anotherfilthyape

True, prions are not considered actually living things and whether viruses are living things or not is really a polemic matter, but some pathogens like fungi are living things and we do try to wipe them out... About mosquitos not making the human race extinct... They are not making it extinct but they are reducing the overall fitness of humanity... They kill some humans and who knows if any of the humans they kill have the potential of making a major breakthrough in the benefit of humanity... Now we must consider that these species are not on the same level as humans, they do not exhibit anything but instinct, they are purely mechanical, maybe electromechanical, but not sentient... We can consider them to be robots of nature... Would you ponder whether it is ethical to destroy a robot? A mere machine? And I'm not refering to artificial intelligence, if we created artificial intelligence we should give this artificial sentience the same value we give other humans, as long as they exhibit a capacity for independent complex thoughts, emotions, sorrow, grief, happiness, pleasure, love, etc. There is not an objective value on this but a subjective value, namely, the value to exhibit emotions, something that we know (thanks to ethology) many vertebrates exhibit but not simpler lifeforms (the octopi exhibits intelligence which makes them an unusual invertebrate but they do not exhibit emotions, so their intelligence might juyst be higher computational power).

If your interest is humanity your interest is the human gene pool so... some degree of eugenics is necessary, but not one biased towards racism or classism but more thoughtful of what genes are detrimental.

We are humans, our interests are the wellfare of humanity so thus... Causing the extinction of a species detrimental to humans in a way that no negative ecological consequence exists? Lets go for it... Mosquitos do not only transmit disease, they cause itches that can become wounds and get infected, some humans are allergic to these... Why not do the same on cockroaches, flies, ticks, fleas, lice, some grasshoppers, etc. The problem is... Do we know enough about ecology to take these risks? We are constantly trying to get rid of many species without any consideration on the ethics of that... We call it "epidemiology"... Of course the specialty only concentrates on lex complex lifestyles... that is in pathogens like prions, viruses, bacterias and such, but that still is "getting rid of species"... Isn't it? And we wish the virus of AIDs could go extinct, and other venereals, so we can have more careless sex...

why should this be the procedure? specially since its full of non sequiturs... 1.one cannot say "nothing exists" if we know that something exists (cogito ergo sum) 2.if one says "nothing exists" asking if it can exist is redundant and meaningless...

I must admit I am ignorant on the evidence to the existence of a single tree of life and to the claim that we are necessarily related to all eukaryota, however at least we can agree that claiming ancestry is far fetched in this one case...

Define kids... Pedophilia is certainly harmful and a paraphilia, not so much for ephebophilia... The problem with a legal drinking age at 18 is that you get a driving legal age at 16, if it were the opposite there would be no problem... At 15 and older people are mature enough to get involved in sex, but if you want to make it legal for people to have sex with 13 year olds or 14 year olds you are mentally ill...

Big Bounce

so just because I assert that people are wrong then my argument is of no value? If someone is biased against philosophy and dares calling it crap or rubbish let him or her deserve all accusations of ignorance because my post did not only claimed negative things against them (as a conclusion more than as an argument) but it also provided with points about how philosophy is of use to science and to people and how your arguments against it are flawed.

How can anyone agree or disagree when the terminology is not clear? I thought you wanted to conduct the conversation towards doing science, that is one of the main goals of this site... For instance when you say "broken" I think "traumatized" or "with no money to survive" and I do not see how an opinion could be of any worth on that matter if we take "broken" to mean "traumatized" and if it means "with no money to survive" it has no value for psychology or psychiatry...

Some of your posts were good, some of your posts were partially good and some of your post were not good at all... Were your posts about philosophy of religion good? I dont know 'cause I stop reading the posts once they went offtopic and were about you discussing with tar... But you must know that "philosophy of religion" is often redundant with metaphysics and... Religion has no such thing as good tools... Is revelation a good tool? It is not a tool at all, is ranges from whims to madness... Neither religion nor metaphysics are of any value, but that does not means that philosophy is of no value... Just like theoretical physics has little value does not means that science has little value... iNow if you are so lazy that you wont read my whole post read the introduction and the nskip to my answer to your questions... You can do that? Can you?

I do understand how the ad hominem fallacy is applied but if you want to thrive in that the term "broken" can be understood in different way by different people then you are not doing good science and the fallacy is nothing but a fallacy of amphibology... The biases people have are a subject in general, specific biases are not important.

1.what ya mean by broken? 2.It is obviously something negative and it has no bearing on the subject because it would be an ad hominem argument so this thread is a waste of time 3.Anthropogenic climate change is a fact but the fact that people have a bias not to accept it is not something to be discussed on "psychiatry and psychology" but on "politics".

It is a fact that there is existence (cogito ergo sum), the question whether non-existence is an alternative to this would be denied from the many worlds-interpretation theory unless you take nothing as a single alternative, with little odds of agaisnt many others with greater odds.

without links between this creature and humans what is to say they are the ancesotrs of humanity? I think this is fa fetched, specially since the primordial soup could have been formed on many palces simultaneously and this mean there could be more than one tree of life and not every living species must be related, it is true we are related to hominids but it is far fetched to say we are related to these eukaryotes...

I know you want to avoid drugs, but I guess what you really want to do is avoid something detrimental to your health, in that case "salvia divinorum" seems to be an hallucinogenic that is not detrimental to your health, but you need someone to take care of you while you haullucinate, I want to try it because it is safe...

dont be sarcastic, the post gave the answer that was required, it adressed many of the posts made in here...

Stephen Hawkings have claimed that philosophy is dead but, what does he know about philosophy? Does he know enough to understand how wrong his statement is? Or is he highly biased because he does not know much about philosophy? anyone knows?

1. Some definitions: Science is any field of study where the studying process involves rigorous observation of the environment and study of things previously done in these fields by others to hold as a foundation for the way this observation will be managed and the consequent employment of these studies to propose a hypothesis of how the future should behave in regards to the observed criteria and the consequent design of experiments to prove this hypothesis which thus gives knowledge that engineers can apply to improve human life... Note that, by design, previous theories which are hypothesis that have been assumed true under empirical evidence can be abandoned for a superior hypothesis or theory. Under this definition "abstract science" is a contradiction, however "abstract sciences" can be considered an oxymoronic in-between of science and philosophy (mathematics and logic would be one such field). Philosophy is any field of study where the studying process involves rigorous study and analysis of things previous done in these fields by others to hold as a foundation for the way the field will be expanded or perpetuated and the consequent application of these fields to human behavior (ethics), human organizations or human societies (politics) or academic fields (philosophy of language, philosophy of science, etc)... Note that by design previous theories which are hypothesis that have been assumed true under reasoning that has not yet been shown to be flawed, can be abandoned for a superior hypothesis or theory as soon as flaws are found in its system and an alternate system is proposed as a solution that both explains what the previous theory or hypothesis explained and what the previous theory or hypothesis failed to explain. In this way philosophy is an abstract counterpart to science and both can complement each other, supplement each other, or be in conflict, depending on the field and position one holds regarding them. Not that this is a definition for science in the sense it is employed in the modern world, originally science was any field which operated to reveal reality as it is for once and for ever, so the boundaries between science and philosophy where not as strong, but those days are over and now science is necessarily empirical or, better said, criticist. Science was a term created by philosophers. 2. dispelling some myths: That is not philosophy, that is theology, if you belief it is crap you are right but you obviously do not know anything about what is philosophy... That is so-called "oriental philosophy", not true philosophy, philosophy as a meaningful discipline is originally western and must comply with western roots for it to work, you are judging true philosophy by false philosophy, that is the same as judging evidence-based medicine by homoeopathy... Both have the same goals but different methods and different degree of rigor and success and application to life. A.not al philosophy is non-empirical, there is criticism that is empirical and rationalist and there is empirism which is exclusively empirical... B.that something is non-empirical it does not means it is false... for example that A is A (a tautology) is true without it being empirical. You do the same in philosophy but the evidence is not necessarily empirical, just because something is not empirical it does not means it is not evidence... Thought experiments and theoretical physics do not use empirical evidence... But mathematic evidence. So does Gödel's incompleteness theorem. You are wrong, confusing opinions with philosophical postulates is like confusing educated guesses with whimsical guesses, conjectures with dogma. Nope, because ethology is not advanced well enough to say much about animal intelligence in hominids, dolphins and cephalopods... Nope because the conscience or conscious mind is not the same as philosophy; philosophy is deeper than mere act of exercising the existence of a conscience, it has methods and a history to follow. A.Wrong. We need philosophy to ask questions, moderate answers and solve non-empirical or trans-scientific problems (for example "what is science" cannot be solved within science, that is like pulling oneself over a fence by one's bootstraps, only philosophy has this power and philosophy is the only field that can, within itself, answer the question "what is philosophy?", all other fields would be enduring petitio principii if they tried to prove their own worth through themselves) B.Democracy, pragmatism, the concept of logical fallacy (ad populum, ad verecundiam, ad hominem, inductive fallacy, plurium interrogationum, amphiboly, ad ignorantiam, Continuum fallacy, cum hoc ergo propter hoc, fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses, ad temperantiam, ad novitam, ad antiquitam, ad baculum and Texas sharpshooter fallacy among others), capitalism, socialism, organized anarchism, science, the problem of induction (related to the inductive fallacy and the reason why science is not dogmatic and it can progress and it has a scientific method), utilitarianism, secular humanism, epicureism, etc. The list is long. False, some art is crap, other art has educational value or at least the value of making life worth living. Literature is art... Would you say good literature is crap? Just because some artists have started doing whatever they want and calling it art does not mean that art is dead... Philosophy is not an art, unlike an art in philosophy being original and the ability to express your feelings through some media are not involved in doing a good work in the field you are operating in. Your work is not valued for its originality nor it is valued for how much it expresses but by whether what it claims is sound. 3. now I will answer the OP and other posters... Then you are completely ignorant of philosophy... I will concentrate therefore on some of the branches of philosophy: A.The goal and direction of metaphysics is, for instance, the same goal and direction of physics, only that it lacks proper tools (as a positivist I do not find any value in metaphysics because of this, but I cannot deny it has a purpose and a goal, if you know reality you can derive what to do from there so it would have a pragmatic capacity if the tools available to solve its problem existed) B.This brings me to epistemology and gnoseology, the branches of philosophy that deal with the capacity to know, what does knowledge constitutes and what is the relationship of knowledge and truth... This is something that cannot be solved through science because science suffers the problem of induction (check wikipedia if you do not know what the problem of induction is). The goal and direction of epistemology and gnoseology is building fields of study that are useful to us in relation to our place in reality if that is determined to be possible, thus science was developed from this branch. C.Science was created from a view that exists in philosophy that is "pragmatism" and you cannot use science to prove pragmatism, you need something outside the system to prove a system, that thing outside the system is ethics, pragmatism is one of many ethical positions, and a person who an ethical pragmatism will also have other set of positions in ethics and none can be scientifically proven and all are achieved through ethics that has the goal and direction of producing the best behavior on those that have developed a position within it or borrowed someone's else's position. D.Ethics has the goal, direction and pragmatic application of answering the question "how should I behave", which is a problem on the individual level, the collective counterpart to ethics is politics which solves the question of "how our organizations should operate and what they are meant to do"... Without philosophy we would still suffer under theocratic monarchies and current science would be the kind of crap that medieval people had. E.Ethics, politics, epistemology and gnoseology some way or another depend on axiology, the philosophic branch that studies what is value... You cannot determine value through scientific means and axiology has a goal and a direction with determining value; with value you know what to strive for. There it has pragmatic value... This brings me to another philosophical field: F.Philosophy of language; Philosophy of language deals with the problem of what a word conveys, sense and meaning, therefore since we share all knowledge through a language philosophy of language rules over all fields by making us understand the nature of those labels that words are. But the labels cannot be whimsical and it requires another field of study to arrive to answers on this subject: G.Ontology; this field has a direction and a purpose and a goal, it determines how you categorize, by knowing how to categorize you understand the foundations of taxonomy which are necessary for biology, the foundations of the periodic table which are necessary for chemistry and so on. H.Then you have philosophy of science, you cannot scientifically prove that something is science or it is not, that is bootstrapping, check Munchhausen's trilemma, the method above the scientific method is the philosophical method and it questions many matters on the subject of science and its nature and its validity; how it can be biased by political goals (as it happened in the soviet empire, check lysenkoism on wikipedia) or by historical biases (like it happened in the field of medicine with puerperal fever) and whether progress in science is something we must thank to exceptional people or is something that happens at a moment in time when society is sufficiently advanced for it to happen and whether a scientist had not been born another scientist would have done the discovery or invention in the place of the scientist that was not given birth to. What a lie! The term "sopolism" is never used on discussing the relationship between philosophy and science because "sopolism" is not a real term in philosophy, you mean "solipsism"... You have to learn to hear... And even then "solipsism" has nothing to do with the relationship between science and philosophy. Without philosophy there would be no scientific method, without philosophy the scientific method would have no one to defend it from the stupid claims of theologists and other religious authorities and the method could be lost as science becomes dogma. You are clearly biased due to lack of understanding and knowledge of philosophy. Then you are judging philosophy not on itself and on its own merit but on the image you get from people that may have no studies in philosophy or that may have them but are not well learnt in the field... That is like judging psychology based on the work of psychoanalists... Then you are not a good scientist. You are off topic but since I am an agnostic I can give you this answer; We are here because the conditions of existence of reality are enough to result in our conscious presence in what "here" seems to be... As to which are these conditions the question would not be "why" but "which" and the answer is two-fold; on metaphysics the answer is unknown and not vital (useful if it could be achieved, but not vital), on physics the answer is provided by science (by the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology and psychology). I think he is the kind of guy that does not realizes the need of science to constantly fortify or redefine its definitions, boundaries, like a construction, and does not understand philosophy enough... But philosophy too needs to be maintained and nowadays scientists need philosophy and philosophers need science (personally I want to study ethology and anthropology after I have finished studying philosophy because that would make me an excellent ethicist and political philosopher) For someone that claims that he values science this is an anecdotic argument and thus not proper science... For instance Douglas Hofstadter is a man that both knows modern science and has interest in philosophy and has done important studies for both fields. In the past we had: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Comte these two are just off my head but many scientists and philosophers that follower also apply, and Marxists too, I am not much fond of Marxism but it does constitute a school of thought where you get people with interest in both science and philosophy. That are appropriate words except where you think that philosophy is a form of expression when it is not so... But the bias is obvious from the moment the OP claims it is crap (in a loaded question) and that it is rubbish (in an introduction) despite not knowing much of the subject. Then you are not getting far... False, in philosophy you have to avoid informal fallacies and establish arguments that, when formalized into logic, lack contradiction or any other set of formal fallacies. Disagreement in philosophy comes not from flaws in the way philosophy is structured but because humans are a very dogmatic species and some people are less dogmatic than others, this means that some students of philosophy are more prone to stay under the influence of previous positions that relate better to their upbringing and some few are more prone to try newer positions so a spectrum of positions are the consequnces... Humans have varied source of dogmas that express how individuals vary from place to place and dogmatism is schismatic... Even science is one among many positions that has different schools of thought within itself. You know not every person accepts empirism? I mean, just take a look at the stupid creationists!!!! Without philosophers we have no one to mediate the discussion between one side and the other. Not everyone is pragmatic... Pragmatism is itself a philosophical position, you need to know about philosophy to defend it when people bring such claims like "the devil deceives but the bible is the truth of the lord, die heathen die!" Philosophy is not just making the question, it is also stablishing what is the methodology necessary to solve the question and what is the way the question has been made and should be answered. Whether a question is well-posed and whether it has well-posed answers that depends more on the individual than on philosophy itself, some people are better at formulating philosophical questions and philosophical answers, it depends on linguistic skill (if you express them in informal languages) or mathematical skill (if you express them in formal language like Boolean logic or something). If that is all you can get from philosophy and that is what philosophy is to you then you either A.lack understanding of those philosophers you have read or B.you have not read any good philosophers (many philosophers are not really philosophers but philosophasters) Marqq, thanks for your answer... These guys really needed someone to tell it to them... Depending on which philosopher you ask, Berkeleyans, idealists and rationalists can make anti-empirical claims, but the position has fallen out of favor and most philosophers nowadays are criticists... and that has a name: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SturgeonsLaw Sturgeon's Revelation I would blame drug addicts, theologians and oriental thinkers calling themselves philosophers or being called philosophers and common people believing they are philosophers just because they read one author that other common people consider a philosopher (Like Nietzsche, Marx, Ayn Rand or any other non-philosopher). I apreciate philosophy but metaphysics lacks proper tools, you cannot solve an equation for the noumena and the phenomena... I would say they apply to philosophy but not to metaphysics, I reject metaphysics because my reasoning (and that of many that agree with me and are philosophers) rejects the existence of any tool to properly solve the inaccessibility of certainty regarding ultimate truth... but we do not need ultimate knowledge to use assumptions for action. Your opinion thinks that the value of philosophy comes from direct pleasure alone but philosophy also has an argumentative value as it is the system by which argumentation is itself ruled. Many fields do, just that not everyone accepts so... It happens with science too... Creationists do not accept science... Most people do not accept positions that are right, which positions are right? Well YMMV but I would go off topic if I specified... That is fallacious reasoning, you are saying it is true because it cannot be proven it is false... that an ad ignorantiam or burden of proof fallacy... If you think Immortal did use philosophy you prove you do not know philosophy, I just denied his claims with philosophy... Nope what most of philosophers do, not every philosopher does metaphysics and metaphysics has fallen out favour, pragmatism has no place for metaphysics because of these things. your quote is good but myth is not something we need to worry about in the way we did before, it has already lost power... we must only worry about those myths that stay strong (creationism, abrahamic religions, etc). However myth is pertinent to understanding the human psyche... Yes, ESP is not a subject philosophy tackles, philosophy has little to no interest in ESP Democracy, pragmatism, the concept of logical fallacy (ad populum, ad verecundiam, ad hominem, inductive fallacy, plurium interrogationum, amphiboly, ad ignorantiam, Continuum fallacy, cum hoc ergo propter hoc, fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses, ad temperantiam, ad novitam, ad antiquitam, ad baculum and Texas sharpshooter fallacy among others), capitalism, socialism, organized anarchism, science, the problem of induction (related to the inductive fallacy and the reason why science is not dogmatic and it can progress and it has a scientific method), utilitarianism, secular humanism, epicureism, etc. The list is long. If "universe" includes everything then it's meaningless... If "multiverse" includes everything then it's meaningless... If "existence" includes everything then it's meaningless... I can make non-sequitur arguments too... ethics, politics, philosophy of language, onthology, axiology and gnoseology Kant is taken into account when the concept of noumenon and phenomenon is accepted and one decideds to rely on phenomenon alone, that is what scientists do when they reject metaphysics through a pragmatic approach (I admit however I do not understand Kant much, he is complicated with words, I have understood his theory better in encyclopedias like Grolier and others). You and the OP have denied good andswers and other posters have sidetracked the thing (immortal and tar) with things that are not philosophy. my post defines philosophy... And a guy defined philosophy from the wikipedia article. Then you are falling to the "no true scotsman" fallacy to call philosophy rubbish and science worthy... Science is criticist not empiricist (this means it uses both rationalism and empiricism). Philosophy is empricists, rationalist or criticist depending on your field of thought... Science is a subfield of criticist philosophy with its own methods. In the 1800s Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that women giving birth at home had a much lower incidence of childbed fever than those giving birth in the doctor's maternity ward. His investigation discovered that washing hands with an antiseptic solution before a delivery reduced childbed fever fatalities by 90%. Despite the publication of this information, doctors still would not wash. The idea conflicted with both the existing medical concepts and more importantly, with the image that doctors had of themselves. That intransigence consigned large numbers of mothers to painful, lingering deaths. The scorn and ridicule of doctors was so extreme that Semmelweis moved from Vienna and was eventually committed to a mental asylum where he died. Caplan, Caralee E. (1995). "The Childbed Fever Mystery and the Meaning of Medical Journalism". McGill Journal of Medicine 1. http://www.med.mcgill.ca/mjm/issues/v01n01/fever.html. ^ Hanninen, O; Farago, M; Monos, E. (Sep-Oct; 1983). "Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, the prophet of bacteriology". Infect Control. 4: 367–70. PMID 6354955. http://web.archive.org/web/20081013160051/http://www.general-anaesthesia.com/semmelweis.htm.

Science is any field of study where the studying process involves rigorous observation of the enviroment and study of things previously done in these fields by others to hold as a foundation for the way this observation will be managed and the consequent employment of these studies to propose a hypothesis of how the future should behave in regards to the observed criteria and the consequent design of experiments to prove this hypothesis which thus gives knowledge that engineers can apply to improve human life... Note that by design previous theories which are hypothesis that have been assumed true under empirical evidence, can be abandoned for a superior hypothesis or theory. Under this definition "abstract science" is a contradiction, however "abstract sciences" can be considered an oxymoronic in-between of science and philosophy (mathematics and logic would be one such field). Philosophy is any field of study where the studying process involves rigorous study and analysis of things previous done in these fields by others to hold as a foundation for the way the field will be expanded or perpetuated and the consequent application of these fields to human behaviour (ethics), human organizations or human societies (politics) or academic fields (philosophy of language, philosophy of science, etc)... Note that by design previous theories which are hypothesis that have been assumed true under reasoning that has not yet been shown to be flawed, can be abandoned for a superior hypothesis or theory as soon as flaws are found in its system and an alternate system is proposed as a solution that both explains what the previous theory or hypothesis explained and what the previous theory or hypothesis failed to explain. In this way philosophy is an abstract counterpart to science and both can complement each other, suplement each other, or be in conflict, depending on the field and position one holds regarding them. Not that this is a definition for science in the sense it is employed in the modern world, originally science was any field which operated to reveal reality as it is for once and for ever, so the boundaries between science and philosophy where not as strong, but those days are over and now science is necessarily empirical or, better said, criticist.

It may seem an ad hominem argument against them but it was usual in that time that rather than science hypothesis were driven by racism... That is why phrenology was so popular in those times... I think it is illogical to think outbreeding depression is possible when human populations are not so different from each other and when survival for humans is so similiar throughout most of human populations... I had say indeed that rather than outbreeding depression we should enjoy hybrid vigour from racial mixing and that racial purity is more of a disease (when it is real) than anything else... furthermore, it is very unusual.

I do not believe much in IQ, I believe in the importance of intelligence, but not IQ because IQ is very biased on what a particular nation teaches its people and it does not account for those with more than one nation as influence (migrants for example) or people that are self-taught and have learnt things average people do not know... However this only means that people can score lower than they deserve, people scoring high actually deserve some respect. I had this person as the highest IQ, thanks for the answer 'though... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant

1.True, wikipedia is not an authority, but it is a center of scientific, philosophical and other kind of information popularizing/divulgation as such it would be convenient if its pages had this information provided however I understand the other reasons you give for it not being the case so... 2.The population level of extant animals (and even of extinct animals) must be known before non-specialists and crossfield professionals can use these in their studies, don't ya think? 3.Science needs a single terminology, that is why Linnæus' work on inventing taxonomy is so important to science... That is why the periodic table provides a unique code for chemistry... Actually we need more unambigous terminology, not only for science but for any field of knowledge... If different scientists use different terminology to distinguish one population from another then studies on the subject of population must always specify their terminology and even then their usefulness is limited, a common terminology must be stablished for all scientists. Ok I tried following the link's claim but I could not make much of what it said because it relied on terminology and graphs I have not been taught to understand and interpret... however I saw that most of the claim is based on genetics on samples that could not be large enough to represent what they are meant to represent... And it uses little consideration of anthropology, history, human geography (where behavioral geography is the one that serves the best), travel statistics and studies of migration and interracial or international breeding... I guessed (I admit it is just a hypothesis, but it is based on an educated guess) that humanity had to be the most panmicitic of all species because by distance travelled versus size per individual the human species is the species that travels the highest amount of distance through its lifetime on average (or maybe arthropods brake our record because they need to travel smaller distances to do so, however in that case we would still be the species that covers the greatest spread of coordinates per average individual, this is another hypothesis I admit)... I mean, there are higher chances that a Japanese man marries a Canadian woman that the chances that a polar bear breeds with an Andean bear... Because humans have the ability and the need to travel through the world (it may be an ability proportional to wealth but even the poorest person has some chance of being able to migrate and a motivation to do so)... I bet humanity is the only species where migration is a permanent option for individuals instead of an ocassional event for populations as a whole. Asia may not be sympatric with Europe through most of Asia, but then you get Russia, Europe/Asia and Greece, Europe and Turkey, Asia where sympatry occurs between one population and the other... You can consider races and class to be different populations (rarely do people of different races or different social classes mate together, it happens, but it is strange because racism and classism is very strong in the modern world, yet classes and races inhabit the same land; class is a stronger factor for division than race however because classism is stronger than racism and people of the same race but different class have less chances of forming a relationship between each other than people of the same class but different race... Most interclass relationships happen because movement between social class is possible and has always been possible, with different chances of occuring depending on the place and time)... Biology, when applied to humanity, is much more complex than when applied to animals, anthropology is always involved, by necessity... and viceversa. Inhabited land is continous throughout the major continents of America, Eurafrasia, Oceania and Polynesia... The later two has the greatest amount of inhabited territory because Polynesia is a continental archipielago and Oceania is Australia plus a continental archipielago... But within America and Eurafrasia you have a continuum of inhabited land, these means that you may have clear national boundaries but no clear boundaries between one population's geographic region adn the geographic region of the other population... Take Peru for example, the cities closest to Brazil have people that speak both Spanish and Portuguese because they often travel between both countries, likewise Tumbes, in the north, next to Ecuador, has people that cross the frontier to Ecuador very often, would this not mean that the populations are sympatric? I mean, it is not permanent migration, they rarely ever sleep in the foreign area, but they do visit it and interatc with its locals. I agree it is an interesting field... However when one determines that a word has a meaning and one finds something that seems to comply to that meaning in everything with the exception of one thing, the normal process is either to modify the word's meaning or to deny that the word corresponds to the example... So I say that I could accept interspecies breeding of non-sterile hybrids (as the heliconius is an example of such) or demand that the cases that do not fit this definition be reclassified (thus reclassifying those Heliconius treated as members of different species to one single species with high genetic variation), however the later could make species as meaningless as the concept of race (specially when the concept of horizontal gene transfer and asexual reproduction means that that the species problem is a strong problem in the subject of species delimitation). This means we need a better definition of species, one probably based on genetic make-up (we know for example that chimpanzees share 98% of their genes with humans and we are sure that chimpanzees and humans are not the same species, so we should determine that whatever the percentage of common genes between two individuals is it should be somewhere above 98% for them to be grouped in the same species). By answering the question "what measure is non-human" with genetic studies we can spread the ancient problem of essence (an ontological problem that can now expand to the species problem and become a taxonomic problem) to species (however for ethical purposes such as human rights we must still classify human on a biological and behavioural level; sociopaths, psychopaths, serial killers, rapists, cleptocrats and other biological humans that cannot feel empathy and are thus a threat to the wellfare of humanity must not be protected by human rights if humanity is where we invest our ethical and political interest) I would still benefit from knowing which other species exhibit the capacity for hybrid swarms (preferibly if they are not arthropods, preferibly if they are vertebrates; under the hypothesis that there was no single primordial soup but that abiogenesis happened on many different places simultaneously because the conditions permitted so we can guess that without a link between some taxa and other taxas it is possible that they belong to different trees of life; for instance we know for certain that all hominids are related but the relationship between hominids and earthworms/cockroaches/algae/coral/sponges/squid is not supported by the same amount of evidence.). Besides, the argument can benefit from a greater list of examples of such species... But I am not the professional in the field of taxonomy so I cannot deny your arguments out of mere whim, all I can do is ask; how much mainstream is your position? And I have recieved examples of scientists supporting it but I have not seen statistics of how many professionals agree on it... Therefore I still do not know how mainstream it is (In science, unlike literature, being mainstream is the goal, in literature it means that you have no talent and need to do what everyone else often does). This only makes me wonder some questions 1.How can you determine that the changes happen only on the population level before you have started your study? 2.How can you determine it only happens on the population level when you have not yet studied other populations? 3.How could it be pertinent to ethology or to branching ethology with anthropology if it only happens on the population level? I have not yet started to study anthropology or ethology on a university but as a person intersted on the fields I have done my best to learn everything I can about them and thus I can provide this question about their relationship which should involve evolution because if studying animals is pertinent to understanding humans it is because we understand that these animals are evolutionarily related to humans and the behavioral composition is similiar or indentical in many ways, this demands evolution to be something you can study on taxa above species, not only on the population level... but I guess other fields, such as ecology, may need similar studies on the metapopulation level. Ok, since at that point I had not yet agreed on the population/species divide and its necessity for the discussion of the subject of evolution I need to answer your claims from that post from where I am standing now, that is a different position that the one I held at the time... so I will quote you again, in order; I have accepted A for these reasons 1.I'm not the professional and 2.you have shown that those that propose speciation is a species process and thus define species based on interbeeding capability have failed to limit the term "species" to creatures that can breed with others in their own species but not with others in close species, therefore proving that the definition of species is not as strong as it should be to be of much value although you recongize that smaller taxa, like "evolutionarily significant unit" and "population" have no scientific consensus so thus they are still problematic... As for B... I accept that under some definitions of arbitrary the categorization of species is effectively arbitrary, however I believe that professionals could (and should) build a better definition using the knowledge provided by genetic studies now that genomas are being cracked and we can determine, for example, that chimpanzees and humans share 98% of their genes. We could thus build two ways to classify animals; one based on morphology alone and one based on genetics/phylogeny alone... The former would be useful for ecological and anthropological studies (the niche of an animal and thus the value of an animal to ecology is based on its morphology, their ecological value is also the value they have to humans and it is reflected in mythology so if we could classify animals on a morphological basis we would have an easier time understanding the relationship between humans and animals, which is often expressed in their mythology and in the mythic animals human societies have believed in, and even monsters of urban legend comply to this) while the later is pertinent to studies involving evolution (even if evolution takes place on a population level). Both taxonomies should have their own taxa (morphological taxa could for example have the category "draconic" which could be further divided into "serpentine", "chiroserpentine" and "non-serpentine"). True, however, to some extent, my population and my parents' population is the same; I cannot breed with women of the generation of my mother because they have gone through menopause already, some years ago I could however, about a decade ago or so... On the other hand, women of my generation, including my sisters, can breed with men of my parent's generation because andropause is so different to menopause that not all men lose fertility with age.... Now I accept that humans can be different but I also accept that any studies human conduct are interested so much in benefitting humanity that there is a degree of importance to each subject regarding how useful the particular subject is to humanity... I cannot think of any evolutionary study more important to humans that the ones involving humanity itself so, under this principle, the effect of population differentiation on generational scales is an important subject... However we can still consider different generations to be different populations and sympatric populations at that, because interbreeding between them is unusual (women may be interested in older men more often than men in older men but even that has a limit which may vary between individuals but is such that it is unusual for women and men of different generations to breed together, men interested in older women are rarely interested on post-menopausic women and if they were no intergenerational breeding would happen, the greatest number of successful breeding for different generations took place at different moments in time) But this only works because you are taking it so many steps backwards it works... The problem still happens that parents and their children are of different generations and different populations but some interbreeding can take place. Migration is also more common to happen differently for members of different generations; My paternal grandfather and his parents-inlaw, or their parents, came from Italy to Peru, I wish I could eventually travel to study in the UK and even travel through many countries through the world and as a sexually active individual I will try seducing women wherever I go and chances exist that condoms fail and reproduction takes place, or I get a disease, I'm realistic but I hope the later does not happens and I hope I can afford the former if I get to travel... This may seem an anecdotical argument but I know for certain that this is not statistically unusual; humans do tourism through out the world or migrate every day, that is why the bussiness of airports, ports, airplanes, ships and such is a thriving bussiness. I can expect the same to be true about most people, even people with religious mores against sex tend to be sexually active (they are hypocrite about it, but they are sexually active). Humanity is too complex and advanced to be broken in terms applied to animals... Don't you think? I should quote the original poster without paraphrasing him; Ok, the problem is that the OP made two/four questions and then he or she made a conclusion from it, conclusion which he/she phrased as his/her third and fourth questions... I based my answer on the conclusion and on the second question he/she made, you based it on his/her first question... I think he/she implies that the theory of evolution is not really proven but that it is just a hypothesis we have accepted with insufficient evidence... Therefore I consider valuable to contend that we know that ancient wolves are the ancestors of modern wolves and dogs, therefore proving evolution for at least one circumstance. Can panmixia be studided through genetic analysis alone? Can't ecological and ethological studies on the behaviour and travel patterns of species/populations/esus and its individuals provide no complementary data? Maybe data on a higher scale since genetic studies are hard to conduct on the large scales which ecological and ethological studies can be handled? I agree that the "environment" in terms of natural selection, is any external factor which interacts with your genotype to influence your ability to pass genes on to the next generation... My argument and my point and what I am proposing is that for humankind these external factors are more often than not sociological, anthropological and artificial rather than otherwise... I mean, more often than not when a creature is analised its enviroment is qualified as the biome it inhabits and biomes vary based on geography, however I contend that humans have created their own biomeless-enviroment, one that trascends geography, not the city (the city is a biome for wild animals, even for cats that are somewhere between wild and domesticated but closer to the wild side than to the domesticated side) but the society; the chances for a person to survive, even when the person does not lives in the city, are more related to his or her relation to the society to which he or she has higher amounts of links (whether he/she is a farmer living far from the outskirts of a city to which he/she sends what he/she produces or an investigator watching the behaviour of orangutans in the deepest jungles of Borneo or an investigator doing whatever research might bring him or her to an outpost in the antarctic or the arctic)... Rather than hunting like a wild animal through the city he or she inhabits a human's ability to survive is related to his or her ability on a field which may not even be related directly to production of wealth and food such as artists, showmen, bullfighters, politicians, philosophers, criminals (in the wild stealing food from another species is possible or from another member in one's population but this alone cannot be the method by which a creature can survive, among humans being "a career criminal" so to say is possible and criminals are a greater threat than wild lifeforms), theoretical physicist, pure mathematician, professional athletes (like Pele, Maradona, Tyson, Beckham, Michael Jordan, etc.) which means that humans can survive exclusively on their abilities to fit and exploit the human factor alone (even stupid people like Paris Hilton and Roland Emmerich can succeed on this skill alone so the skill does not demand intelligence or knowledge either; and endurance, manual manipulation and intelligence are often considered the source of humanity's success as a species yet we can see how, as individuals, success is limited to exploiting the power of popularity... Paris Hilton was not a nice person on her show and her show was very stupid, it promoted shallow and selfish behaviour and bullying those that have less money than oneself by pranking them behind their backs, but since people existed that looked up to that bitchyness she managed to earn enough money that when her grandfather left her without his economic support she no longer needed it to continue living among the wealthy; that a human like Paris Hilton, with no true talent, can, by making a show of how much she lacks talent, get as far as she has in our society is but evidence that humanity trascends biomes and it is an enviroment in itself, I know this is my hypothesis but what I have mentioned are evidences we both know to be fact... Likewise we can argue that people with a varying of conditions that would die without human support manage to breed thanks to the help they get from their jobs or relatives... Stephen Hawking is capable of reproducing dispite his crippling situation because he is not sterile as far as I understand and if someone is willing to help him ejaculate a sample of his semen can be used to impregnate a woman, nonetheless he is severely crippled, and just like Marilyn Monroe proposing Albert Eistein to have a child with her many women would want to have descendants with him, indeed he has been married twice and has three children. Jane Wilde and Elaine Mason, his former wives, were probably attracted in great deal mostly due to his skills than to any other factors, skills which made him well suited for the human factor but not for survival in the biomes that correspond to the geographic regions he has inhabited... I am taking this from wikipedia; "diagnosis of motor neurone disease came when Hawking was 21, shortly before his first marriage, and doctors said he would not survive more than two or three years". He is currently 70 years old so he has survived the condition for almost 5 decades and the same article says that it is unusual that he has survived for 5 rather than 1 decade. So we can know how strong is the human factor on survival, for example your claim about a severe allergy to penicillin could be countered by testing for allergies before applying the penicillin on the kid and trying an alternate cure on the child. By the time he was 32 years old, more or less, according to wikipedia, he was totally paralysed and yet it was about this time that he started his rise to celebrity status, he may be too old to be fertile now, I do not really know, but there has been a time when he was both fertile and admired by so many women that he had great chances of passing on his genes to more than three children despite no longer being adapted to a wild version of the enviroments he inhabited). In other words I do not deny that enviroment, in the way you have defined it, has banished, under your definition there is always an enviroment, I only say that nowadays for most humans the enviroment is more artificial and human than it is natural. The selection pressures are now a subject that the human sciences, rather than than the natural sciences, would study, whether it be sociology, anthropology or psychology... I also wanted to add to the discussion an interesting subject on subdivisions to the species divide that do not seem to be populations nor do they seem to be subspecies... but I will add that at a later time. Anyway, do you agree with what I have claimed?

actually "artificial" or "man-made" is just a sub-group of what is natural... nothing can be both real and unnatural, so everything is natural, but what is artificial is a special kind of natural and what is man-made is a special kind of artificial... (Non-man made artificial things are bird nests, termite mounds, honey, beaver dams, scarab beetle dung balls, etc)

I know that over time the concept of IQ has proven to be flawed but it is still popular on television and it has made me intrigued about the highest results ever achieved... Maybe I could profundize on their biographies... I already saw that the person with the highest IQ ever measured achieved great things but not as great as people that have not had their IQ measured... Any psychologist out there knows the 5, 10 or 50 highest results ever and who got them and how high these were? and at which age which they were measured?

True... Thing is... I thought "arbitrary" was not a term with a specified meaning in science but that scientists used the same term as common people when they refered to "arbitrary"... Anyway, people that study the law develop less deeper studies in ontology, categoremas, categorization and language than taxonomists... I believe... And When I said "I which we could extend to every noun; only nouns; to have a scientific language to identify objects without ambigous nature, I mean, it is a problem when a word has one meaning in one dialect and another meaning in another dialect and a way more complex meaning on another language... It is what I wanted about morphology..." I made a mistake... I meant "I wish" I dont know why I wrote the wrong word there... Easily defined? Every definition is hard, some are harder than others... Even the concept of categories is sometimes contested... Ontology is a hard field and scientists must realize that they have to know as much of ontology as ontologists must know about science. It brings to the discussion that you are somewhat more of an authority than me... I mean, yes, your studies do not mean you are necessarily right (believing so would be ad verecundiam) but it does gives credence to your words and it makes me realize you understand my claim that studies in the field of pscyhology cannot focus on single populations... I recommend you the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", is a very good book... Yes, sorry, I love biology and in school I was among the best students in biology but things changed when I went to university, we were forced to take a course of biology but the course was oriented toward the agendas of the teachers and did not helped me learn much beyond high school level, other than the concept of sustainability, everything I learnt about biology beyond high school I learnt it on my own through the net. About the straw man, sorry for it, my bad, it was not intentional... I just had misunderstood your position... Yes, but if you check any animal on wikipedia they list their taxas but not to which ESU they belong or which ESU they have. Fine... Ok... I guess humans are the most panmicitic of all species (I understand that panmixia is something where some evolutionary significant unit can have a higher degree of panmixia than another evolutionary significant unit)... I was not faimiliar with the term panmixia but I was familiar with the term "sympatric speciation" and "allopatric speciation"... With the degree of panmixia in humans and the way human "populations" are all sympatric... Would you say humanity can really be divided into populations? Of all the links you have provided so far the best one is the one of the hybrid swarm because it leads to an article on "Hybrid speciation" that mentions how the heliconius butterflies have generated hybrid swarms... But I love the subject of hybrids because chimeras have been my favourite kind of creature ever since I learnt about mythology and hybrids are the closest you can get to chimeras (I know that in science we get chimeras too but they are just not the same as hybrid, chimeras do not have hybrid vigour which mythical chimeras do have). This is why I have investigated everything I could about hybrids and I wanted to know anything about hybrids that could reproduce... The kind of evidence I wanted about it being possible was a list of species, evolutionary significant units or any other taxa that are known to hybridize benefiting from hybrid vigour and producing more unique creatures as a result... Ligers, the goat-sheep hybrids, hinnies, I find all such creatures interesting... Ok, but even if you understand the processes of evolution you need to work with metapopulations, not with populations, it is too hard to make useful scientific advances when your studies are only pertinent to a single population Perfectly, your analogy is an excellent addition to this debate... And I have an explanation that serves as a solution; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grue_and_bleen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyan I guess you are familiar with this ontological problem and that is why you propose that the limits are arbitrary... It happens with other colours and with plant taxa too... (The expression orange and apples has been contested on linguistic grounds; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oranges_and_apples )... Etymologists are not sure what was called orange before, the fruit or the colour and we can say that the green of mucous is different than the green of the sea and the green of grass, that the blue seen in the sky, the blue in the sea, the blue in some birds are all different shades of blue... There are shades we might have hard time classifying but there are shades we can classify easily... We have a hard time distinguishing some individuals between close species but we have other individuals that are easily identified, or is that not the case? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki%27s_Wager We cannot tell where the neck ends and the head begins but we can tell that the nose is in the head and Adam's apple is in the neck... The existence of gray is in no way a reason to deny the existence of black and white... It applies to morals too... The existence of things that are neither evil nor good does not means that good and evil do not exist... The solution to the colour problem is the following: You can determine that violet or purple is the colour with a wavelength between 380 and 450 nm, that blue is the colour with a wavelength between 451 and 485 nanometers, that green has between 486 and 570 nanometers of wavelength, that yellow is 571 to 590, orange goes from 591 and 620 nanometers and red from 620 to 750 nanometers... Human sight cannot diferentiate wavelengths of light so well as to make this differentiation useless... 415 nanometers of wavelength is deffinitely purple, 468 nanometers of wavelength is definitely blue, 528 nanometers of wavelength is definitely green and so on... Creatures do not have wavelengths... But they have genoma and dna... Now that the dna and genoma are getting broken and cracked we can find a way to determine limitations between species that is not as whimsical as saying "this is where green ends and blue begins" when a person that sells paints do it and which are of any use, the categories have been determined with more analysis and greater thought... By people with expertise in spectroscopy (you see I am using six colours instead of the traditional seven, but the traditional seven are an invention of Newton because he was still motivated by superstition, he can be the father of spectroscopy but he was just that, the father, not the specialist; the ancient Greek sophists saw a connection between the colors, the musical notes, the known objects in the solar system, and the days of the week. but the human eye is relatively insensitive to indigo's frequencies, and some otherwise well-sighted people cannot distinguish indigo from blue and violet. For this reason some commentators, including Isaac Asimov, have suggested that indigo should not be regarded as a color in its own right but merely as a shade of blue or violet.) Of course this is just an approximation, but we use an approximation for pi and that does not means that pi is arbitrary... Or is it? However I still wonder how the fact that evolution happens on the population level means that an ancestor must be extinct for him or her to be considered an ancestor, I consider my father one of my ancestors and he is alive and he can have children, not with my mother but if they divorced or he cheated on her or she died he could impregnate a younger woman, his reproductive qualities are not extinguished but I still retain confidence in him being not only my father but my ancestor... The same applies to populations, species or evolutionary significant unit... I must however admit one thing... Aren't we branching of into a debate that no longer relates to the OP's post? I mean, if you ask "are their any pair of evolutionary significant units that share a known common ancestors" the answer still is yes; any population of dogs and any population of contemporary wolves share the ancient wolves as ancestors... But back to the debate... How can you delimitate populations for dogs? I mean, dogs are rarely ever mixed by breeds but breeds are found through all the world and they are controlled by human intervention so schnauzers only breed with schnauzers, fox terriers only breed with fox terriers and so on... But fox terriers and schnauzers are as much dog as each other is and both can live as close as neighbours and yet not interact with each other... The species problem is even more complex, or we can say, the population problem or the evolutionary significant unit problem, when human intervention is considered... A schnauzer from Lima, Peru has greater chances of interbreeding with a schnauzer from Pursat, Cambodia than schnauzer from Berlin, Germany has with a fox terrier from Berlin, Germany (yet mongrels exist, but how many mongrels exist is related to how many stray/street dogs exist, this is why I chose Berlin for comparision, I doubt they have many stray dogs or street dogs... I mean, the way their laws are so strict and correctly applied I guess they have avoided the problem of allowing dogs go stray... Mongrels and stray dog behave like the cities were another kind of natural enviroment, for us humans and our pets and the domesticated animals and not-so domesticated animals we manipulate cities and similiar anthropological units are artificial enviroments with human factor being stronger than natural factors; humans no longer adapt to the enviroment but adapt the enviroment to themselves and adapt themselves to each other, few adaptations are to the enviroment and these are mostly tools; clothing for colder or hotter climates, ointments to resist mosquitos and solar radiation, tools to reduce or eliminate plague-bearers, pathogens or other pests and problems, et cetera) Bottomline, this is a linguistic and ontological problem not only a scientific problem. It may even involve mereology... I did not need Arete to tell me that nature lacks strict boundaries... I have been aware of that a long time already... Ontology and sociology and anthropology reveal the difficulty in determining boundaries, between language, culture, etc. I for once have been influenced by many cultures, from the British school I went to foreign television from Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, the United States and even the United Kingdom and some movies from China (such as the excelent The Gods Must Be Crazy III that mixes a bush tribe with the legend of hoping vampires and caucasian villians), Germany, Ireland, etc. Even tv series from Australia... My previous knowledge on physics and chemistry, while not extensive, was enough to understand the difficulty of boundaries, philosophy of time also helps to understand the difficulty in determining boundaries... When does the present starts an when it ends? When the past becomes the future? Where the sea ends and the land begins? Where a solid object ends and its fluid surroundings begin? Where matter ends and energy begins? Where one object ends and another object begins? Is there void gaps between space occupied by matter? If you accept, in the field of mereology, that everything is composed of gunks, you understand that reality is filled with fuzzy bourders and has no strict bourders... This does not means that bourders are arbitrary because they are pragmatic... Bourders are not decided upon from a dogmatic position, not always, and when they are they often are useless, but bourders as decided by scientists are pragmatic... They are useful... We benefit from them... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunk_(mereology) Hope I'm not incomodating anyone with my persistence but I will persist until I run out of answers... or arguments... I feel debate benefits us...