Simon Paynton

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
vitalism

I think it makes much more sense to say that life is matter that processes resources for its own benefit, than to say that life is that which contains a vital essence.

All living things have electrical and chemical energy coursing round their bodies.  When they die, this activity ceases.  Yet they are not b…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Life Is just Matter with Meaning.

This article is super-interesting.  Life is what happens when inert matter starts processing resources in order to promote its own survival.  That’s basically the starting axiom of my evolutionary ethics model.

They say the organism is processing information, which includes r…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
But yes, we made progress in the sense that we evolved to live in all of the Earth’s extremes.

Yes, and we’ve wrecked every single one.  We can’t compare one species with another to say one is better than the other.  Like you say, each is optimised for their environment.

We’ve made progress – but in what kinds of…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
But cooperative breeding, known as ‘alloparenting’, where individuals other than the biological mother help raise offspring did not start with them. Hominins before erectus already had extended childhoods, reduced canines, increased sociality, and group-based foraging, all of which support cooperative care. Homo ere…

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Apparently the first human species to make it out of Africa was Homo erectus, ~2 million years ago, and they were the first species to do cooperative breeding, meaning that a woman could have more than one child at once, because she got help in looking after them.  This meant that human children had longer in which to mature.

The human line must…[Read more]

We know that there was a “last common ancestor” (LCA) of chimps/bonobos and humans around 6 million years ago.  I believe the human line got started around 4.5 million years ago.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
They are not some sort of “old” humans or “failed humans”. They are modern chimpanzees and specialists in their own ecological niche and with their own evolutionary pressures. Humans didn’t “progress”, we diverged.

That’s true.  But what changed was our environment, when theirs didn’t.

So, where we learned to cop…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
Simon i think you are guilty of the same mindset as the scientists who first heard about Jane’s discovery.

Not at all, I’ve read a lot of Michael Tomasello and Frans de Waal about what chimps and bonobos can and can’t do, and how they behave.  It was Jane Goodall who paved the way for them.

jakelafort wrote:
This theory suggests that during human evolution, we may have lost some ancestral short-term or working memory skills to make room in the brain for other, more complex functions, such as advanced language abilities, symbolic representation, and hierarchical thinking.

Surely we grew bigger and more complex brains throughout our…[Read more]

@jakelafort – yes, Jane Goodall totally opened up the field of primatology, changing a great ape from a “what” to a “who”.

TheEncogitationer wrote:
Only a small difference in DNA, but what a difference a DNA makes.

Apparently, it’s all because of our “harsh and risky foraging niche”.  The great apes live in forests where food is easy to come by.  Humans were forced to share and cooperate as soon as their forests died back and they were forced onto the savannah.  Gr…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
Oh and i should adduce cuz what the deuce that Goodall herself was a theist.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Scientists can and do cling to pet theories.

Admitting error is the ideal but defending one’s career is the reality. The embarrassment cost is tiny, but the career costs can be enormous.

There have been scientists who continue to push false and even harmful theories even after they’ve been completely discredited, s…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Groupthink in science isn’t a problem; it’s a myth.

From my experience, if you want to convince a scientist of new ideas, they are often willing to listen, as long as you come with a convincing argument.  I find this is very different from politics or religion.

The enemy is where someone doesn’t like to admit they…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Simon, the problem with JD Vance isn’t that he “respects” his wife’s atheism — it’s that he doesn’t respect her Hinduism. He’s implying she’s an atheist simply because she isn’t a Christian, which is a rather offensive way to erase a faith practiced by hundreds of millions in India. It’s disingenuous.

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Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
What you’re describing isn’t moral realism but moral function: why we act morally, not whether morality exists as some external reality.

Thanks @Reg, that’s it in a nutshell.  Talking about morality is like talking about the middle east – the answer is always complicated.  The remit was to figure out morality so th…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
People on social media are very vexed indeed.

JD Vance respects his wife’s atheism.  That’s good.  But they bring up their kids as Christians.  Surely the kids should be allowed to make their own minds up.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Simon, you are still redefining “faith” to make it appear intellectually respectable. You are using the religious version, which explicitly praises belief without evidence, and you are stretching it to also mean rational expectations grounded in observation.

Yet, any day of the week, faith has a dual meaning of rel…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Simon, I think you are trying to rescue the word “faith” by redefining it. You are taking a specifically religious term that means believing in something without sufficient evidence and trying to stretch it until it becomes a synonym for “hope” or “general trust in life.” It sounds warm but it is sleight of hand.

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