The Spith

Forgive me for not reading the whole thread but there are many pages... I think we all go through a stage of being very empathic when we are quite young. I remember when I was 8 or so and whenever I saw someone doing something very embarrassing I would turn red and become even more embarassed. If it was something I saw on TV I would have to change the channel because I felt the emotion so strong. Then I had an incident where I was made to feel deeply ashamed and since then I have let go of emotion altogether. It might have something to do with my love of science. View the universe (including yourself) as something which obeys physical laws. I believe everything can be explained through maths, and in the future even the workings of the human mind will be reduced to formulas. Most people I meet tend to find my views very cold hearted and deep down simply can't 'connect' with me, so I wear a mask and pretend to be interested in their day to affairs, and the meaningless drivel they find important. The way I see it - in a thousand years we will all be dead with no trace of lives. It will be as if you never existed at all. So relax, chill out. At the end of the day it doesn't realy mean anything Sorry martin, but I disagree, you have your personal taste in music, you can rationalise being a fogey,(err I mean liking classical music), all you want, but you cannot blame modern entertainment culture for the problems of society. I'm with Martin here. I strongly believe that the majority of modern culture dumbs us down, reduces our imagination and fuels our desire for material goods, making us no more than animals I follow Frank Herbert's view of what it means to be human: "The animal when trapped, would gnaw off it's own leg to escape. The human would bear the pain and feign death in order to kill the trapper and remove a threat to its kind" That's probably not word for word as I'm quoting from memory, but the intent is still there - act in the greater good of the species, rather than following animal desires

There is still a big gap though. I live in London and when someone is a bit chubby we call them fat. I can spend a day in London, walk past more than a thousand people and not see one obese person. However I went to America once for a fortnight and seeing grossly obese people was a daily occurence. Oh and Japanese people have the longest life expectancy due to the large amount of omega 3 fish oil-rich sushi they eat

Good point However I'm of the opinion that the species will be wiped out somewhere in the next hundred years

In Richard Dawkin's book "The Ancestor's Tale" he discusses how this happens. If you think about it, as long as you have one surviving descendant in several million years, then the chances are you will have thousands because along the way many of your descendants will go on to produce more than one child. Go forward far enough in time and you will reach a point where all survivng humans will be your descendants

To the original message: It's best not to think of things like "first human" as it implies that at some point one species suddenly turned into another "Human" is simply a label we place on a group of organisms. Evolution should be thought of as a continous process. Humans are not a product of evolution, or even a set point, we are just an arbitrary point on the chain of evolution that we decided to call human.