E. O. Wilson: Synergism Between Science and the Humanities

[janesatorres]

Definitely a stunner. Nicely crafted video. Just awesome.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

Wilson is an ecologist, as am I. At this moment in time 'Big Pollution' is trying to get Congress to weaken The Clean Air Act so that it can pollute the air more, like 90 million tonnes of pollutants into the air each and every day isn't enough. Humans override nature when they:

(1) industrially pump 90 million tonnes of pollutants into the atmosphere each and every day

(2) humans legislate through designed, written laws that regulate behaviour

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The power of artificial earther

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

The tide is turning and your shallow gene-centrism is being exposed by the day. This is the way of things when new technologies emerge, new ways of thinking. We need to look out for the Luddites, or in your case the Flat Earthers.

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I didn't invent the truth that humans have created and designed their own world.

I didn't invent brain science changing in the light of neuroplasticity.

I didn't fiction up 151 year of neo-Darwinian shortcomings on culture.

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It's called reality.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

Bless you. You've been caught out on so many core elements, poor on natural selection, oblivious to artificial selection, adoption was mystery to you and you flat earthed the idea that cultural change was faster than evolutionary change. All in all, not a good day for your fading position.

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Collective consciousness, meaning as the human informational range, zeitgeist for the human mind leads into understanding feel'd phenomenon but I think it could be beyond you, like so much.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

Humankind overrides nature to a destructive level with out overcapacity which generates technological surpls, economic surplus all of which eat into the aggregate workings of nature. Wilson states himself that the current extinction rate is between 100-1,000 times faster than the natural rate. That's humans overriding nature with a dominant economic system that treats nature as a free resource. We override nature and you can't get that simple point through your head Flat Earth

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

"Earth 3.0 is thus the new way forward that we need to establish, one with all the prosperity of 2.0 but also the sustainability of 1.0"

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If humans decide to change their behaviour and thinking about their effect on the natural world it will be through cultural processes not biological and/or genetic. And with no less a source than 'Scientific American' saying that earth "it is also our creation" your weak narrative "It's all natural selection" looks weaker and more delusional

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation

"Actually evolution doesn't account for the reading and identifying parts of the brain...they emerged within the last 5000 years."

5000 years? And you have the balls to tell ME to brush up on my neuroscience????!!!! Absolutely any scientifically literate person will burst into laughter a this preposterous misstatement.

No refutation is required.

And what the hell is the "identifying" part of the brain?

Impostor!

Buffoon!

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

"And since people have only been reading for a few thousand years,

humanity hasn`t been reading very long, that piece of brain cannot be the

product of natural selection. So it must be that each of us in our

lifespan wires up the circuits based on experience to make that region

selectively responsive to the orthographies of the language as we know."

says Nancy Kanwisher, The Perceiving Brain during the Charlie Rose 'Brain Series'

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Identifying words, if you can read Missy.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

I think you completely underestimate:

1. the neuroplasticity of the human brain

2. the effect that experience has in changing the brain

3. that the primary source of experience for most humans is the designed human world, not the organic of nature.

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Until you get that through your thick mind you'll continue to struggle Missy.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

"There is almost nothing we do with our brains that is hard-wired: every skill, attribute, and personality trait is moulded by experience", writes Lise Eliot (neuroscientist), New Scientist, 17 July 2010, p.27

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I've said that the biological sciences cannot account for culture because it is a different domain but the social sciences can/will realise mechanism/law/mathematical expression of culture which remains a superorganic and beyond the explanatory capacity of biology.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation

I don't have to look up that article to know you're quote mining. You're mistaking software and hardware. By analogy, almost nothing I do on this computer is hardwired into it, buts basic computational capacities are.

By the same token, your 93 IQ is mostly the result of genetics.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

Gee, you are an epistemological luddite deary. I thought so, a narrow gene-centrist. Don't worry the scientific bandwagon "It's all in the genes" is slowing down and no mistake. You can only laugh when you watch Steven Pinker on The Colbert Report misleading the viewers that it's all in the gene and then Stephen asked him if there was anything interesting that Pinker found in his genome and he said genetically he had an 80% change of being bald. Have you seen Pinker's hair?

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Take a seat.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

You don't look up articles because it looks like you generally don't read and that explains the non-thinking Missy. The hardware/software analogy is a good one. Biologically hard-wired species in stable localised environments over geological time is the foundation for evolution. However, due to a causative transfer from hardware to software we have the emergence of meaning (causative, personal information) and culture.

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Biology has fundamental limitations in dealing with the soft world

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

In 'Consilience' Wilson calls the social sciences "hypercomplex" and I've already mentioned Michael Shermer calling culture "the really hard problem". The deeper reason the social sciences are called the soft sciences is because we deal in this causative dynamic soft matter of meaning.

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To say that something 'matters' is always to say that it is meaningful. Meaning has a weight, yet is non-corporeal but causative. It is not amenable to biological explanation. 151 years and still counting

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

You wrote: "I don't have to look up that article to know you're quote mining."

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I understand why you say that because it challenges the weak narrative you are clinging to but then you'll have to accuse New Scientist magazine on 'quote mining' as well because right in the middle of page 26 (New Scientist, 17th July, 2010) it says in very bold text:

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"There is almost nothing we do with our brains that is hard-wired."

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We're 'Super learners' learning from a world we have designed Luddite.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

I broadly adhere to Wilson's Unity of Knowledge but not only will the social sciences realise ToC but in the process outline a periodic-like table of the three epistemological spectrums that are physical, natural and social.

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Even after 151 years (and counting) of hues of nothingness on culture I can sense the faith in you that the biological sciences will succeed where they've only had failure in the past and you share this with Wilson. It is entirely misplaced. 151 years and counting.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation

151 years... blah blah...

I'm through with you. But I'll leave you with this:

There is a reason you are not an academic, and a reason you are ignored by academia.

There is a reason no one needs to know who you are to ascertain this, and there is a reason you succeed in fooling absolutely no one.

Don't reply to me again unless you can cite your own published material.

Remember, you're worthless and you don't count.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

So another day we can add to the 151 years since Darwin and no theory of culture from the biological and/or natural sciences. It certainly isn't going to come from you because on culture (like Flat Earth Fabs) you are uncritical of thought and it's beyond both your domain and intellectual capacity gene-centrist.

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Evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith said that culture "was the second hereditaty system" and it's a non-biological system that humans 'man'age dialectically Missy.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

Remember, the very idea that culture was a system of motion acting through a bosy (society) appeared as quite a surprise to you, and in that you have similarities with your Flat Earth Fabs sister who denied that cultural change was faster than evolutionary change at the species level. This is what happens when you dogmatically box yourself into the "It's all genes, it's all evolution" corner.

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It's only going to get darker in there Missy. IQ is mostly in the genes? Social Darwinist you.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

You're probably getting settled in for another shift on you tube, so I'll leave you with another blow to your denial of the artificial, and we can add that to your flat earth denial of culture's speed earlier in the day.

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October 2008 Scientific American ran a feature on earth 3.0. 1.0 was "was the world that persisted and evolved for billions of years, up until very recently."

2.0 "this planet is no longer simply the home of our species: it is also our creation."

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

So no attempt at trying to provide an evolutionary explanation for zeitgeist then Flat Earth? If it is so simple and it's all natural selection then it should be no problem at all for to do that. It's clear you can't and you're out to waste more of my time. Go back and look at what I said about culture jamming, culture shock and soaking up culture and you'll get a feel for what I'm saying. In as much as a died in the wool UD pretender can get it. I don't hold out much hope.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs,

I see you or Missy have replied to the idea of 'the current political/moral/economic climate' which doesn't look positive for you gals at all. In The God Delusion Dawkins refers to "the changing moral zeitgeist" to which we can add changing moral, political, educational, scientific, economic, etc zeitgeists. If we put all these together, non-coporeal and yet a source from which we can feel the change around us (climate and meteorology) you gals will be on your way, eventually.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs,

Your days of mischief making will continue but the tide is turning on Universal Darwinian pretension. In Timonthy Taylor's 'The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution' he is quite clear about the human overcapacity to override nature. The book description? 'A new take on the evolutionary story as archaeological evidence unravels the great mystery of why human evolution defies the principles of natural selection'.

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That's 'evidence' Flat Earth Fabs

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

You say that natural selection can account for the social world of humankind, but the very man in this video states that the social sciences need to generate a general theory of culture after he's tried to account for culture since 1975. Clearly, Wilson is a more profound on mind on culture (and no doubt almost everything else) and yet you still think that natural selection can account for culture.

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This is the usual stuff of faith, and flat earth neo-Darwinism from you.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

Sorry, it's tough to keep up with you and total garbage. You'd think that evolutionary theory has culture all worked out the way you go on. You were caught out on culture's speed.

1. You said it was an illusion that cultural change was faster than evolutionary change.

2. I said you were talking garbage and quoted Dawkins.

3. You still denied this.

4. Then you had a change of heart (busted) and then took ownership of the Dawkins quote like you had some kind of memory disorder.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

Are you back on denying that cultural change is faster than evolutionary change again Flat Earth Fabs? I don't feel like a winner when I'm dealing with a loser like you, you do a good enough job boxing yourself into a corner Flat Earth Fabs, I just sit back and watch you squirm like you did on the speed of culture issue. .

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Classic cultural creationism from you.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@fabs038

I don't know about you but this clown has tired me out already. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he's posting his comments from a mental hospital.

I'm not joking.

In fact I'd estimate the probability to be as high as 40%.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

If you go to a place on holiday where the experience of that culture is so alarmingly different from your own culture then you can experience 'culture shock'. The human mind relays with culture 40 times a second (if Francis Crick is correct) so to be plugged in to culture is very real and science has to work through that complexity.

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People refer to the current economic climate, the current political climate, or the current moral climate. That is not a metaphor, it is a real feeling.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

Your summary of what culture is borders on a banal dictionary definition while serious thinkers on culture try to approach it scientifically, you know, mechanisms, laws and mathematical representation and stuff. The fact that culture is our second nature, but the primary source of experience is vital because we can actively change it, and dynamically change it because beliefs are not stored in genes. Culture is not a biological phenomena.

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You are out of your depth on this Missy.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation "...borders on a banal dictionary definition.."

But unimpeachably clear, and clarity was my criterion.

"mechanisms..."

Yes, there you are!! Mechanisms, laws and mathematical representations are indeed need -none of which *you* have even hinted at.

Nor have you come close to explaining how you know this lies outside the scope of the biological and cognitive sciences, nor what conceivable advantage the social pseudosciences enjoy.

You're worthless and you don't count.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

You brush off the last 151 years of failure while equating that with the last 8 months of my endeavour, I'm flattered but I'd like to focus on that 151 year period. It's not inconsequential, there has been more science carried out over the last 151 years than in the rest of recorded history, and that includes the number of scientists. Culture remains a mystery, so you and your field can only point to a history of struggle,your obvious lack of knowledge about this area shines through Missy

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

There's only so much you can convey on you tube but let's just say all my problems now are in presentation and I haven't made a single claim I can't substantiate and that includes mechanisms, at least one law and mathematical representation where culture's state can be measured and with multiple measurements a speed. That understanding was only reached through a grounding in the social sciences and the development of a methodology/approach of theoretical sociophysics.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation

"Culture is not a biological phenomina" "Phenomena" is *plural* jackass, but I'll let that go.

Your statement, as all your statements, is highly equivocal, and simply begs the question. It's like saying biology is not a chemical phenomenon. Biology and chemistry are different levels of analysis, but there's no fundamental line of demarcation between the two.

I'm out of YOUR depth, pinhead (ah, but who isn't?).

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

Your belief system that natural selection can account for all change, even though cultural change is much faster, is directed by/through human intention rather than natural tendency towards the good of the organism all undermine your faith, and your previous flat earth denial of culture's speed is going to stick with me for some time. You are a died in the wool neo-Darwinian cultural creationist who doesn't let silly things like facts get in the way of your faith/belief system.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation

"It's difficult to know how to answer your points because you're not making any".

Wow.

That rhetorical inversion is downright Orwellian. True, I'm not making in points in terms of propositional logic because....

I'M POINTING OUT *YOUR* LACK OF CONTENT.

This is like a defendant blurting to the prosecutor out of the blue, "I THINK YOU'RE THE MURDERER!!"

It's on exactly -exactly- the same intellectual level as a ten-year-old saying, "I know you are but what am I ?".

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

Okay so nothing in that statment. Nothing whatsoever, an unfortunate habit you've picked up there.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

Have you even watched this video in its entirety where Edward O. Wilson explicitly says we need a general theory of culture and not some shallow comment from a child-like mind like you are exhibiting.

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There is a causative shift science needs to get to grips with, geneing to meaning, nature to culture, organic to artificial, biology to belief and one thing is for sure it's not going to be discovered by you Missy.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation

"151 years and counting..." Good God, how many times *are* you going to say that before you actually *elaborate* upon it?

You are the blackest kettle I have ever seen.

Eight months and counting...

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

Actually evolution doesn't account for the reading and identifying parts of the brain, so you're wrong there. They've only emerged within the last 5,000 years, so you could do with updating your neuroscience, which will also point at the neuroplasticity of the human brain with experience changing the brain. And what is the primary source of most human brains? No, not nature but the artificial human social world we experience through culture.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

That'll leave you still some way from understanding that meaning and time are interwoven and that all cultures across time and place have the same, very specific configuration of placetime, meantime and spacetime faciltating experience where meanings are constructed and reconstructed (meantime) and then recorded (placetime) for other persons to experience (meantime).

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Understanding the difference between temporal sequence, timing and time is certainly not amenable to biology, sorry Missy

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

Word identifying parts of the brain I should have said, but you've still got to brush up on your neuroscience, general social science, and critical thinking as well. I'll keep going on about the last 151 years, then 152, 153, etc until social science presents a general theory of culture to the academic world.

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You are dismissive of culture and I'll just put that down to youthful naivety but when Michael Shermer calls culture "the really hard problem" (over consciousness) it's big stuff.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

If you really want to get a handle on the limitations of genetics, biology and neuroscience in understanding culture go to Fora.tv and search for 'Hardwired for Life'? At point 08. Neuroscientist Stuart Derbyshire speaks for 3mins 39 secs on 'Neurogeneticists Misunderstand Human Behaviour' and then at point 09. 'Humans interpret the World not Genes or Neurons'

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This guy talks a lot of sense. Reality is ground in the relationships (meanings) between human agents and the outside world.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation

What's so hard to understand? What's hard to understand is that you seem completely unable to comprehend and draw a distinction between a metaphor and and actual theory. Even as metaphors go "motion" is about as vague as you can possibly get.

You give every appearance of holding full blown delusions or grandeur, and I mean that quite literally and in utmost seriousness.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

A system of motion acting through a body, there is no metaphor, indeed at the technical levels that is where scientific laws are discovered. It's clear that's a few layers down from where you conduct whatever clowning around you do Missy. More nothing.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation

How bout this, hon, just name a a specific phenomenon -not culture itself, but a SPECIFIC sub phenomenon- that science cannot in principal explain.

While you're at it, give us your definition of culture.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

That's a poor way to skirt over a problem you can't explain, asking me about a sub-phenomenon that science can't explain. You really are a settler aren't you, I hope you have a good career in administration in science because it's not going to be in discovery with that attitude.

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All animals have an informational range, the human range is 'meaning' which emerges as a causative shift to our communicative/awareness range. Culture is "the climate and meteorology of meaning in time/place"

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

This is tricky and I don't think you've got the equipment to get it (like Flat Earth Fabs) but I'm an educator, so I'll give it a go. 'Culture Jammers' are urban activists who distort advertising, etc to alter the meanings (communicative indications) around us. Culture can be jammed.

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If you go to a different city on holiday, you can 'soak up' the local culture so in a very real sense culture can be felt, hence I said culture is a feel'd theory. Information is noncorporeal, as is culture

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation

Evolution accounts for the capacities of the human brain.

The human brain is able to acquire vast amounts of extrasomatic (non instinctive) knowledge.

Culture is essentially learned behavior and attitudes.

To say there is no complete account of culture is like saying there's no complete account of physiology.

Trivially true, but there's surely nothing about the kidney that lies forever beyond the reach of science, even in principal.

Cadit quaestio, assclown.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

You are pretty thick of mind on this. Wilson said he could account for human behaviour in Sociobiology, he was short. He came back with 'On Human Nature', he remained short. In 1981 he came back with gene-culture co-evolution (culture being held alongside evolution....that's a big deal) and he was still short.

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Still short, just like you. He calls for a general theory of culture from the social sciences because after 151 years it's not going to come from evolutionary theory Missy.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation

Yeah, yeah you said the same thing earlier with your timeline.

Anyone who needs to be told "short" is not an argument -let alone a series of arguments- is literally mentally ill.

I have a hard time believing any such person, however deranged, really exists, and so I call Poe's law.

You are either very ill indeed, or you''re just amusing yourself by irritating people with the most invidiously idiotic comments you can think of.

I honestly don't see a third possibility.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

You've shown yourself to be short several times now. You brushed off culture's importance and that is testimony to how out of depth you are on this. The late evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith called culture "the second hereditary system". If you think that genes are important that makes culture even more important because it is:

(a) a hereditary system that we can actively change, and

(b) allows us to understand the first hereditary system, science and wider world of knowledge.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

"Natural (positive) selection is an important factor of evolution but is only one of several fundamental forces and is not quantitatively dominant; neutral processes combined with purifying selection dominate evolution."

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This is a quote from a genomics paper 'Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics' (p.1027, 2009, Koonin). This is still similar to what Darwin suspected but mechanisms are not laws, much as you'd like it be to validate your very simplistic understanding.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation 

"Natural (positive selection).. is but only one of several fundamental forces..."

I have no idea how this ties in with any point you're trying to make, and you don't either. All this passage means is that not every event that enables genes to pass on shapes adaptation. For example a volcano eruption could wipe out a large population of australopithecines, but this does not imply those not inescapably in the path of the lava were any "fitter".

You know

NOTHING.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

I'll give you a chance on this one lightweight. Natural Selection is a tendency in nature to preserve changes that occur as the result of random mutations. I'm not saying there is no process here but it requires time, it requires random mutations, it's name was metaphorised from the real selecting 'artificial selection' that takes place in the social world of humankind. It is "a tendency" in the words of Darwin who said this mechanism was a means, but not the only one.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

I think you may have some kind of learning and/or memory issue because it was I who told you that Dawkins said culture was a million times faster, and now a few comments later you've hoovered it up saying you mentioned it. Talk about deluded.

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Still, from a died in the wool cultural creationist like yourself that's as good as I'm going to get in terms of you accepting that you were wrong on culture's speed. Now what else are you gibbering on about, ah yes, 'the law'.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

At some point you're going to have to come back and backtrack on 'natural selection is a law' just like you backtracked on culture's speed. To remind you, you said the following:

(1) "Apart from the fact that cultural evolution 'appears' to occur at a vastly greater speed than species evolution. This is an illusion of course."

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An illusion? You then backtracked with

(2) "I have already pointed out that cultural evolution happens millions of times faster than species evolution"

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs,

Potty mouth there, mind you with the garbage that spews from your mouth and fingers it's in keeping with your general, tittle-tattle, journalistic view of science. Anyone else reading it will know what you meant?

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"Apart from the fact that cultural evolution 'appears' to occur at a vastly greater speed than species evolution. This is an illusion of course."

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There is no illusion, it is your flat earth delusion that is the question poor little ole fabs.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs,

The reason I keep picking away is because:

1. You make ridiculous statements, well beyond your reading (or non-reading) level, and

2. Even when you're caught out, with Richard Dawkins disagreeing with you, you still keep on going with your total garbage.

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So what, I believe in God but I also believe in a material understanding of the world and you won't admit you're wrong to a believer. That's your hang up not mine. All the time cultural change accelerates flat earth fabs.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs,

Are you calling yourself a scab? You are a female ponce, claiming to know something when it's clear you are an inlay reader at best, a product of generation Wikipedia, a prime example.

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Natural Selection is a mechanism not a law - so wrong there.

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Cultural change is clearly faster than evolutionary change - wrong again.

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Culture has been beyond the explanatory power of evolutionary theory for 151 years and counting now but you still have faith it's natural selection. Bless.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

Darwin knew enough about nature to know that it has core differences with culture. He wrote in a letter to Lyell (letter 2931) that:

1. nature for the good of the organism

2. culture for man's pleasure

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Humans can generate their own imperatives, their own lifestyles running quite counter to nature and all you have is your flat earth faith rooted in natural selection because Richard has told you so. Even Richard disagrees with you on culture's speed flat earth fabs. Bless.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

So busted on culture's speed, you make another extreme point in calling a process within/through evolution "a law" (natural selection) when it's a mechanism, or "a tendency" as Darwin wrote. Calling me a moron doesn't make you less wrong, indeed that a moron continually picks up on your inadequate reading and thinking in these areas only makes you look sub-moronic Earther.

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Natural selection was/is a tendency metaphorised from the process of artificial selection in culture.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Eart Fabs

What you said was ""Apart from the fact that cultural evolution 'appears' to occur at a vastly greater speed than species evolution. This is an illusion of course." Which is a flat earth denial of Dawkins 'millions times faster' comment, and Gould's previous "the Lamarckian juggernaut" label to culture while arguing with Dawkins that evolutionary theory couldn't explain culture.

(1) Lamarckian, and

(2) Juggernaut

You are squirming all over the place on culture's speed Earther.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

Aw, poor little flat earther fabs, running off. I hope you don't close your account like you did the last time. Don't worry the question of culture's speed will be here waiting for you to flat earth your way through when you come back, which you will because this is what you do.

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I am the twister? Please. You made the ridiculous statement about culture's speed and you've been found wanting, again. Name calling and tittle-tattle, that's all you've got. Enjoy your human-made bed.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

So I'm waiting for you to acknowledge that cultural change does occur much quicker than evolutionary change. I'll continue to wait.

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Darwin said himself in Origin and more so in Descent of Man that natural selection was "much diminished" in civilised societies. In Taylor's book 'The Artificial Ape' he makes the same point. So you are increasingly wrong in clinging to natural selection, and flat earth wrong on the speed of culture.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

In your last reply you referred to the difference between the world of artifacts (the artificial, urban social world of humankind and culture) and that of nature. I'm saying that when culture emerges from the evolutionary process it extends away from the natural generating and working to different imperatives most of which run counter to nature. Look at the environmental destruction that result from human activity. That is facilitated by culture, and by science Flat Earther.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

You are stil squirming on what you said earlier about cultura change/evolution being an illusion of going faster than natural/organic evolution. A child could see this difference. So I'll keep coming back to this point until you accept you are/were wrong Flat Earther.

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"with his god-like intellect....with all these exalted powers - Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin." Darwin finished every edition of 'The Descent of Man' with these words

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

You are squirming all over the place on the speed of cultural change. You know it, I know it and anyone with half a brain can see you are squirming.

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40,000 years of behaviourally moderns and yes artificial cells/life from modern genomics is impressive. Pay attention Flat Earther, the Human Genome Project started in 1990, with a complete draft by 2003. In 2010 Venter's genomics team created artificial life/cells. This is where the speed issue comes in, that you deny Earther.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

Natural Selection is a mechanism, not a law. You are trying to elevate an important process of evolution to purpose, but then again what do you expect with a died in the wool Neo-Darwinian cultural creationist so out of her depth that in desperation to be heard she says the quite ridiculous "Apart from the fact that cultural evolution 'appears' to occur at a vastly greater speed than species evolution. This is an illusion of course."

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Richard says you are totally wrong Earther

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

You've got nothing. We've created an artificial cell, do you think it will stop there? You're stuck back in the 19thC in Darwin's time. Bless.

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You are squirming flat earther, it's palpable. You said ""Apart from the fact that cultural evolution 'appears' to occur at a vastly greater speed than species evolution. This is an illusion of course."

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On the issue of speed you were completely wrong, flat earth wrong and you can't admit that. Poor little dogmatic that you are. Bless

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

You can listen to that lecture if you want, it's on You Tube (your lifestyle choice) 'The Purpose of Purpose' lecture. In summation, Dawkins refers to the speed of culture a few times so it's important for him, as it was for Gould.

(1) "but at a rate which may be a million times faster"

(2) "the extreme rapidity of cultural evolution"

(3) "throwing our stately Darwinian evolution into runaway overdrive"

.

You are a joke Flat Earth Fabs but I get it, this You Tube is your life

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs,

I can only imagine that's uncomfortable laughter. Speed is important (systems of motion Missy, hope you're paying attention. You might learn something) because when Dawkins was fencing with Stephen Jay Gould back in the 1990s Gould said evolutionary theory couldn't account for culture, "the Lamarckian juggernaut" he called it.

.

Now Dawkins is lecturing that cultural evolution may be a million times faster. Stephen Jay Gould's observation stands. Poor Flat Earth Fabs.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs,

Dawkins goes on: ".......capable of producing advances in technology which mirror the old genetic advances but at a rate which may be a million times faster."

.

[And you say that the speed is an illusion. Wow, you are a flat earther Fabs]

.

"The speed of this new kind of evolution coupled with the ease with which the human brain can be reprogrammed to adopt a new major goal.....are frightening."

.

Adoption is a sore point with you, but Richard is quite clear on the speed issue.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

You said "Apart from the fact that cultural evolution 'appears' to occur at a vastly greater speed than species evolution. This is an illusion of course."

Richard Dawkins takes a quite difference view, he lectures: "Cultural evolution is a new kind of evolution. Superficially similar to the old genetic evolution..."

[I'll cut off here to say that your understanding Flat Earth Fabs is veneer thin, so when he talks about superficial, you need to make sure you're listening.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

I've got 54 lines 'About Me' on my channel and only 4 state I believe in God. You'd love to mislead people that I'm saying "God did it" and that is all, but I'm in the business of mechanism, law and mathematical expression of/for culture. That doesn't fit in with your narrative Flat Earth but you've been caught out far too many times for me to take you seriously.

You didn't even know about 'adoption' in cultural theory, that still makes me chuckle. Don't close your account now.

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

Again, you're spectacularly wrong. Check out my channel, I'm saying quite clearly that culture is a different dimension to (beyond the measure of evolutionary theory) nature. The 151 year long attempts to explain culture from the natural sciences have all crashed and burned, some are even slowly burning in front of our eyes. I am saying that we can arrive at mechanisms, laws and mathematical equations for culture but it will be the social sciences that realise that metanarrative

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs

You don't have the equipment. Of course you remember the feeling when you are talking to someone who believes the earth if 6,000 years old, and maybe even flat, this is your lifestyle choice doing this, of course you remember. Well, that's the feeling I get when I read your words strung together. It's clear you don't have the equipment, you've shown a remarkable consistency in what you don't know, it's right there.

Maybe you can feel it in your quieter moments Earther.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@fabs038

I'm tempted to agree, but if he knows he's doing it, what's his motive? To escape the depressing tedium of his waking life by moonlighting as Youtube intellectual? As far as I can tell this has only brought him unanimous ridicule, so it's hard to see how this could fulfill his fantasy.

On the other hand it's equally difficult to imagine he *is* that oblivious.

Can It really be possible for someone to so easily lose track of simple questions and threads of basic common sense?

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

Hey grad student, are you doing psychology now from evolutionary biology? Wow, you sure are spreading yourself thin and the way you slip into 'gossip mode' with Flat Earth Fabs here is something she'll soak up. Her virtual friends on you tube really keep her life ticking over. Welcome to her tittle-tattle circle.

I see you are not coming back on the substantive points. Typical tittle-tattler, all mouth and no trousers.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

It's difficult to reply to any of the points you are making because you are not making any. Get this, Wilson wrote in 'Consilience' that the social sciences were hypercomplex and on this I would agree. Indeed Michael Shermer (The Mind of the Market) says that consciousness is the hard problem, and culture is the really hard problem.

Wilson tried sociobiology, then wrote 'On Human Nature' and was still short before coming back with gene-culture co-evolution. He is still short Missy.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@fabs038 Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about! Whatever his reply, the one thing it won't contain is an answer to your question. He'll either spout a non sequitur that can't even be identified as corresponding to that specific question, or hell randomly drop a name as if *something somewhere* (?) in the work of that scientist answers the question for him.

I'm honestly puzzled that his subterfuge can be so much easily less visible from *inside* his skull.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@fabs038

Have you ever talked to anyone, anywhere, ever, who spewed so much literally meaningless verbiage? This is not a rhetorical question.

It's not even that he's wrong. It would be far too generous to say he's without *substance* -he's without *content*!

What's even more bizarre is that he could think anyone could have any difficulty noticing this.

;D

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@fabs038

*grin*

You're quite right.

I completely fabricated "social motion theory" out of thin air" to see whether this inflated poseur would call me on it.

You pass the test.

He, unsurprisingly, doesn't.

XD

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy

Culture is a system of motion acting through a body (society). Nature is a system of motion acting through a body (the organic aggregate of Earth). The Cosmos is a system of motion acting through a body (the Universe).

I'm sorry if that's confusing for you grad student but that's the way it is. A lot of science involves looking at 'the character' of the material world and that isn't an 'in' understanding, that's a 'from' understanding. Clearly you don't get it. Shame.

[naturalpreservation]

@Fabs back!

I never used that term 'social motion theory', culture is a feel'd phenomenon and you just don't have the equipment to understand it, so I'm not going to try fabs back! I'll leave you to You Tube, clearly a significant lifestyle choice of yours and yet at the same time 'just disposable junk'.

.

Open your eyes babe, that 'disposable junk' all networked together is your primary source of experience and for human neuroplasticity that's very, very important. I'll leave you to your hobby

[naturalpreservation]

@Flat Earth Fabs,

'With breathtaking scope and depth, archaeologist and prehistorian Timothy Taylor presents a new and much-needed theory of technology. It not only turns Darwinian theory on its head, but also argues that (alongside physics and biology) it is the human relationship with artifice that has as powerfully framed and formed human evolution.'

.

I've put Taylor's video on my channel in case you feel like breaking a habit and opening your mind. I don't hold out much hope Earther.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation

You clearly have no idea how much egg you now have on your face.

Are you g\familiar wit the Sokal hoax?

Well, in the same spirit I pulled one myself. I just threw together a bunch of random terms from quantum physics and thermodynamics, and coined a few nonsensical neologisms no in AI will ever have heard of, and you show no sign whatever that you smelled the ruse.

You're an impostor, and BAD one.

[naturalpreservation]

@Fabs back!

The tide is turning, you can't read culture, heck I'm surprised you can even read the garbage you come away with cultural creationist and your UD flat earth spamming. In Timothy Taylor's 'The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution' he adds more weight to what I've been arguing, that humans can override nature (and natural selection) although there are limits to this.

.

You are an inlay reader at best, a real UD flat-earther on culture.

[naturalpreservation]

@Fabs back!

Locking horns with me? That is delusion beyond your new 'flat earth' level denial that culture moves faster than nature. You were the one that ran off and closed her account once your veneer thin understanding of evolutionary theory was exposed. Way to lock horns there fabs back!

.

I see you've nothing to say on serious academics underlining human exceptionalism and the emergence of system 3 (culture and mind in relative concert) from system 2 (nature).

.

Of course you've nothing.

[naturalpreservation]

@Fabs back!

And over the last 151 years history has strengthened my case and undermined your case, not that you have one cultural creationist.

(1) Darwin didn't crack culture, indeed he wrote "nature for the good of the organism, culture......for man's pleasure"

Humans can generate their own imperatives well beyond the narrow Darwinian imperatives. A child can see this.

(2) There have been a steady number of attempts to account for culture and they have all failed.

You embody this nothingness.

[naturalpreservation]

@Fabs back!

You are way out of your depth here Fabs back! but I know you are a motivated neo-Darwinian cultural creationist out to mischief make, so I'll play your game for a few comments more. Stephen Jay Gould called culture 'the Lamarckian juggernaut' in 1996 and Richard Dawkins now lectures that 'cultural evolution is a million times faster' than Darwinian evolution. To say that cultural evolution only 'appears' to occur at greater speed is a 'flat earth' statement from you. You have nothing

[naturalpreservation]

@Fabs back!

In late September 1860 Darwin wrote three letters stating that if he could go back again and start origin he would have went with 'natural preservation' rather than selection because nature doesn't 'select', it preserves and from this process (which requires both time and random mutations) there is an outcome.

.

To focus on natural 'selection' has lead evolutionary biology down the flawed 'gene as unit of selection' route, when the 'gene is the unit of preservation'. A key difference

[naturalpreservation]

@Fabs back,

You Tube is one of those trillions of artifacts, and we know how much of a staple it is to your lifestyle FB, so I wouldn't discount the importance of human artifacts to shape thought and behaviour, especially yours. Darwin spent the first chapter dealing with the only intelligent designers known to science: humankind. He took human 'artificial selection' and metaphorised this system on the organic 'illusion of design', or 'natural selection' fabs back!

[naturalpreservation]

@Fabs back,

Can't you let the adults discuss without your word phlegm? (Sigh) Buy a copy of 'On the Origin of Species' and read the first chapter, it's all about a process called 'artificial selection' where humans are the choosers, creators and designers of animal breeding, plant breeding etc. From this real 'selection' process Darwin metaphorised the illusion of selection in nature, he called this process natural selection.

[eswolf84]

Dr. Wilson, you are a visionnaire.

[naturalpreservation]

@eswolf84

If you read Consilience Wilson refers to the social sciences as "hypercomplex" and that is borne out by evolutionary theory falling flat on it's face in generating a theory of culture over the last 151 years. It's an important 151 years because there has been more research carried out over that time, and more scientists that in all of the rest of recorded history.

.

.

Truly the social sciences are hypercomplex indeed, with culture remaining a mystery wolf.

[naturalpreservation]

@wolf

Lets timeline Wilson on culture and we can see how complex culture is:

1975 - Sociobiology, Wilson knew he was short on humankind

1979 - 'On Human Nature' by Wilson win's the Pulitzer, but he's still short on culture

1981 - Genes, Mind and Culture: The Coevolutionary theory

Wilson has since lectured for the social sciences to generate a general theory of culture while other neo-Darwinians either try to bypass culture (evolutionary psychology) or push dogmatic pseudoscience like memetics.

[naturalpreservation]

@wolf

The evidence points to a time about 40,000 years ago when humans EMERGED from the evolutionary process to such an extent that they/we could design and create an entire dimension of reality beyond the natural: the artificial.

.

.

As soon as Wilson writes a book on gene-culture coevolutionary process he's almost saying as much. Darwin wrote that humans had:

(a) God-like intellect, and

(b) bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

.

.

Emergence from evolution wolf.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation 

God, you're a poseur.

You may be the most intellectually hollow and unimpressive crackpot I've ever come across.

Well no, that's an exaggeration.

But only a very slight one. You're certainly up there (or down there, as it were)

[naturalpreservation]

Lets timeline Wilson on culture and we can see how complex culture is:

1975 - Sociobiology, Wilson knew he was short on humankind

1979 - 'On Human Nature' by Wilson win's the Pulitzer, but he's still short on culture

1981 - Genes, Mind and Culture: The Coevolutionary theory

Wilson has since lectured for the social sciences to generate a general theory of culture while other neo-Darwinians either try to bypass culture (evolutionary psychology) or push dogmatic pseudoscience like memetics.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy The Point,

I posted that stuff about Wilson again because it's clear you can't read which makes thinking ever more difficult. There have been a range of attempts to explain culture from neo-Darwinism and they've all failed.

.

.

In Consilience Wilson called the social sciences 'hypercomplex' and in Michael Shermer's 'The Mind of the Market' he said that consciousness was the hard problem but culture was 'the really hard problem'.

.

Culture is part of human second nature Missy.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy the point,

I am not denying the unity of knowledge but if we take the three epistemological bands representing the physical, natural and social spectrums we need to understand they each have their own system of internal logic. The theory of everything is the internal logic of the physical world. To assume that the internal logic of the natural world is the same in the different 'intelligently designed' social world of humankind is dogmatic and an affront to critical thinking Missy.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation

I.

Now you're just erecting a straw man. No competent scientist or epistemologist would ever confuse physical and natural worlds, which is why for example papers on physics in the journal 'Nature' are always carefully identified as such.

And it is well understood by that conjugate variables in the quantum wave function supervene on structures in the brain called microtubules, which it is widely accepted mediate between quantum and macro effects, and renders the brain...

[MisappliedRhetoric]

II

...-somewhat paradoxically- a Godellian non-linear deterministic-nondeterministic hybrid system. In short, it is well understood that it these effects that divide the low-level psychophysical properties of brain activity from higher order activities of social motion dynamics.

There is an *entire branch* of Artificial Intelligence research devoted specifically to modeling higher-order social motion as distinct from aggregate neuronal activity.

We'll get there first, boyo.

[naturalpreservation]

@Miss Applied

I'm glad you mention AI because that is one of trillions of human creations, designed not by natural selection but good ole human selection, or artificial selection as Darwin said in the chapter one of 'Origin' from which he metaphorised the illusion of design in the organic setting as natural selection.

.

The human informational range is meaning. Information is meaning potential (abstract) which collapses into the human field of experience as meaning (applied).

[naturalpreservation]

@Miss Applied

Theory of Culture (ToC) is pretty good in this area. Nature, culture and mind are preserving systems of motion. I think you're talking about the mind as our 'virtual neural membrane' but it's still meaning that holds the human social world together, on the inner (neural association) and on the outer (cultural attraction).

.

Cultural theorist Dan Sperber has been writing about 'cultural attractors for decades. Keep up with the long words, maybe you'll be successful at Countdown Miss

[naturalpreservation]

@Miss Applied

You contradict yourself again Missy, a bad habit you could really do with getting out if. You've been keeping bad company, but don't worry it's not in the genes and the power of experience can work that out of you.

.

You say that no one would confuse the physical with the natural worlds but it's the same error when you confuse the natural world with the social world of humankind (mind and culture in relative concert).

.

It is you that is making the error there Miss Applied.

[naturalpreservation]

@Missy The Point,

And just like your neo-Darwinian cohorts Missy all you've got in reply is more narrative, and we've had a lot over the last 151 years. We're literally wading in the stuff and that doesn't get us any closer to understanding culture as a system of motion as different from the natural system.

.

.

So bring on the narrative Missy, words really are all you have because Darwinian thinking can never be the basis for a social sciences 'theory of everything.'

.

.

That is a lasting fact.

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation

Ok, fine. Very well.

Yeah, I spammed up your channel. You want to know why? I find your posts extremely frustrating -infuriating, even.

I'm a grad student in evolutionary biology. My closest friends and those I most admire are what you call "neo-Darwinians".

151 years of *damn hard work * have gone into these theories and for you to just blithely say we've come up short, it really stings. People have a lot invested in these theories.

You're a trouble-making jerk.

[naturalpreservation]

@Miss Applied

Thanks for acknowledging that you spammed up my channel. I was a postgraduate student back in 1998-2000 and left my PhD to go off and read/research not just evolutionary theory but develop the needed methodology/approach to take explaining culture beyond narrative to the level of metanarrative, something a lot of great social scientists have said was not possible.

So it's not just shallow neo-Darwinism that has been short but the history of social science as well Miss Applied

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation

Your social motion theory may have more going for it than anything in the biological or cognitive sciences, but bucko that doesn't give you the right to smugly toss your intellectual might around and beat people over the head with your genius. Impressive as your intellect may be Scotty, its abrasiveness wears down its charms pretty dang quick.

And besides, we're not as clueless about social motion dynamics as you think. 

[MisappliedRhetoric]

@naturalpreservation 

No answer, eh?

Hehehe,

Ponce.

[naturalpreservation]

@Miss Applied

No answer to you? Please. It's going to take someone a little further up the critical-thinking food chain than yourself to get me on the run. Ten years ago I decided the task I was on was well beyond the scope of postgraduate degree, and whatever you are doing is:

1. within such a scope, and

2. is not trying to locate the fundamental mechanisms and laws of culture towards mathematical representation.

.

.

Despite your shortness I understand it remains your personal truth though Miss

[TempleRat2]

I read Consilience. I really wanted t o like it . Wilson's book is really about the way Science will eventually "explain" the humanities.

[naturalpreservation]

Temple - One thing is for sure it will be the social sciences, not evolutionary theory that will provide the underlying laws, axioms and understanding of the social world of humankind: culture.

[eswolf84]

@naturalpreservation you guys have just missed the whole point haven't you ?? The future is at the convergence of humanities AND science.. BOTH views are crucial to futher our understanding of HUMAN NATURE.

[naturalpreservation]

@eswolf84

First of all it's the 'human condition' over time and place that is the field of enquiry. We don't need to generate more and more African Savannah myth making to piece together sociobiology's latest form which tries to bypass the entire notion of culture in talking about an 'evolved psychology'. Natural selection was the metaphorised process from artificial selection which was the basis for Darwin's first chapter to 'Origin'.

[naturalpreservation]

@wolf

It is you (and Wilson) that miss the point that culture (with an awareness that meaning is the informational range of humankind) is the theory pulling together the social sciences, arts and humanities. We can understand the social epistemological spectrum and then bridge into natural and physical sciences with a deeper understanding of the layers which make up the fabric of reality.

.

.

Wilson thinks this can all be done from natural sciences. I clearly don't. 151 years, and counting wolf.

[yamaha893]

consilience.

[NegativeNick]

con-fucking-ilience! dude! yeah!