nympho
Well-known member
I think we more or less agree christian. its just wording and im more of a ruthless materialist in my outlook than you, at least in the way i word things. We have to be careful if people of a woo persuasion are not to jump to the wrong conclusion. Anyway, semantically nothing can be more than the sum of its parts, by shear definition. Something is always only the sum of its parts. I think we are just arguing semantics here because I obviously agree effects generated the sum of the parts can be impressive and be more impressive than the machine that generates it, if thats what you mean by 'more than'. Its still the 'sum of its parts' overall. Where we differ is you favour certain complexity being probably able to generate effects out of proportion to its inherent possibilities, as a more likely scenario than the more prosaic expectation of it being totally in accordance with it. but dont worry about it, im probably misreading you.These were two different arguments. Arguing that life may be more than the sum of its parts (I said no more than this) doesn't imply that insects aren't a subject of ethical concern. It is just that we know more about verts and this should be sufficient to not cause any unnecessary pain to other verts - particularly as they are not usual diet for mantids and any natural occurrence has still to be regarded as rare. We can only badly assess what "pain" means for an insect. I do not argue that they can't feel pain - we simply don't know it. But as usual part of mantid diets I have to accept that they are eaten this way. If not, I couldn't keep mantids. The difference is that as a human, one shouldn't do similar things to insects either, as it simply is not necessary.
ok cool, i understand. i forgot what preadaptation meant.Of course selection has no precognition. Preadaptation simply means a trait that evolved as a consequence of some other trait without having an immediate evolutive value. It can become important though if evolution takes another direction. I won't go into human evolution here, as this is too exhaustive. One point should be sufficient in this regard: we (say H. sapiens) don't have the very largest human brains. Some population of H. neanderthalensis had larger ones. Despite this, they were not able to deal with a changing environment as well as with the newly arriving H. sapiens. Nor did they (as far as it is known) have any kind of art. Thus, brain size isn't in every single case a good indicator of intelligence or evolutive success. Of course noone would compare a human with a fish brain.
i did read somewhere that some human have smaller but more efficient brains than bigger brained people too. and are more intelligent. Size does not nesessarily equate with complexity. In other words, neanderthaths may have been more inefficiently structured brains which meant they had to be bigger.
ok, we cant define all life everywhere in the universe, but we can now describe cellular activity on earth to an acceptable level of accuracy, as much as its feasable to do so. i was just saying they know just about everything about that worm within bounds of acceptability of making judgments about its capabilities and i disagree we have to make one from scratch to do this. Observations are sufficient. im not saying it wont suprise us with many new discoveries, but so far its known abilities are totally in order with what would be expected from its known complexity. You seemed to be saying they it did things out of proportion to its complexity which couldnt be accounted for. I'm saying everything is accounted for.No, I don't have to. It is of no importance if a nematode is sophisticated or not. I just pointed out that as an organism, it exhibits traits that are not exhibited by simple organs or organelles of it under lab conditions. Maybe we will some day find out every single aspects of life. However, knowing all the stuff doesn't mean we can reproduce it de novo. As long as we don't succeed in creating life de novo we should be careful with generalizations. And by no means should we imply that we can define life. We can't (yet). We can just define partial aspects of it. This is what I wanted to say. I never talked about stuff like auras or spirit or a universal conciousness or something. This stuff is for philosphs.
what are the 'undefined' aspects of life that science need to look for. is there any evidence there ARE any undefined aspects left. surely science starts with observations and then comes up with theories, not make theories without an observation. please, let there be a problem first before you jump to the conclusion theres any huge issues left unresolved.