is meant to have "free will" and explore things that interest it instead of things that humans have told it to explore.

[Sparrisen]

Obviously, that means we need computers with a sexdrive.

[ReverendLostLamb]

Actually, they could learn from humans, in style with children. http://www.cleverbot.com Of course, since it lacks common sense, there's no proof it will be polite.

[Smiskfisk]

since it lacks common sense, there's no proof it will be polite.

Sounds like the average teenager to me

[ReverendLostLamb]

Then I must be a sick twisted individual.