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106 comments on Our Toughest Foes: Apathy and Cynicism

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Don Sailorman on February 12, 2006 - 4:08pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Speak for yourself: I'm an overweight carnivore with four grown children and three grandchildren so far, drive an Audi with the original German chip in it so I can go 165 miles an hour whenever I feel like it.

Furthermore I can drink you under the table, beat you at tennis or fencing, wipe you out at Trivial Pursuit and sail right by your power boat when you run out of gas.

Also, I have a great sense of humor;-)

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Nate Hagens on February 12, 2006 - 4:21pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
LOL!. (note: on the acronym page, maybe there should be a difference between LOL in caps which means I really did laugh out loud and lol lowercase, which means Im typing this with a straight face but recognizing an attempt at humor)
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Agric on February 12, 2006 - 8:32pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
A sense of humour often helps recovery from heart attack, as does access to an available hi-tech health system. Please do your best to avoid having it at 165 mph - your God may judge you culpable if you kill others (especially now i've made you aware).

Don't lose that sense of humour - I, at least, appreciate and like it - but do try to augment it with a bit more self wisdom before it's too late, particularly if your genetics are the least bit unfavourable.

Live long and prosper

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Don Sailorman on February 12, 2006 - 9:40pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Thank you. I know a great deal about genetics and phenemena such as regression to the mean. Now, please explain this: My children are smarter than I am, and my 8 year old granddaughter in second grade is reading Jack London's CALL OF THE WILD and loving it. Also, she is quite a chess player.

Please explain,

What did I do right?

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Agric on February 13, 2006 - 1:04am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Probability is only probability, means are only averages, there are always outliers. Perhaps the mother of your children is smarter than you realised ;) perhaps that's just her, or your, genes, perhaps their happy combination, perhaps the benefit of environment and / or education.

Once the waveform collapses you watch the electron, rather than ponder the probabilities of the waveform.

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Don Sailorman on February 13, 2006 - 8:48am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Good analogy!

I have this feeling, however, that somehow I can create "luck" and beat probabilities. I know intellectually this is totally irrational, but I feel it nevertheless.

In addition I think the men in my family are attracted to spectacularly intelligent women who have ancestors the same. But nutrition has something to do with it: My father was 5'3" and I'm 5'9" but my son is 6'4" tall. To grow thirteen inches in three generations is probably a lot more than just genetic selection.

One huge puzzle to me is why we are no smarter than people were 2,500 years ago. That is about 100 generations, and as I understand evolution, being smarter than others should provide some advantages. Yet if you read the ancient Greeks, it is pretty clear that people have not gotten smarter at all, and the simplest hypothesis is dysgenic breeding.

Oh now I'm going to be attacked from all sides, but maybe there is something to "The Bell Curve." I do know this: Plato worried a lot about dumb people having more kids than smart ones. Anything that Plato worried about, I worry about.

Thus, to do my part and redress the imbalance, I decided the right and moral thing to do was to have a lot of kids and improve the gene pool;-)

In a contest for Political Incorrectness, I'll win hands down. LOL

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Agric on February 13, 2006 - 11:52am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
It may be possible that you can create 'luck', just as it may be possible that some can remote view and some 'see' into the future - the universe is almost certainly stranger than we, with our blinkers, currently deduce.

Many things can be limited by environment and can limit us in many ways, perhaps that has to do with height in your family, it reminded me of something I read yesterday: 'In 1942, 17-year-old Pvt. Harold Zatkowsky sat down for his first breakfast in the U.S. Army. "That was the first time in my life when I got enough to eat." '
http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=communique&newsid=10940

There's an hypothesis in evolutionary biology that the rapid increase in human brain capacity was a direct result of dietary changes of humans living near seas and eating more fish oils. Twin studies indicate that about two thirds of intelligence (as measured by IQ tests) is due to genetic inheritance and only a third due to environment - but that third can make a huge difference, lol.

There's a lot of room under a bell curve, those at the extreme high end may be rare but are the ones whose words are most likely to live through history. Perhaps there are proportionately as many or more with the ability of Plato now but relative to the accumulated wisdom, knowledge and intelligence of humankind they are less obvious. I once saw a quote (dunno how accurate it is) that the average male in 17th century England processed as much information in their life as was in a typical 1980s UK Sunday newspaper - and they've got bigger since then!

Political correctness must not preclude rational discussion of important subjects. You and Plato were right to be worried about that, methinks. Many things, including 'luck', contribute to survivability, and human development seems to have thwarted most of those determinants in the last couple of centuries - but before then they were largely operational - without substituting any alternative mechanisms. No doubt some corrective processes will occur one way or another, if Darwin was near correct. Genetic (mitachondrial DNA) studies seem to suggest that virtually all modern humans are descended from a mere 6 or 7 women, hopefully we won't come that close to exterminating ourselves in the future.

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Donal on February 13, 2006 - 1:22pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
There's a lot of room under a bell curve, those at the extreme high end may be rare but are the ones whose words are most likely to live through history.

Like Yogi Berra?

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wkwillis on February 14, 2006 - 9:06am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
That's what my parents did. Scholarships to Harvard and Radcliffe, had ten kids in fifteen years to outbreed the dumb people, then got divorced. I always said that to get time to go back for seconds on the brains, they had to skip the common sense. All my siblings agree with me.
It's why I never had kids. I already raised a family when you count taking care of the younger ones.
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