Holy shiat. Didn't I just bring this up yesterday?? And didn't all you same people say I was batshiat crazy? Now because Hawking says it, it's right. Sure, what do I have to do for credibility???? Get a terminal nerve eating illness???

/oh, i need a PHD and a few books published? And prove a few hypotheses? In physics????
//Nevermind.
///Math is hard.

VonAether: feanturi: Biology has little to do with human evolution anymore, at least in a forward direction. If anything, we're influencing biology to take us backwards by making sure everybody gets to breed regardless of what's wrong with them. The next phase of human evolution, moving forward at least, is all about ideas and information exchange. The only way we're going to get biology back in the saddle is by taking direct control of it, and we need to get a lot smarter before we can do that safely. Let Hawking say what he needs to say, we need all the geniuses we can muster if we're going to get through this.

That's funny. One of Fark's own molecular biologists claims otherwise. From another thread:

entropic_existence: George Burns: Haven't humans somehow halted or artificially altered the course of evolution?

Simply put? No, we haven't. This is a common misconception and you'll even see some biologists uttering it but it couldn't be further from the truth. Have we changed our fitness landscape with modern medicine and all that? Certainly. But there is still natural selection going on, we have just managed to alter those selective constraints. One could actually argue that because of modern medicine we now have more raw material for evolution in the human population. Genetic variants that would have been lethal 50 years ago (killed you before you reproduced) may not be now, this allows humans, as a population, to explore deeper "fitness valleys". Compensatory mutations may then turn these negative traits into net positives down the road, we really can't predict anything about the path evolution will take.

So no, all we have done is altered what is important and visible to natural selection through our ingenuity and shifted the emphasis of natural selection, not removed it from the picture.

Thank You, Von. I take back every mean thing I never said about your mother.

syrynxx: VonAether: Stephen Hawking is a physicist, not a biologist. He's a very smart man, and I hold him in the utmost respect, but he should stick to talking about his areas of expertise and let the biologists talk about evolution.

I was going to call him an idiot attention whore who said nothing of consequence, but you phrased it much more better. It's like Jillian Michaels telling us her opinions on string theory.

Well, some guys just know how to write good.

So many green arrows for me this thread!

Thank you to syrynxx and jso2897, and you're welcome to entropic_existence and GeorgeBurns.

e_e, you, ninjakirby, abb3w and the rest of the PERC are responsible for my present interest and subsequent extensive (layman's) knowledge of evolution. Thank you for caring.

GeorgeBurns:
Holy shiat. Didn't I just bring this up yesterday??

Yes.

And didn't all you same people say I was batshiat crazy?

No.

(Not all of us.)

Daienden: I watch rugby. At least there, we get to see some ribs cracking!

First RTFA. I'm spot on with assessment of disparities regarding a huge number of our supposed academic "leaders."

//you be the troll

Here ya go:

entropic_existence: Its just... deviated in terms of mechanisms.

A seriously novel sense of "mutation". (Some might claim it's also selection, but I think in the long run the final mechanism for that stays the same.)

lantawa: Daienden: I watch rugby. At least there, we get to see some ribs cracking!

First RTFA. I'm spot on with assessment of disparities regarding a huge number of our supposed academic "leaders."

//you be the troll

Here ya go:

... I did RTFA, but your post had absolutely nothing to do with the article. You were bemoaning the fact that some of the smartest people in the world enjoy sports.

And, yes, I am a dick, but you were one first when you decided to through a hissy-fit because people enjoy getting drunk and cheering on sports teams. What's wrong with that, exactly? Why is a scientist automatically a "poseur," because they enjoy football (both versions)? You act as though it's a sin that these people aren't doing something "intellectual," with every waking second of their lives.

Now, because you specifically mentioned contact sports, I assume that you have nothing against chess, am I correct? Now, Being good at chess requires a keen mind, you have to know the rules, know what each piece is capable of doing, and account for every possible movement that your opponent could make. Now, you could also just as easily apply those specifications to any sport, such as boxing (or chess-boxing the strangest thing to come out of Sweden), or even Football. Playing football recquires you to not only know the rules, but to know the details of specific plays, and to know the appropriate course of action to take in response to actions made by your opponent. The same basic formula can be applied to pretty much everything humanity has ever done.

You lament the fact that people get "cheap, vicarious thrills," from watching sports, but why does it even matter? If these people are doing good work inside the lab, why do you care from where or what they get their jollies? If they were showing up to work drunk, or randomly pulling off their coats and yelling "Go Packers," I would understand (I would also question what they're doing in a lab in the first place), but it's evident that this type of thing is not a common occurence, so why does it matter what these people do in their free time? Would you care if they were avid target-shooters or rock-climbers or hang-gliders? Would you object to these "Poseurs," if they practiced fencing instead? You seem pretty upset against watching sports specifically, and I don't know why, nor do you provide any particular reason.

LewDux: So you WIMPed out?

Maybe it's late, but I genuinely laughed over that.

This article is just incoherent, and if it follows Hawking's actual train of thought, then that implies that he's incoherent. I got a few things from that article:

1) In the 1800s, when books were printed manually, there weren't very many of them. Now that Oprah can make 10 million housewives buy a book just by recommending it, there are too many books for anyone to read in their lifetime.

Thank you, Captain Obvious! It's called population growth. According to Wikipedia, the world population in 1900, not just English-speaking, was less than a million people. There were probably more people than that in downtown Chicago tonight watching the fireworks.

2) "But we are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls "self designed evolution,"

No, dumbass, we are not. If anything, we have entered into a phase of devolution. Because of advances in medicine and technology, humans with defective genes are breeding where they would have failed to do so a few centuries ago, either by dying young or being incapable of supporting a family. Stupid people who are good-looking have stupid children who are good-looking (see Paris Hilton; just like her mom). Intelligent and wealthy men breed with eye candy instead of with intelligent women, leading to Idiocracy.

If intelligent men intentionally bred with intelligent women specifically to produce intelligent offspring, then we would be in a new stage of evolution. Instead, as the Onion has foretold, (^), the mouth-breathers are out-breeding intelligent people by 2:1.

syrynxx: No, dumbass, we are not. If anything, we have entered into a phase of devolution. Because of advances in medicine and technology, humans with defective genes are breeding where they would have failed to do so a few centuries ago, either by dying young or being incapable of supporting a family

I think you're missing the point Hawking is trying to make. It's not that our genetic code is getting better, but that humanity has developed new methods to propagate information through space and time. This is a function of the written word and civilization. You can think the same thoughts as Socrates as a result. Our species can build of all those worthy in past generations as a result.

The urge to share information that prompts you to type in this forum and share information is thus akin to the urge to fark.

/Boump-chicka-waw-wah

Apparently, Hawking's talking about downloading our brains into computers. Immortality would certainly help Humans make a turn for the better, in the long-run anyway.

With luck, our generation may be the last to die. If we're extra, super-duper lucky, it'll be the Boomers who take that spot. Probably won't happen, but hey, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

Oh, and Syrynxx, A few stick figures want to have a word with you. Link (new window)

GeorgeBurns: Holy shiat. Didn't I just bring this up yesterday?? And didn't all you same people say I was batshiat crazy? Now because Hawking says it, it's right. Sure, what do I have to do for credibility???? Get a terminal nerve eating illness???

We said you were wrong in the same sense that Hawking is wrong (as I pointed out above) with regards to the biology end of things. The human capacity to transmit information non-genetically is an outgrowth of our biological evolution, it doesn't supplant it. We are still subject to evolution, we have merely shifted the fitness landscape.

The point about humans approaching the point of being able to control their own genomes, he has a point about. Hawking is a smart farking guy but he isn't a biologist.

syrynxx:

Thank you, Captain Obvious! It's called population growth. According to Wikipedia, the world population in 1900, not just English-speaking, was less than a million people. There were probably more people than that in downtown Chicago tonight watching the fireworks.


Fail!!!!!
I think you're referring to this link? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
Estimates for the human population in 1900 is somewhere around 1.6 Billion. The last time the world population was around a million is thought to be around 10,000 BC.

feanturi: Biology has little to do with human evolution anymore, at least in a forward direction.

Implies evolution has a "forward" direction.

From the article:

"Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them, and work out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression."

Hey Daienden. I specifically said "contact sports."

Additionally:

FTFA: Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them,

I guess he's been on Fark already.

imfallen_angel: FTFA: Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them,

I guess he's been on Fark already.

Well...glad I just took an extra dose of Farkitol. Should get me through the day. Happy Fourth...

Denial_of_Death: Nurglitch: You know who else was confined to a wheelchair?

FDR.

Reverse Godwin?

/kidding
//"Mein Fueher, I can walk!"

It was supposed to be a reference to Davros. I, for one, will welcome being encapsulated in my own Dalek shell.

Kome [TotalFark] 2009-07-03 06:33:54 PM
"Stephen Hawking's in my library..."

You'd better let him out.

Kome: Stephen Hawking's in my library...

really...What about Fermi? (pops)

Kome: Stephen Hawking's in my library...

Pray tell, might you be conversant in JavaScript, as well as Klingon?

chaoswolf: On the cusp of making computers that can outhink us? Check.
Beginning to engineer better shells for our minds? Check.

Hot damn. Cyberpunk here we come.

I'd say the latter is far more likely than the former. We are not "on the cusp" of AI. The more AI is studied the more distant it gets, because it's really, really hard, and the more we study the more difficulty we discover. Our brains are computers, but they have an entirely different architecture from computers.

Now, we're on the cusp of another ridiculous explosion of computer technology, with the advent of quantum computing in the next decade or two, but I think AI is a rather long way off. Longer than fusion. And maybe completely impossible.

That really sucks too.

syrynxx: LewDux: So you WIMPed out?

Maybe it's late, but I genuinely laughed over that.

This article is just incoherent, and if it follows Hawking's actual train of thought, then that implies that he's incoherent. I got a few things from that article:

1) In the 1800s, when books were printed manually, there weren't very many of them. Now that Oprah can make 10 million housewives buy a book just by recommending it, there are too many books for anyone to read in their lifetime.

Thank you, Captain Obvious! It's called population growth. According to Wikipedia, the world population in 1900, not just English-speaking, was less than a million people. There were probably more people than that in downtown Chicago tonight watching the fireworks.

2) "But we are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls "self designed evolution,"

No, dumbass, we are not. If anything, we have entered into a phase of devolution. Because of advances in medicine and technology, humans with defective genes are breeding where they would have failed to do so a few centuries ago, either by dying young or being incapable of supporting a family. Stupid people who are good-looking have stupid children who are good-looking (see Paris Hilton; just like her mom). Intelligent and wealthy men breed with eye candy instead of with intelligent women, leading to Idiocracy.

If intelligent men intentionally bred with intelligent women specifically to produce intelligent offspring, then we would be in a new stage of evolution. Instead, as the Onion has foretold, (^), the mouth-breathers are out-breeding intelligent people by 2:1.

Ahh, I just KNEW Fark would give me an opportunity to post this:


/BTW, there is no such thing as devolution

RemyDuron: /BTW, there is no such thing as devolution

And did Mr. Hawking ask for God's input on this?

God's very tight-lipped. He doesn't want to accidentally create a Babel Fish scenario.