Tuesday, March 04, 2008

"So where are you working now?"

"Nowhere."

"What the hell have you been doing this past two weeks?!"

"Sleeping, mostly. Reading a bit. Eating ice cream. Playing with my nephews. Riding my motorcycle. Watching zombie movies."

"Are you doing anything productive whatsoever?"

"I spend some time educating people on internet forums. I don't charge for it; it's more like community service."


For example:

Wreckless wrote:

They say human beings use only up to %15 of our brains. Perhaps some if not most the %85 is primal knowledge left over from when we were hunter and gatherers, that enhaces our sences capibilities.

(Don't take this the wrong way but,) research shows people of African decent can hear better (long distances, ampiflication,ect) then people of European decent. Any fact that might be related to this is that people of African decent's cranial/neck structure is 100,000 years behind in human evolution, and brain devolopment is behind a tad as well. So meybe zombies brains are set back 100,000 years or so. This mey also affect small and all other sences.


Gurg wrote:

Hullo. There's a lot going on in the above paragraphs, but I'd like to introduce a few ideas about how the amount of the human brain is "used" and then a few ideas about human evolution, specifically on the concept of being "behind."

Average brain usage: The 10-15 percentage people often hear is very, very specific. Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Positron Emitting Tomography (MRI and PET) scans often show what parts of the brain are active during certain activities like spelling and writing, but at no point is the rest of the brain idle.

The brain is not a muscle, more like a computer.

I think we can agree that it seems like some people use more or less, but biologically that isn't the case.

Whenever someone has a head injury, or a stroke, or partially drowns, or has a brain tumor, something is affected. Not always, but almost always. If only 10 percent of the brain were necessary, the injuries and illnesses that affect it would be 90% less. But that is not the case.

Next I'd like to address some misconceptions about evolution. Evolution does not go from lower-to-higher, dumber-to-smarter, or better-to-best. Evolution is merely change. Then, according to the theory of Natural Selection, the environment then "selects" the organisms best able to live in that environment.

Big and scaly used to be in for example, then the temperature changed and small and hairy became popular.

This doesn't happen quickly [in most cases; debatable] but very exact conditions are required for evolution to occur.

Our physical appearances as a human species are incredibly malleable. We're right up there with the dog for wacky mixes of traits and size variation.

Humans are learning machines. We all are. If I learn nothing in my lifetime and manage to have a kid before I get myself killed, that child does not lose potential to learn. Nothing happens to its brain, or its genes.

There are several examples in which we find, what might be thought of as "advanced" people having extreme difficulty with "less evolved" people: The Lord's Resistance Army comes to mind. Feisty little guys.

Oh, also those pesky folks in Mesopotamia, aka Iraq, the cradle of civilization, a people as genetically similar now as back in 5,000 BC, seem to be handling this technology thing okay.

I know this is just a forum, but great care should be taken when insinuating that some Americans are less than others.

But then again, I'm a bastard race: Mexican, a mutt-like hybrid of the Aztecs with their love of astronomy and the curious Spaniards with a lust for gold. But born and educated in the United States.

That's what makes the difference, not half-assed genetic speculation.