What is the human body evolutionarily designed for?

[DrP]

1 hour ago, John Harmonic said:

One mans trash is another mans treasure.

I think you misunderstood this:

1 hour ago, John Harmonic said:

I agree. Possibilities are endless.

1 hour ago, Strange said:

And therefore it is not wasting time on those that have no evidence. 

If the 'possibilities are endless' then we investigate the lines of the possible according to the evidence we have that points to things that are a reality....   if there is no evidence for something then it is a waste of time going down the avenues of investigating it as we have so much to do already and very little time.  

Who's treasure would it be to investigate the possibility of talking and flying slow loris shit? Personally I think it would be a waste of time - shit doesn't talk or fly - we 'know' this as far as we can know anything at all..  so what worth is there in investigating it further? Who's treasure would that be?

 

 

[John Harmonic]

I don't know, maybe I am talking more philosophically. Possibilities are endless, so shit could possibly start talking in the near future, who knows, possibilities are there. What about a a designed and constructed robotic shit that that actually speaks? This is a "world" of possibilities, so what I mean by "ones man trash is another mans treasure" is that one thing can mean more to one person than another. One can establish evidence for anything by simply saying it is possible.

[Strange]

1 minute ago, John Harmonic said:

One can establish evidence for anything by simply saying it is possible.

Nonsense. 

[John Harmonic]

6 minutes ago, Strange said:

Nonsense. 

Possibly.

[mistermack]

Funnily enough, "One mans trash is another mans treasure." does actually sum up most of life on Earth. Virtually all of it is recycling what went before. And we are doing more of it than at any time in history, due to fossil fuels. 

[Phi for All]

Science has high standards. Trash is normally defined by those standards as unusable for any scientific purpose (usually because it's wrong). Like a restaurant that refuses to serve roadkill as "another man's treasure". 

 

[Ken Fabian]

Possibilities are not unbounded or unconstrained; not everything is possible. However, as long as a full and true understanding of everything that is relevant is not known, we are "free" to imagine possibilities that won't be true. The more we do understand the easier to recognise and dismiss "possibilities" that are illusory.

 

Humans have evolved to be able to survive, to reproduce and support their offspring to survive and reproduce. With a social species the ability to support and assist those around them to survive and reproduce contributes to the individual's ability to survive and reproduce.

The details of what individual traits contribute can get very hard to pin down; in one circumstance the ability to whack at others with clenched fists will be a valuable survival trait. In another, the ability to make a spear that flies straight and has a point that can penetrate flesh will be a determining factor for survival; the one making the spear need not even be the same one as throws it. It gets very complex to tease out what individual traits contribute to that first "function", to survive and reproduce.

Edited October 3, 2018 by Ken Fabian

[mistermack]

On the subject of spears, ( and I hope this is not too much of a digression ) the throwing spear would have come far later than the very first spears.

Throwing a spear is a good hunting tactic, but a terrible fighting tactic. The first spears would have been stabbing weapons, for self defence against hostile clans or predators. Throwing it would be the last thing you would do. Once it's gone, you're defenceless. It might even have been that stabbing spears evolved from fighting sticks. If you carry a fighting stick around long enough, eventually the end would wear into a point, and stabbing with it would be more deadly than clubbing with it. 

There's no way of proving it, but I think it must have happened that way. There's no way that someone sat down, and invented the javelin from scratch. It might even have taken tens or hundreds of thousands of years, just to progress from club stick to throwing spear. The progress of stone tool-making was equally slow. Unfortunately, sticks don't last the way stone does, so the evidence is lacking.

[CharonY]

1 hour ago, mistermack said:

There's no way that someone sat down, and invented the javelin from scratch. It might even have taken tens or hundreds of thousands of years, just to progress from club stick to throwing spear.

Actually I think you are overestimating the difference in complexity or perhaps the pathway in their development. Remember, folks have also developed throwing sticks for hunting. Moreover, there are archaeological findings pointing to both, spear and javelin use some 500k years ago. Of course, going that far back it would be difficult to find definite timelines (especially as either or both could be far older and only few wooden tools would be preserved in the first place).

On 10/2/2018 at 10:07 AM, John Harmonic said:

I don't know, maybe I am talking more philosophically. Possibilities are endless, so shit could possibly start talking in the near future, who knows, possibilities are there. What about a a designed and constructed robotic shit that that actually speaks? This is a "world" of possibilities, so what I mean by "ones man trash is another mans treasure" is that one thing can mean more to one person than another. One can establish evidence for anything by simply saying it is possible.

See, that is actually one of the roles of science. By establishing a certain theoretical framework we go from making all kind of things up to a more rigorous system. Instead of just postulating things we can start asking more precise questions: What can we test? What can we learn from those tests? How precise is our knowledge on a given topic? Where are open questions?

You may think that ideas and inventions come from thin air, but in fact they are derived from principles that we may or may not know about. After all, if you build a robot there is no equal competition between engineering knowledge and occult demonology, is there?