Reading Philosophy

"We are just a speck of evolution's masterpiece."

I wonder what John Fiske would say.

"I think you wind up accepting the status quo."

I wonder what the other John Fiske would say about the status quo in regards to "Popular Culture".

I love reading Russian Literature!!!

Well i'd like to point out that mitochondira are now made by our cells, so apparently they are no longer bacterial entities. They are as much appart of us and other animals as chlorophil (check the spelling im lazy) are to plants
and of course we evolve to adjust to changes in our environmet to match the environment and we also evolve to the speed of direty
e.g. i mean like the inuits, they have fattier eyelids that aids them in the cold climate. They evovled relativly quickly because it was nessesary to live, however something like our air is steadily changing to a more polluted state is more or less a small concern to our bodies. Here's why: If u put a frog in a boiling pot it jumps out. But if u put it in cold water and heat it up to boiling it wont jump out.
In essence, its the same thing, we are steadily poisoning ourselves but our bodies dont know it.
And a sudden brainwave i had asks me something inpaticular (Check that too) if a cell had swallowed another cell would that cell not be a predator cell looking for food for energy? and if it required food to process into energy then would it not have some form of mitochondria already?

Uhm actually, our cells don't produce mitochondria, they reproduce themselves independently. They also got they're own genome which doesn't really change over time.
In fact, the genes inside the mitochondria are passed on by your mother and so on, and there's only 5 different types of mitochondrial DNA (iirc) in all of human population, so you can say that we're all offsprings of 5 different women :P

but still, our cells can not produce mitochondria, they grow and divide themselves when they feel that the need for energy inside a cell grows to big for them to handle. And they divide themselves in a process similar to bacteria cell reproduction.

The one thing that does seperate them from bacteria is the fact that they could never live outside of a cell.

And Chlorophyll is a pigment, there's 4 different sort of chlorophyll and they never really chan ged throughout the history of evolution, and even though mitochondria haven't changed much either, there still was some significant changes and different species got different mitochondria DNA, whilst all land plants share exactly the same type of chlorophyll (only some algae got different types of chlorophyll). It never was anything that was seperated from cells, it never existed outside of cells ;) so i think that analogy is a little misleading.

greets Magic

"The wise have always said the same things, and fools have always done the opposite"-Schopenhauer

Well evolution only occurs when there is a 'void' (if you will) of purpose in the food chain. For example, when plankton evolved, there began to be a vast amount of plankton floating on top of the water (due to lack of predators). At a certain point, a fish which might have been a little different than its predecessors that filtered organisms drifting through the water took to the top of the surface to eat the plankton. Since there was *so* much plankton, these fish did far better than the predecessors in competition with other species that filtered organisms drifting through the water.

The predecessors that continued to scrap by eating organisms drifting through the water would have easily been wiped out come an event which would have caused such organisms to die out. These new fish would live on.

And since these fish would be so numerous living amongst the plankton without competition, a new predator that had used to scrap by eating fish that fed off of organisms drifting through water have evolved to spot spots on the surface of the water (where such plankton-eating fish would feed). And since there were *so* many such fish, these predator fish did far better than the predecessors in competition, et cetera.

Evolution is an opportunistic process. Never does an animal evolve with wings and flies. It only happens through many changes that would allow a particular evolved species to take advantage of a cycle that constantly changes because of the other many species which have done exactly the same up until then.

It's hard to me to understand that some animal would give birth to another animal that would miraculously start flying.

In fact, most scientists don't think it happened that way at all. The first ancestors of the fliers were probably dinosaurs which were known to leap in the air to escape predators. Obviously, they came back down. The ones which managed to stay in the air the longest were the ones that weren't eaten by the predators waiting for them when they came back down. Eventually, those with folds of skin were able to glide away rather than having to land back down. Thus the first fliers were born.

And they say birds probably evolved from the pterodactyl dinosaurs from there...

If the world should blow itself up,the last audible voice would be an expert saying it can't be done

It seems that the over-arching problem, that one nagging hair in my throat of this arguement, is that at some point evolution could stop.
Evolution is a principle, like gravity, and self-adjusting qualities of water, it exists outside of our vantage.

It occurs to me that the Western mind says that time is an arrow, and once shot will eventually end. The Eastern mind says that Time, our existence is cyclical. All will meet itself eventually.

We may see this eventual union with the computing machine as the pinnacle of man's acheivement, but I direct the reader to civilizations and cultures millenia older than our recently-civilized society. The Pyramids of Egypt, South America and Mexico hold the same power as any Pentium 4...if we could be decypher the code.

Electronic Computing Machines, our most recent evolutionary step is not revolutionary, as some might maintain. Nothing is revolutionary when one is held anchored more firmly by the process. Let us also not confuse "process" with "evolution"; process can be also de-volutionary.
These machines are only one cog in our eventual acclimation to the True Nature of Things and The Universe.

Knowing what a rock knows, or what that 900 year old oak knows, or what those cave painting in that region of France knows, we can truly know evolution. These are items of a celestial time scale.

But I submit, we here, now, know the scale of evolution. We can see things evolve in our own time.
Look at the rise in polution, green house gasses, and radiation outputs. These are all phenomena that have been seen, explored, and realized within my life time.
Within my own life time I've gone from a rotary dial phone to a Blackberry. There is noone on earth that can tell me that evolution will ever stop. It is a principle.

Or maybe people find a way to kinda stick together and think as one, so that they would form one big "organism" (dunno, like the borgs in Startrek *lol*), through telepathy or something. Like when those singles cells merged to multicellular organisms.

It's kinda deserving of a chuckle, that statement. But then it's also deadly serious. Within the working of the mind, we all have the ability to realize that we are all connected to the Greater Mind.
The borgs merely represent the question of Fate, and Individuality. Are we ever truly independent thinkers, or is the always going to be some form of hive-mind that pulls us to our eventual fate, that which has been predetermined?
Eventually, all will return to the source, The All.

what do you think about the evolution of mankind in the future? How will we change ?

We see it all around us. People are much stupider these days than ever before. Many more clones, and drones walking around.
It is true, we are amusing ourselves to death. We prefer to let the machines do the thinking for us.
We will never evolve until the machines are shut down, and we are not anchored to them any more.

Once Fred Neitszche declared God is Dead, f*ck became the most important word in the English languag

This post was edited by zen on Dec 20, 2006.