CDarwin

Anthropology's got that beat. The average for a PhD now is 11 years, and it's not unusual at all to see people that spend 15 years in school and another 3 in post-doc before they ever get on the tenure-track.

Including Judaism in the series makes it more interesting to me. You don't hear a lot about political Judaism.

It was a joke.

"Intelligence" implies that you have the action of an individual organism working working within its lifetime that makes the difference. That simply isn't the case with your thistle for example. A plant is born with a phenotype and prospers or fails because of it.

Well... this is why physics isn't my subject. Thank you for all the responses. You're all so eager and helpful. It's inspiring. I think you're all neglecting warp fields and wormholes, though. You can move faster than the speed of light with one of those.

I was being a bit tongue in cheek. Microbes aren't animals either. Actually, capuchin monkeys have an EQ of 6 to 8. The EQ gives a good idea of how important a brain is to an animal's lifeway, but it's not all telling. The best anatomical correlates to cognitive ability are those that take into account both relative size (EQ) and absolute volume of the brain. Both seem to be important, and humans to have the perfect mean. Brain size isn't the same as intelligence (meaning cognitive ability) though, it's only an anatomical correlate, a way to spot it. No, people just like being difficult about this. Intelligence in the zoological, evolutionary sense, is cognitive ability. How intelligent you are is how much you use your brain to survive. That's the only useful definition. A) Scottish thistle isn't an animal. B) Scottish thistle didn't "develop" anything. Nature doesn't work like a research laboratory. Mutations happen and then those mutations are selected for or against by the environment. The organism has nothing to do with it. There's no place for "intelligence", conscious or unconscious to act in that process. It's all the blind action of nature. That dream thing was pretty interesting. Thank you for posting that. Their brains served the purpose. That's why they were evolved. Were brains as important to early reptiles as they are to us? Obviously not as they were much, much smaller and simpler. By any meaningful definition of intelligence were they as intelligent as us? All the evidence says no. You associate adjectives oddly. I said that I was afraid I was being combative, and it's the microbes that elicit the "that's cool" factor, not you.

This is just a silly and I'm sure not very original idea of mine, so I didn't think I should dirty the astronomy board with it, but have you ever considered the potential of telescopes for future paleontology? Obviously this would require technology far beyond that which we posses now, but wouldn't it be possible to move a telescope out far enough into space so that the light reaching it from earth would have reflected off of it millions of years ago? If the telescope was then ridiculously powerful, could you not see individual animals on the surface from millions of years in the past? That would be profoundly nifty, don’t you think?

I really think it's just going be about the interface between politics and religion, not necessarily a comparison of the three religions. Degree of violence is irrelevent, as Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all heavily interface with politics. I'm definately going to watch it. Junctions of religion and politics are something of a pet interest of mine.

I can't think of any, but that's not really the point. The unconscious imagination of a human is wholly and fundamentally different than the ability of bacteria to mutate and be acted upon by the environment until they've evolved a symbiotic relationship with larger animals. If one is intelligence, the other is not. By all tenets of the English language, you just can't stretch a definition that much. Yes, yes I do. Biologically, as I was speaking, there is much less difference between Einstein and a vegetable than between an amoeba and an archaebacteria. By your definition of intelligence, which seems to be how much of an "isn't that cool" factor they illicit from humans, microbes are also extremely diverse. If we're going to operate in your paradigm, I'm going to have to stick by my statement that life is the most intelligent animal.

But adaptability and variation don't equal intelligence by any reasonable or useful definition of the word. Not to mention the fact that you picked a rather arbitrary grouping of quite diverse organisms (most of which couldn't even be called animals I feel I should note). I might as well say that life is the most intelligent animal. Hmm... that sounds a bit combative. Don't think I'm being combative. I don't mean to be.

I think you may have missed the point of the last 3 pages of discussion.

You may be familiar with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. It posits that one's language intimately effects one's worldview. The classic demonstration of this is a study conducted with Finnish, American, and Israeli children. The languages Finnish, English, and Hebrew have increasing degrees of gender-specific phrases. The study tested how quickly children of these three cultures understood gender-concepts (for example, recognizing that you can't change your gender by wearing the clothes of the opposite sex). True enough, the Hebrew children were first, followed by the Americans and then finally the Finns. Alexander Z. Guiora, Benjamin Beit-Hallahami, Risto Fried, and Cecelia Yoder, "Language Environment and Gender Identity Attainment," Language Learning, 32 (1982): 289-304. I was interested in if any one has any opinions or knows of any more work that's been done on the connection between language and thought. Is recognition of the future and the past dependent on syntactic language? Is language necessary to conscious thought? I realize I'm being ridiculously vague, but I'm hoping to provoke some sort of discussion here more than I'm simply asking a question. Perhaps nothing will come of this.

Too many letters. In America we get by just fine with complete words. And the ACT. SAT. PSAT. PLAN. But other than that!

Who made it so complicated?

Just use BBC. You'll be happier and better informed.

Now I know there are more people who can respond.

Ha, I missed this little gem. Oh irony of ironies. EDIT: I see the indefatigable Lucaspa has joined the discussion, so I suppose that means all of my points are going to get prodigiously cited, if he decides to respond to Wormwood. I guess I'll add a "So there!".

I'm bored so I've decided to make a few points I know that I make without exerting myself too much. Don't expect me to necessarily respond to rebuttals; I'm not debating. I know it's pointless. That statement shows a profound ignorance about the biological, geological, anthropological, and just all around scientific community. As an amateur and I high school student I'm a little insulted, and I know a real scientist would be. Actually science can explain the Cambrian Explosion. There are three things you have to keep in mind: A) The "appearance of a taxon" is really just the first appearance of a fossil. Molecular divergence rates and the scanty fossils of the Ediacaran fauna both suggest that most of the phyla that we find in the Cambrian had earlier origins in the Precambrian. The "Cambrian Explosion" is likely of the the first evolution of hard body parts which fossilize well, perhaps as the result of the evolution of the first effective predators. B) The "genetic controls" were probably much looser back 700 million years ago. Big mutations happened much more frequently, leader to a greater number of body types. Mutating like crazy isn't selective so the controls have been progressively tightened since then. C) At any event, saying "I give up, we can never know; the Designer did it" isn't an explanation. You accuse evolutionists of not being intellectually rigorous enough? ID is the complete abandonment of intellectual rigor. I don't know a whole lot about the 'phi ratio'. Evolution isn't just random. There are two stages to evolution in a sexually reproducing population. The first is the origin of genetic variation. It results from stochastic ('random') processes within the cell, mostly recombination, but mutation is important in bringing in brand-new variation. The second stage is the elimination of that variation. Sometimes this is due to more random processes (genetic drift and so forth), but often it's due to the very non-random process of selection. Polyploidy, which is a rather complex form of hybridism, can also cause rather rapid evolution (the origin of a whole new species in a single go), and its reasonably common in plants and could happen in animals. Forensics works because we know how human criminals work. We know what traces they will leave behind. We don't know the first thing about how "the designer" works. Ultimately it comes down to circular reasoning. "This is the work of the Designer because it's just obviously designed."

Or get a tricorder. Speaking of

By state law, the New Hampshire primary is before the primary of every other state. That's the only statute I know about.

I just saw this and thought "Hey, I get to correct Lucaspa!". Neanderthals had very human-like hyoid bones. This Boneclones page was the first thing that came up on Google. Whether-or-not "braininess" came before spoken language depends on your definition of braininess. We only have two hominid hyoids, the Kebara Neanderthal's and the Dikika Australopithecus afarensis's, which was ape-like. Of course that says nothing as to non-spoken language, which as we all know the great apes are capable of. Lucy's Baby (it had the hyoid)

There are bacteria that live in rocks deep in the crust.

Oh, come now, you could call that zoology. Work with me here a little. Thank you moderators for adding things. And just to make sure Anthropology doesn't get left completely by the curb, I'm going to put that. I've taken one college course it in... I know my dowries from my bride prices and my Proconsul from my Palaeopropithecus. I like to think I'm freshman caliber at least.

Haha

Blast! I'm hopeless.