181–190 of 274 posts
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It is also reasonable to argue that they and we are subspecies of the same species not rather than separate species.
Of course we are not separate species since successful interbreeding did happen (when the populations interacted).
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Donkeys and horses are not the same species, but they interbreed. Their offspring are called mules. Although mules rarely have offspring, so perhaps not a great example.
There is supposedly neanderthal DNA in some modern humans, implying that offspring were viable. Breeding resulting in viable offspring is one of the only consistent definitions of what a species even is.
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You might find the essay "I, Pencil" by Leonard Read interesting. It's told from the point of view of a pencil who talks about the complexity of his own creation and all of the components involved in the process
There's also Thomas Thwaites' "building a toaster... from scratch" project that goes into the details of how even an extremely simple appliance involves materials and processes that are effectively impossible for a single person to replicate (spoiler: he has to give up and "cheat" on some things).
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You might find the essay "I, Pencil" by Leonard Read interesting. It's told from the point of view of a pencil who talks about the complexity of his own creation and all of the components involved in the process
It's just ideological drivel. People never had any difficulty to cooperate on such level.
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Billions of transistors in a smart phone, and those took many^many machines to build
The factories that build them is like something out of a sci-fi film. Quite mind blowing.
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I think it's typical in non-technical English to use "humans" to refer to homo sapiens only, unless you qualify it, like "archaic/early humans". Without additional context I wouldn't assume somebody talking about humans meant to include e.g. Neanderthals.
Qualifications like, “600k years ago”? That’s pretty clearly talking about the humans of 600k years ago. “Early humans” are still humans.
I respectfully disagree, as started in my earlier post. It would be nice if human language worked like that, but it does not always. A "stone frigate" isn't a boat, an "iron lung" isn't a respiratory organ.
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I'm also not seeing the connection to free will. Did the program choose to be broken by a cosmic ray? Did the cosmic ray choose to break the program? Stochasticty doesn't imply volition.
It's the only way I've come up with that allows for free will, maybe other people have other ways. If the universe is not like a computer then I have even less ability to explain where free will would be possible. Cosmic rays are just an example to explain that there's external causes of non-determinism to a deterministic system. Another example I gave above was the limit of precision of the system itself, allowing f…
I personally believe forms of writing and record keeping are far, far older than we think, having been discovered and forgotten repeatedly. Very hard for something hundreds of thousands of years old to be preserved. Once you can pass on information orally and written through the generations, knowledge will always improve.
> Once you can pass on information orally and written through the generations, knowledge will always improve. Nope. You can pass on myths the same way. All that happens is that you get more refined myths, that always have "evidence" for them at any point in time because they are refined by each generation to fit any new observations. It's worse with oral knowledge[1]: oral "knowledge" that is passed down is frequentl…
Wouldn't multiple transmission between generations and the comparison of diverging stories of the older generation in a newer generation work like an error correction?
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The word human is commonly used for both modern humans and members of the entire genus Homo. Hominids is a more general superset that isn't strictly correct here. The term hominin is more appropriate in this context and what they actually use in the abstract. In my opinion though, "human" is the better word here for conveying the right mix of informality without implying the specific semantics of "Hominini sans Pan".
Is it? This is literally the first time Ive seen the word human applied to other hominids. I see many discussions about neanderthals and denisovians and so on. I have never seen them referred to as human.
> Although some scientists equate the term "humans" with all members of the genus Homo, in common usage it generally refers to Homo sapiens, the only extant member. All other members of the genus Homo, which are now extinct, are known as archaic humans, and the term "modern human" is used to distinguish Homo sapiens from archaic humans.