Phi for All

Usually, this question presupposes you can't tell. Which makes it fairly meaningless. I don't mind that a question doesn't have an answer, but it bunches my undies when it CAN'T have one.

If we're supposed to stop looking when we think we've found the answer, then the world is flat and everything revolves around it. Stars are just holes in the black fabric masking us from Heaven. We ARE the smartest species overall on the planet. Other species might be smarter in different aspects of intelligence. Chimps have better visual memorization than we do, for instance. But overall, we have advanced cognitive abilities across the board that gives us superior intelligence. I don't think that's arrogance talking.

Come on, you're assigning a very specific meaning to the quote, and then berating zapatos for not adhering to that meaning. It can easily be argued that living a day as a lion simply means living free, being your own boss, afraid of nobody even if it's just one day, as opposed to living like everyone else who is afraid and needs someone else to protect them for their whole lives. It doesn't have to be about killing, or magic, or eating, and I think that's what zapatos has been trying to say. Your interpretation isn't the only one. We should move on.

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! Moderator Note lhcisphysicist, you need to show evidence in support of your assertions. There have also been some posts refuting specific parts of your science. You need to address those by either altering your ideas, or showing where the refutations are wrong. If you make an assertion that is trivially falsifiable (like the laws of physics change the further we move away from our sun), you have to provide evidence. We have a LOT of evidence that they don't change, so you would need a LOT MORE evidence to convince anyone you may be right. If you could provide any evidence at all that supports your ideas, now is the time to do it. If you're just guessing, say so. If you continue to make assertions, then support them with evidence. Don't respond to this note, respond to the other member's questions.

Have you ever seen an air cannon blow a smoke ring? Study the physics of a toroidal vortex to "see" how oxygen and nitrogen react as a fluid.

Our minds look at all the evidence and find the preponderance of it refutes what you believe. Reality simply doesn't support you. Your mind is convinced what you believe is right despite a complete lack of evidence. Your faith means you think you know things you can't possibly know. I'm sorry, whose mind is closed?

! Moderator Note The topic is Atheism and Spirituality. Please stay on topic.

I tried to edit someone else's post that got messed up in quotes, and I think part of the problem was that the person he was quoting was using different fonts, sizes, and emphases that may have confused the software. It placed three /quote tags at the end that were quite persistent.

...or aren't being informed by their choice of media. I've noticed that since the GOP nomination was secured, FOX News has seriously curtailed their negativity about T. Besides NPR and BBC News, I read HuffPost and Fox for the extreme views, and FOX hardly mentioned the "2nd Amendment citizens" gaffe, and this morning had zilch on the campaign's alleged funding from the Russians. They had 3 stories about Clinton's email, though.

He's a box-seats kind of guy. He believes exclusivity and privilege trump knowledge and tolerance. He doesn't think outside the box-seats; he doesn't see them as boundaries, but rather that they define and highlight him.

Biochemical reactions are hardly random, but I also wouldn't call them "planned" or "intelligent". They're definitely guided by the laws of physics and reality, though. If you studied these from a science source instead of a religious source, the emphasis would be on evidence instead of belief. If you knew every component of a reaction, you could guide it to react in the specifically efficient way nature does, without taking such large amounts of time to stumble upon it through trial and error. Evolution is a fact, and the Theory of Evolution explains the development of life on this planet.

One more thought. People aren't the labels we give them, or they shouldn't be. Just like in a good discussion, we should attack ideas, not people. Your in-laws aren't racists, they've just done and said racist things. The things people do and say can change. Give it more time for you to rub off on them (sorry, non-native English speakers, weird idiom). You're leading by example here by being the people you are, and hopefully your influence will positively affect your children's grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, if you allow them that benefit. What you're considering sounds a lot like punishing your in-laws by banishing you and your wife. I think I heard this analogy first from iNow in another thread, but that's like drinking poison and expecting it to kill someone else.

Oooh, definitely c), my man. As iNow says, the woman you want to share your life with needs to be happy, and that usually means juggling that in-law hornet's nest rather than punting it downfield the way you'd like. You're looking at this the wrong way. Why would bigots/racists/pigs want to pay attention to anything cool your awesome fiance does? I would expect people like that to flap their arms and fly first. Also, why would you want her family to pay more attention to her? This seems like one of those "be careful what you ask for" situations. They have no idea what they're missing, and that means you share her less with them. I'm betting, if you analyze the family visits over the years, your fiance spends just enough time with her family to remind her why she prefers to spend time with you. And I'm also betting that one of the things she loves best about you is your ability to keep the peace with her crazy relatives and not blow up at them, despite what you say about them as you're driving home. Or post on science forums.

I'm afraid it's worse than that. He's willing to IMAGINE evidence that scientists "are very close-minded people who don't like to admit that their cherished theories could be wrong" in order to believe a human could implausibly live to 250 years with zero evidence. Cognitive bias 1, Reason 0.

I think the lion is the perfect symbol for Trump. He owes much to the women in his life but ignores the fact. He's loud and gets all the attention while others take care of business. His mane is part of his identity. He cares for others only as long as they support his pride. And of course, the homonym for lion is....

This sounds good to people, so good that it often makes them stop thinking any farther. What could be better than the truth (or Truth)? But truth is subjective. What's true for one person isn't universal to all. That's not the way reality works. Science is interested in where the evidence leads, that's all. When evidence stacks up to support an idea, and nothing falsifies it, and no other explanations have as much support, we accept that explanation as our current best, subject to change if other evidence is presented. In this way, science continually improves its understanding. Truth makes us think we've found the answer, and we stop looking.

Good for your friend for making that distinction. I suppose this is no different than any endeavor where someone hires experts but doesn't really listen to them unless they're saying what that someone wants to hear. Which psychic makes the most money, the one that tells you you're going to have a pretty run-of-the-mill week, or the one that tells you adventure is in store when you meet a beautiful stranger? Truth is cheap, padding costs extra.

Wow, $50 per 20 minutes. And I'll bet these consultants aren't stopping these men early on to correct basic flaws. It would be so easy to offer encouragement instead, pointing out corrections as you go, but keeping these guys on the line for more money. That's a dangerous combo for the crackpot, emotional surety + just a little more money. It's a con artist's dream. We know these guys can go on for pages when most of the responses are telling them it's a no-go idea. Imagine if they had someone telling them, "Hmm, you could really be on to something here, with a little patience and some digging!"

You're right, this is an important point. Trying to answer the question as is lends it relevance it shouldn't have. It leads you down a path that looks well-traveled and brightly lit, that dumps you out under the creepy troll bridge.

Since you specified human skin and heart, but just blood in general, the answer is blood. Blood as we know it developed long before anything you'd call a human existed. But that's the problem here, what you'd call a human. If you try to point and say "This is the first human!", then its parents aren't quite human yet. So didn't the first human's skin, blood, and heart all happen at once? This shows the absurdity of trying to pin evolution down when it comes to speciation. There's a smooth progression that makes it impossible to draw a line. Find a color wheel representing hundreds of thousands of shades in the spectrum, a wheel with no white lines between the colors. When you find one, try to point to where blue becomes violet, or yellow becomes orange. That's what it's like with evolution.

And you're all welcome to it. The smile is pretty good, though. It's here if you need it.

You definitely don't think of atheism the way I do. The first sentence of yours I quoted claims it can be quantified, and the second attempts to do so. I think of god(s) the same way I think of stamp collecting. I'm not against people collecting stamps, it's just not something I give any credence to. It's not part of my life because it offers me nothing I can't get elsewhere. If some enormous revelation about stamp collecting presented a rational reason why I should suddenly embrace it, I'd check it out, but until then, I just don't collect stamps. Spirituality, to me, is a focus on the connectedness of the various pieces of my life, including the lives of those I encounter. I can easily forget about everything except my own immediate concerns, and just walk through my days doing what I need to do. But when I slow down and take in the circumstances like weather or traffic and how it's affecting the moods around me, and focus more on other people while still keeping my own objectives in mind, I'm open to a whole new experience that gives a much more fulfilling, layered, interesting perspective on living in a human society. I have to admit to some weird, irrational behavior I'd lump under spirituality. I like seeing people smile, so I engineer little incidents that cause good feelings. For instance, when going to the supermarket, I park far out for the exercise, and I also watch for people unloading carts into their cars. I'm getting good at spotting those who're close to finishing, and timing my steps to reach their car as their cart is empty. I walk up, flash my own smile, and say "Your timing is perfect!" as I reach to take their cart back to the store for them. The mixture of pleasure, pride, gratitude, and friendliness I see on their faces is awesome. And it gives me a lasting sense of interconnectedness and hope.

Well now you're changing the conditions while still criticizing my choices. Now you're just talking about "a good human", instead of humans in general. In this case, yes, I would save a selfless member of Doctors Without Borders before a snarling, rabid wolf who eat babies (over Vegan protests). But consider this scenario. I know a man who regularly cheated on his wife the whole time they were married. After their two children were grown and out of the house, he left his wife for another woman, but they never divorced. The other woman eventually left him, and his wife took him back in, believing that her vows meant she shouldn't give up on him. He lost all their savings on stock market speculations. He now refuses to find work, and while he's too young for Social Security, he's pushing his wife to take it early, which means her fixed income for the rest of her life will be much lower than if she waited. She can't leave him because she feels loyalty to the marriage. It's like he's drowning, she's trying to help him, but he's pushing her under to save himself. She's now borrowing money from friends who really can't afford it, so it's like he's pulling those people underwater with him too. The man is a sociopath, a liar, and he is a detriment to anyone he comes into contact with. If he was the human in your save-a-human story, and my dog was the animal, you'd be asking me to save someone I know will cause more harm than good to people I know and love, over an animal who has given me and my family nothing but love and companionship. By choosing my dog, I could actually help more humans, humans who maybe deserve my help more than this man. It's more than just choosing humans over animals just because we're the same. Some humans have done nothing to deserve being treated as humans.

One of my first thoughts was of a jellyfish-like creature in the atmosphere, something that could out-compete plants and ground creatures for sunlight.