Speciation

"Diversity" will result in a global class of mobile, hyper wealthy elites and we'll all be cast aside regardless of how much melanin we have. Your stormfront-tier concerns miss the mark.

boring, reductionist interpretation of the article

0/10 kys

I'm sure no matter how vast the differences become, pointing them out will still get you labeled a racist.

You couldn't find the mark if I told you where it is, which I'll do now since I'm a nice guy: those elite you're referring to aren't a racially distributed collection of individuals, they're jews. You only see the pajeet Google puts in front of your face, not the jews running the operation. That's why you are the one who is off the mark here. Pay attention instead of pretending to know more than you actually do.

this, they are literally all Jewish or subordinate to Jews

>it might actually result in speciation: the divergence of humankind into different biological castes or even different species.

this has been happening for thousands of years already

What the fuck? This is literally the opposite, this is the effect of isolation

>no arguments
>your dumb
Fuck off to /b/, underage tard.

And what makes you think globalization will actually bring people together? It will reduce everyone except the technocratic elite into a slave-like existence as economic cogs for multinational corporations. Your piece of the pie is going to be taken away and split with the rest of the world so that everyone can live in equal misery.

In a way you're right (although it would be helpful if you could explain more). What comes to mind is the Spanish and the New World; guns, germs and steel allow a relatively small group to smash up a much larger one real good. We have seen caste societies and we have seen civilizations at different levels of technological advance. That's true.

Increasingly it seems as though the problem is confusing the post-WW2 welfare state for the actual reality of things, which is inequality, absolutism and so on. Like confusing one brief period - Antonine Rome - for "actual" Rome, whatever that is.

So maybe we are heading into a new age of elitism, driven by liberalism and consumption. It makes sense. The rate of acceleration, and the scale of it - the planetary - and, I suppose, the timeframe (forever?)...one world under privatization, one great big automatic planet.

feels dystopian-SF cyberpunk/Victorian man. Or maybe all of these superhero films the collective unconscious is generating is trying to tell us something...

I'm just rambling here, stuck between how beautifully horrible and horribly beautiful the future is going to be.

We're talking biologically, and something "taken away and split" implies flux, movement of people and thereby genetics. The aboriginals of Australia became almost like a separate species through thousands of years of isolation and modernized in the presence of European stock, which demonstrates the premise

fuck you, i'm an underage tard and i'm already fucking off back to /b/

eat a dick or something. or, if you prefer, don't eat one

There are other types of movement. The elite will eventually begin to alter themselves genetically and mechanically in order to improve their part of the species above that of the lower class, whose numbers and development will be regulated through worldwide eugenics programs.

I would agree, in part, although it's interesting to imagine how this would play out in different parts of the world.

Sloterdijk, for instance, seems to have no trouble with genetic enhancement, although he's in the minority in Germany with that one (for now). People seem to think China won't have too much problem with CRISPR babies and so on. But how likely are eugenics programs likely to occur in Africa, the Middle East, or South America? My guess is that genetic experimentation is probably haram in many parts of the world and will probably remain so. If anything, the population there only seems to be growing in a completely unregulated way...

also, i hope that someday some Veeky Forumsizen will write a transhumanist/cyberpunk/neo-Victorian version of game of thrones that deals with these issues

would be cool

>writer acknowledges the burgeoning field of AI
>still assumes that any human, genetically modified ot not, will be relevant in a world of advanced AI

elon musk seems to think humans will still be useful for a while yet

waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html

Musk and Thiel are my favorite contemporary memes. Literally what happens when autismos who read to much sci-fi become billionaires.

Has he really done anything of note? I know that Tesla has had some success, but I normally see him touted around in a way that reminds me of Neil deGrasseTyson.

still more likeable than this asshat. even thiel, who owns palantir and drinks the blood of the living

He's the founder of Paypal, SpaceX and SolarCity.

>Inequality is inherently good

Neuralink hasn't happened yet, but electric cars and deciding to solo the space program is pretty awesome. For a tolerably eccentric billionaire visionary who says and thinks crazy things he seems like a cool guy. Perhaps his destiny is to become a less tragic version of Tesla or a less douchey version of Edison. I don't know, really.

businessinsider.com/crazy-elon-musk-quotes-from-the-code-conference-2016-6/#musk-said-the-gigafactory-a-battery-plant-that-will-be-the-largest-footprint-building-in-the-world-is-so-big-its-like-an-alien-dreadnought-1

huxley was saying this in the 1950s. (obviously aldous since his uncle was saying it earlier).

But let me put it this way: what has SpaceX done? This is probably more about my ignorance than the apparent lack of meaningful achievements on his part.

>like-an-al
me 2

wells was thinking it too

sorry about the lack of a more aesthetic picture

>can't even construct an antithesis properly
Leave, contrarian brainlet.

Developed reuseable launch vehicles, burned-out countless underpaid brilliant people.

wells has a slightly different take, but the early eugenicists are interesting. galton-darwin's reflections on birth control are probably more relevant than OP's article to the RL problem, even though huxley deals more with specialisation and lands on the other side of galton-darwin to wells.

Sometimes I wonder if people who write articles like this are actually warning people or they secretly want it to happen, because even the smartest human being on the planet can't even predict what is going to happen in 25 years, let alone 100 years.

I guess it depends on how you look at it. For some people, the fact that it happened *at all* is an achievement. I would count myself in that group. Space exploration is to me the continuation historically of the same impetus that drove people to navigate the Atlantic ocean. It has to happen, eventually. Am I optimistic, given the current sociocultural climate of things? Not really. But this is it, this is history. Space exploration is a good look, for many reasons. We will eventually need to get off this rock. Not out of pure escapism, or because we think that dragging our same problems to Mars will of necessity be an improvement...but whatever, you know what I mean. Pic related blew Nick Land's mind, for what it's worth.

There are probably lots of other reasons why space exploration is good too, spurring other innovations and developments that are good for human civilization, which I am to brainlet to think about right now.

What would Europe have been like if it hadn't explored the oceans? Ancient Egypt went on watching the banks of the nile flood for millennia. Then things changed that people never imagined could have changed, opened up paradigm-shifts in culture and civilization that were unthinkable. We're always playing catch-up, in a way, forgetting how fucking outrageous it is to be able to carry around the Western Canon in a cell phone and so on...

whatever tho, I'm just rambling.

Harari is super-pessimistic like that. I think he's sort of doing both things at the same time, warning people and secretly wanting it to come to pass. Maybe what Land called hyperstition. It sounds perverse but I kind of understand it, if that's how it is.

Think about Frank Herbert writing Dune, Paul Atreides vision-nightmares of the Golden Path and so on. He sees these nightmare visions of things and can't look away; I kind of wonder if Herbert didn't drive himself nuts thinking about them too. The combined horror-temptation of looking into the black box. Of course Nick Land did this also, though he's since recovered quite well from it.

>or Herman Melville...

Herbert actually has a quote somewhere where he talks about science fiction as preventing some worlds from coming to pass, simply by writing about them...he must have been an intense guy.

That's all off-topic, but w/evs. And today it's sometimes hard to tell where fiction and theory separate (Cyclonopedia, for instance).

I would imagine eugenics discussions are only going to get more frequent and more interesting going ahead. What did Galton/Darwin think? Illuminate us.

>I would imagine eugenics discussions are only going to get more frequent and more interesting going ahead. What did Galton/Darwin think? Illuminate us.
The Next Million Years is a pretty short book. It's more interesting than current discussions, as are Wells and most of the Huxleys (who invented the interesting parts that are still current). Why would you suspect they're going to get more interesting?

Technocapitalism is a runaway evolutionary self-optimisation algorithm that uses humans merely as a crude resource.

There are no people in charge, we are unable to resist because it so utterly seduces us, and in the future there will still be no room for us in this process.

We are the sex organs of the machine world. Garbage time is running out.

Current disruptions are the birthing pains of the post-human.

>christians have updated since that Jesus didn't come at 1000AD phenomenon
i'm sure he'll be here soon, lad

'Humans will walk the earth forever and extinction events aren't real' seems a lot more Christian to me, lad.

Because genetic experimentation and so on is back on the table, but postmodern individualism (combined with the rise of China, which I think will be more open to these sorts of experiments than the West) may not see any reason this time around to play God. Playing God is what people do, and the more technology we have at our disposal the richer the game. If people feel dispirited about social reform, what better project for Homo Narcissus, or Homo Aestheticus - the cultural heir to Homo Economicus - than biological immortality?

>tfw shitposting this hard
>maybe I should switch to decaf
>whatever tho

Mind, reading all of this continental phil has made me hyperbolic and wonky by nature. Like Land (or Baudrillard) I tend to allow myself to try to think the extremes, which are almost always the worst and scariest possibilities, rather than the happiest or the warmest ones. Warrants mentioning.

I don't really see any limits to human self-experimentation in the next 100 years. Granted, like many things, humans will probably find a way to still somehow be humans at the end of all of it, even though they will have servo-droids telepathically linked to their mind-phones or whatever just so that they can make a chocolate cake. 1950s-style American life seems to me to be the ultimate fantasy, and much technology and so on will go into preserving that, this evanescent vision of a comfortable family life that becomes more and more of a remote possibility.

Again tho...this is all just rambling. And sadly, even though we will learn how to manipulate genes at the atomic level I don't see any end to racism and so on either. Why do electrostrong forces dominate electroweak forces in quantum mechanics? Is magnetism electrochemically appropriative? Ugh.

And I'm sure that by no means answered your question. Again, pardon the rambling.

Glad somebody brought the requisite Land memes, they're always welcome.

sorry, to *not* play

Humans will be responsible for their end seems ever so Christian to me. I hope you get your Armageddon, just like the rest of them who want that. It'll make you feel extra important, no doubt. I'm sure our technology will outlast all those other creatures that won't miss us.

You should read earlier eugenicists and realise that your viewpoint is largely one of ignorance that relies on an 90s sitcom view of race and science. you think it's getting more interesting because of that view.

What do you think is a more plausible cause of human extinction that is not technology related?

all the events that killed the rest of the homos? all the events that caused all other extinction events? if we're accepting that there's some recourse to induction, all of those are far more likely stessors on a species than technology. you're hoping to be a special case. we probably won't be, by which i mean so probably it would be as unique an event as the second coming for your plan to work out. still, you'd get good odds if you wanted to put money on it.

Yeah, probably. Most of my views are based on ignorance. That's really why I come to Veeky Forums and shitpost: to be deflated. Otherwise I'd have no idea when I was saying crazy stuff.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. So enlighten me. What do the earlier eugenicists have that makes them worth reading today?

>What do the earlier eugenicists have that makes them worth reading today?
An education in basic genetics for a start, though for some of the Huxleys it was their job and so they deal with more advanced subjects. If you're looking for me to spoonfeed you the sparknotes of how to argue genetics on the internet, I'd say your interest will not span to a lengthy or scholarly book on the subject and you mostly just want to shitpost about things the 90s sitcom told you were risque or smrt.

>all the events that killed the rest of the homos? all the events that caused all other extinction events? if we're accepting that there's some recourse to induction, all of those are far more likely stessors on a species than technology.
That would be treating a few million of widely dispersed hunter-gatherers, basically apes by most measures, the same way as a 7 billion and growing globalised society that has been changing its own circumstances rapidly and increasingly so for the last few centuries.

Of course I'm not doubting something like a meteor impact or massive volcanic eruption being capable of killing us off, but the way things are going I think the timeline for a sort of accidental technological suicide is much shorter than waiting for a random cosmic bombardment.

What you mean capitalism will coopt and farm advantageous social controls amongst the people? No shit.

>That would be treating a few million of widely dispersed hunter-gatherers, basically apes by most measures, the same way as a 7 billion and growing globalised society that has been changing its own circumstances rapidly and increasingly so for the last few centuries.
we are not the most populous or colonial species on the planet. we've had several events which have more than decimated our population and we become more prone to disease and other vectors as we globalize. there is literally nothing to think we will be special except hope.

This.

Except for the one thing that does makes us special: Our level of technology, which is unprecedented and therefore not easily dismissed.

/x/ was right.

I don't understand. How is communism further to the right than corporatocracy? How is it any different from what is being called syndicalism?

It's an interesting chart but some of that stuff confuses me.

It's more of an authoritarian line than a left/right line... And, well, it's /x/.

we've lost that technology over a large part of our species for hundreds of years within history, and even gone illiterate, more than once over our civilized history. it makes us no more special than ants, and twice as vulnerable to the usual extinction events. it, like jesus, is less of a threat than plague or locusts.

We haven't reverted to hunter-gatherer lifestyles on any large scale since the agricultural revolution, and if you keep the sedentarism base it's very quick to bounce back into technological advancement.

Things like the plague are caused by human technology, without it we wouldn't live in large sedentary argriculture based societies that have levels of concentrated human and livestock interaction that could even spawn disease on a massive scale. Locust swarms have only been a problem since we entered a stage beyond hunter-gatherer carrying capacity and have starting to rely in large numbers on staple crops.

The threats you mention are in fact technological. The only real threats to humanity that are not technological are human-independent climate change and meteor strikes.

That doesn't look like no ant flag up there.

Humanity is the last, best hope, for the story of life on Earth to outlive its fragile biosphere. No other species has even shown an inkling of the capacity to take both itself and large chunks of the genetic record to the beyond, much less demonstrated any awareness of the myriad of threats that require it to be bone. Should man fail, there's less than a billion years remaining before the oceans start boiling, any number of things could go wrong catastrophically before then, and as anything that wipes out man will likely mean and end to complex life as well, life doesn't have enough time left in it to develop another species so capable from such a stage.

Now some edgy wannabe-nihilist might argue that life doesn't matter, but if you can't even set that axiom, then there's no point in drawing comparisons between man and other species to begin with.

I should add, human beings literally would not exist without technology. Earlier hominids already incorporated technologies like clothing, fire and tool use. Our brain size is the result of technological food processing. Most of our chosen habitats are directly dependant upon our use of technology to survive.

Technology came before us and created us. We're arguably the only species in the world for which this is the case, except for the ones we ourselves have bred and manipulated like domesticated animals and plants.

>Can't, or won't

I'm working on the precedent you established

>Technology came before us and created us.

This is interesting. So you're saying the drive to technology is fundamentally built into us? It makes sense, I feel guilty for being as lazy and stupid as I am...maybe less for disobeying the biological imperative than a technological imperative

After naming the Jew, how do you avoid speciation? I suppose this is a more extreme version of their jew/gentile dichotomy. I also suppose no one here has any better solution other than "join or destroy".

I'm saying the use of technology existed before modern humans existed and that said use of technology created us.

Pre-homo sapiens hominids using hunting and cooking technology allowed for a much larger and dependable food intake which allowed our nervous system to become less 'frugal' and allowed for greater brain capacity.

For illustrative purpose, the earliest creature we would identify with as a member of our species was already born into a tribe that would transfer the information to him that would allow him to use tools to hunt, to make clothes, to make fire and to use basic chemistry to transform foods (cooking).

So there has never been a time where homo sapiens has not been dependant on technology to survive. It has nourished us from before the dawn of our species.

we have lost writing and large structures, which are the basis of civilized society. domestication is not the point of civilization, it's when we become global. when we lose technology above farming and tools (which makes us no different to apes, ants, otters, etc) such as writing and geometry and building techniques and international trade from a period of having those things, it's considered a collapse of civilization of which there have been at least two major ones.

>things like the plague are caused by human technology
God, you're retarded. Not at a level above that seen in ants, and also you are ignoring that the plague is a vulnerability of a civilized society. For instance, TB has been with us since domestication. People didn't start dying of it in droves until we made industrial sized cities though, and we didn't get drug resistant strains until we fucked up prison treatment. However, that "technology" of disease is also created in fungus. Locust swarms have always been a problem, they were just a problem for other creatures. You call it technology when they eat our food. It's dumb
>That doesn't look like no ant flag up there.
>Going to the moon is going to kill us
Yes, that sounds nothing like a Jesusfreak explanation for why their rapture must happen.>Humanity is the last, best hope, for the story of life on Earth to outlive its fragile biosphere.
You know there are species that have outlived more and greater extinction level natural disasters than us, still kicking around? Crabs have a greater claim to longevity than us, and they might well go on without us after. That does not make technology likely to kill us, it makes us vulnerable to the standard longevity of a mammalian species, which so far in history is pretty short, and not because chimps use sticks.
It's not technology when ants wipe out a species by eating their food which they collect in one area, any more than it's technology killing us when we exchange syphilis or TB with naive populations.

>oceans start boiling
they already have and there are bacteria that fugging love it. their increased incidence is how we can date some extinction events for other species. You're hoping when we leave, everyone else has to too. Historically, that hasn't been the case.

Using that line of thinking, does it make more sense then to claim that technology will remain even after us? It is eventually going to drive our species into not being a conventional species at all anymore, or at least becoming another species, while remaining there making that new species ever more technology driven and dependant.

I would argue that since technology was around with the species before us who led to us, it would be around with the 'species' after us to which we have helped to lead in some way.

You could say we are one of the first babies of technology. It seems reasonable to say that it will have more.

>we have lost writing and large structures, which are the basis of civilized society. domestication is not the point of civilization, it's when we become global. when we lose technology above farming and tools (which makes us no different to apes, ants, otters, etc) such as writing and geometry and building techniques and international trade from a period of having those things, it's considered a collapse of civilization of which there have been at least two major ones.

As long as you have agriculture you can easily bounce back, as is shown by historu. When you're sedentary you can make tools advanced beyond what you can carry on your back and trade and cities start to spawn. So domestication of plants and animals is at the base of civilisation itself.

>God, you're retarded. Not at a level above that seen in ants,
Hunter-gatherers are already at a technological level beyond ants, let alone agriculturalists. Ants don't make fire, wear clothes or use bows and arrows. They also don't traverse the oceans in canoes, all things humans have done before reaching the civilised stage.

>and also you are ignoring that the plague is a vulnerability of a civilized society. For instance, TB has been with us since domestication. People didn't start dying of it in droves until we made industrial sized cities though, and we didn't get drug resistant strains until we fucked up prison treatment. However, that "technology" of disease is also created in fungus.
I'm aware of all of this, but all these factors exist precisely because we are a technological species.

>Locust swarms have always been a problem, they were just a problem for other creatures. You call it technology when they eat our food. It's dumb
If it is technology that makes us dependant on a food source that leads us into direct competition with locust swarms then yes, the resulting starvation is caused by dependence on a certain level of technology.

But my original point is that technology makes us unique and therefore it should be consider as a unique and plausible factor in our possible demise.

If you think a bunch of monkeys creating the internet, going into space and building nukes is 'nothing special' compare to a bunch of otters banging scallops on rocks then you're being unreasonably dismissive, I think.

>As long as you have agriculture you can easily bounce back, as is shown by historu. When you're sedentary you can make tools advanced beyond what you can carry on your back and trade and cities start to spawn. So domestication of plants and animals is at the base of civilisation itself.
>we haven't lost industrial agriculture before
We don't actually need technology to survive as a species. We did survive being hunter-gatherers, and better than our competitors. You're trying to redefine what makes a civilization which is not domestication. It makes your ignorance look like arrogance.
>Hunter-gatherers are already at a technological level beyond ants, let alone agriculturalists. Ants don't make fire, wear clothes or use bows and arrows. They also don't traverse the oceans in canoes, all things humans have done before reaching the civilised stage.
Ants have thriving slave trades, construct architectural miracles by instinct which we struggle to recreate, use tools to hunt and entrap slave ants, and make rafts. We really are not special like you think. The things you are giving prizes to humans for are not unique and we did not do them first or as consistently once we discovered them.
I'd trust a fire ant colony to make a raft ahead of you, to be honest.
>I'm aware of all of this, but all these factors exist precisely because we are a technological species.
No more so than squirrels who get raided by different color squirrels. Your "muh technology" is as much myth and prejudice as any religion. Take it from someone who actually understands the technology in play.

>Technology makes us unique
Most Christians call them "souls" but whatever helps you sleep at night.

We may not need technology to survive as a species, but keeping our current population level and living standard without technology is impossible. I agree with you that we've got plenty to learn from nature, and the boundary between "technology" and "nature" should be made much thinner, though.
Also, what defines civilization in your opinion? IMHO, it'd be technique - the ability to abstract and perpetuate practices that provide or improve someone's ability for the next performance of the practice.

>Going to the moon is going to kill us
I'd say scarecrow, but you aren't even in the same cornfield anymore

>You know there are species that have outlived more and greater extinction level natural disasters than us
Eventually and inevitably, nothing is going to survive, period, and there's not enough time between now and that inevitability for another species to develop that's capable of taking the biological imperative of spreading abroad to such scales as we, even as we are now.

> You're hoping when we leave, everyone else has to too. Historically, that hasn't been the case.
Quite the opposite, I'm just hoping for a handful of folks to get out with a DNA bank and enough gear and tech to survive and fix any possible inbreeding problems.

>keeping our current population level and living standard without technology is impossible
so? it's not like the 1500s were a different species because you might have to shit in a lake and get cholera.
>civilization
>abstract and perpetuate practices
in theory that's a good one, but places many animals into the category. human civilization is usually defined by urban development and writing (though other symbolic communications are counted) and a feeling that humans are unique and independent of the natural landscape (early versions of this are religions, but technology works for today).

We say it's technology causes famine like the Egyptians used say it was the Pharaoh worshiping the wrong gods. It's just nature doesn't care if we eat each other or lots of insects or pine nuts any more than it cares what birds do. Birds are here longer than our end of the homo line though, so they might technically be more important.

I think you make many good points, but why all this asshurt about Christianity in particular? It is only one in a long line of religous experiences, and it's largely rooted in Judaism (and there's Islam, too). Why all the ressentment - isn't it much better to acknowledge our cultural heritage and how it informs our assumptions than to keep uselessly railing against it?

>I'd say scarecrow, but you aren't even in the same cornfield anymore
Don't be upset ants can lift better than you. But we are talking eschatology here.
>Eventually and inevitably, nothing is going to survive, period, and there's not enough time between now and that inevitability for another species to develop that's capable of taking the biological imperative of spreading abroad to such scales as we, even as we are now.
You really don't understand the timescale of evolution. Either that or you don't understand how long before the sun dies, which wouldn't kill off life or the building blocks of life like protein. Did you just think saying that shit would make it true, or did someone tell you this?
>Quite the opposite, I'm just hoping for a handful of folks to get out with a DNA bank and enough gear and tech to survive and fix any possible inbreeding problems.
To add to my preceding question, did you learn your science from sci-fi? If you're interested in that type of thing, there's a lot of legitimate research on the "alien" nucleobases and amino acids floating around in space.

I'm not asshurt about Christianity. I'm just saying your understanding is based in faith and myth as much as their end of the world scenario. (I prefer theirs for style, so I'm really more asshurt by technology lovers who need to think humans are loved by the god of technology) I figure Christianity is probably the best mythology for religion to choose, because the audience here probably recognizes who Jesus is, and what the rapture is, and these have symbolic meanings we can agree on. Picking something like the Druze sect has obvious complications for outlining the comparison, because I'd have to explain both sides.

>You really don't understand the timescale of evolution. Either that or you don't understand how long before the sun dies, which wouldn't kill off life or the building blocks of life like protein. Did you just think saying that shit would make it true, or did someone tell you this?
We've got less than a billion years before the sun gets so hot it literally boils the oceans away, and another four after before it inflates to the size where it reduces this rock to slag. If you can point me to the complex carbon based life form that can thrive in that, I'll see about getting you a nobel prize. Maybe we can drop it on Venus.

...and that's assuming something else doesn't happen to kill all the megafauna, and possibly keep them dead, before then. Given everything we've found that can go wrong - discovering two or three new possible apocalypses every decade, and every now and again, inventing a new one - the closest thing we have to evidence of divine providence, is that there's been only five global extinction events, and not five million.

>inb4 water bears
No, they wouldn't - and those ain't building no rockets.

>We've got less than a billion years before the sun gets so hot it literally boils the oceans away
Modern humans have not been on earth a million years. Homo erectus has hardly been around that long. A billion years ago we still hadn't had the major extinction events that would kill the majority of ALL species. It's only 251million years ago that we lost 96% of species on earth.
The idea that humans would survive to see the like of the Great Oxygenation in reverse is hilarious. _Nothing_ besides things like bacteria and proteins and other bits of space junk has lived that long. The reason you think this is a good argument is because you have no idea the age of the earth, the timescale of evolution, or anything that a fucking twelve year old should know about the planet as your "knowledge". I'm not the one who brought up the idea that the oceans would get us anyway in a billion years- you seem to think that event is somehow linked to the end of mankind, which is an almost absurdly hopeful view of mankind's longevity as a species.

>kill all the megafauna
This really is like you think a science book for four year olds is relevant. If you're looking for something to kill everything, killing the megafauna kills a very small amount of the species on earth, and kills species which tend to be less populous already than those that would fill the void. I really think you brought this up because you wanted to say megafauna. It does at least bear some relation to humans, but it should be pointed out that one of the great survivors of the cenozoid mass extinction event was the giant tortoise, and they did pretty well everywhere until humans showed up (though not all humans are megafauna) despite all the mammalian megafauna that sprung up. Even humans killing all the other megafauna might not be the end of humans.

>We don't actually need technology to survive as a species. We did survive being hunter-gatherers, and better than our competitors. You're trying to redefine what makes a civilization which is not domestication. It makes your ignorance look like arrogance.
Hunter-gatherers are already deeply ingrained with technology.

>You're trying to redefine what makes a civilization which is not domestication. It makes your ignorance look like arrogance.
What makes civilisation is essentially city life, which is the result of a process set in place from the moment domestication starts to happen.

>Ants have thriving slave trades, construct architectural miracles by instinct which we struggle to recreate, use tools to hunt and entrap slave ants, and make rafts. We really are not special like you think. The things you are giving prizes to humans for are not unique and we did not do them first or as consistently once we discovered them. I'd trust a fire ant colony to make a raft ahead of you, to be honest.
I would accept ants have technology to some degree, just not to the degree that we have it. I wouldn't say I don't find them impressive, but comparing an ant raft to smartphones and satellites is just really trying your best to downplay human technology.

>No more so than squirrels who get raided by different color squirrels. Your "muh technology" is as much myth and prejudice as any religion.
It would be more like squirrels getting raided by squids because they switched to a different way of living themselves and suddenly found themselves in different company.

> Take it from someone who actually understands the technology in play.
>Just take some haughty cunt's word for it

No.

>Hunter-gatherers are already deeply ingrained with technology.
Again, as much as some insects, other mammals, etc. It's just as cool that we can teach a bonobo how to make a fire and cook over it as it is cool we can teach a seven year old human.
>What makes civilisation is essentially city life, which is the result of a process set in place from the moment domestication starts to happen.
That is part of the definition which I gave to user here.If you think your idea is better, gather the anthropologists and convince them to change it.
>result of a process set in place from the moment domestication starts to happen
It's not though. It's a result of a process that develops history, and the other user was closer to it with his speculations on the abstract.
>I would accept ants have technology to some degree, just not to the degree that we have it. I wouldn't say I don't find them impressive, but comparing an ant raft to smartphones and satellites is just really trying your best to downplay human technology.
Not really- ants construct things and wage war and travel on a scale that's pretty astounding. For their size, they're physically more capable of these things without technology, and still use technology where it makes it more efficient in terms of labour. Sure, smartphones are fancy- they're not as inventive as some of the things early humans did which we're only working out the technology of still. Do I think they're anything more than a refinement of civilization though? No. We've always made neat toys and some of their older versions from earlier humans are even better than the toys we now keep as our best technology (for instance, in cars) but I think that's about as good as religions do selling the idea humans are special because we have a shiny kind of god that only we get to talk to. It's about as impressive as a budgie with a mirror to me most of the time. Especially compared to some earlier discoveries like geometry.
>It would be more like squirrels getting raided by squids because they switched to a different way of living themselves and suddenly found themselves in different company.
You think locusts change species depending on which other species relied on the food crop? Interesting.
>No.
So far I've only got you to move slightly on ants despite the fact you can build nothing as neat as them. I'm pretty sure you learnt that shit about ants from me too, which is sad on a literature board, because it probably means nobody's read AS Byatt either. Yet you want the anthro people to change the definition of civilization for you, so humans go through no dark ages, with I'm pretty sure less experience of that than someone telling your facts about ants. I'm competent not arrogant, and the reason you don't have a basic competence in this is because you are arrogant enough to think you don't need one to make the kind of pronouncements you are making. It's not even good fictions.

>Again, as much as some insects, other mammals, etc. It's just as cool that we can teach a bonobo how to make a fire and cook over it as it is cool we can teach a seven year old human.
I think the latter is cooler because it's part of a process that lets you teach the kid to build nuclear reactors a few decades later.

>That is part of the definition which I gave to user here.
I agree on your definition pretty much, I'm merely saying domestication is an essential step towards it.

>It's not though. It's a result of a process that develops history, and the other user was closer to it with his speculations on the abstract.
Domestication is what starts even the possibility of 'history'.

>Not really- ants [...] about as impressive as a budgie with a mirror to me most of the time. Especially compared to some earlier discoveries like geometry.
At what point would have human technology have to get before you would consider it something notably out of the ordinary for an animal species to achieve?

>You think locusts change species depending on which other species relied on the food crop? Interesting.
I don't follow.

>So far I've only got you to move slightly on ants despite the fact you can build nothing as neat as them. I'm pretty sure you learnt that shit about ants from me too, which is sad on a literature board, because it probably means nobody's read AS Byatt either.
I'm above averagely interested in ants desu.

>Yet you want the anthro people to change the definition of civilization for you, so humans go through no dark ages, with I'm pretty sure less experience of that than someone telling your facts about ants.
I said no such thing. I'm merely saying that once agriculture is in place the structures remain in place for a relatively swift build-up. Going from hunter-gatherer living to agriculture took about 190,000 years. Once that was established all sorts of civilisations popped up in the last 10,000. Agriculture is the foundation of civilisation and in places where agriculture has taken hold it tends to hold on.

>I think the latter is cooler because it's part of a process that lets you teach the kid to build nuclear reactors a few decades later.
I dunno m9, it's going to be hard to get funding to prove the bonobos can't.

>I agree on your definition pretty much, I'm merely saying domestication is an essential step towards it.
It's not though. Part of what is essential to the meaning, which the other user pointed out, is symbolic meaning and representation like writing. Humans do that before domestication. Often civilizations rely on people they do not consider civilized to do the domestication work as often (I'd bet) as they distance themselves from the natural landscape by domestication. (For instance, the Spartans domesticate the Helots more than they did any animal, have writing while the Helots are not adept in writing, don't keep cities, and generally don't get to write the history). That's what makes a collapse of civilization possible, when domestication continues but history doesn't.
>At what point would have human technology have to get before you would consider it something notably out of the ordinary for an animal species to achieve?
Probably something that would destroy the universe or time. You can destroy a solar system by getting space travel wrong, and while it's nice that you can use kik or whatever, we're not very efficient users of technology. We're actually dying younger like we have a very bad flu season or war going on in the places that use it most. If ants were doing that, I'd assume they had a fungus or something, and it wasn't going to end well for that colony. I wouldn't think it would wipe out ants in China. Humans like to think their technology is special. They don't like to think anything that needs to evolve quickly is badly suited to the environment. It's why we make cities too, even when they kill us like building Rome on top of a malarial swap or San Francisco on an active fault. Us thinking we're special is what makes us civilized. It doesn't matter if we think God or smartphones made us that special, the abstraction of ourselves and the concept of our history are more important to the definition of civilization than our technology above writing.

>I'm above averagely interested in ants desu.
Yeah, humans like their society. Beehives too. The bible's full of them both.
>I'm merely saying that once agriculture is in place the structures remain in place for a relatively swift build-up.
I'm saying that a lot of civilized people are civilized because they found away around having shitty land in Crete or Mongolia, and agriculture and domestication is not just an arbitrary line, but a late line to draw which ignores far more essential elements like symbolic meaning.
When civilizations collapse it does not mean domestication goes away. When domestication appears, it does not mean civilization does. It's in no way integral to the process, and could be arguably said to hamper it as distance trade develops writing.

And you think modern humans came out of nowhere? No, they evolved from complex lifeforms, that evolved from complex lifeforms, that evolved from complex lifeforms - gotta go back over a billion years before you get back to something simple as a common ancestor. So if something wipes out all the complex lifeforms now, or even just most of the ones on the surface, you're done. You don't have enough time left to do it again.

>common ancestor
You realize every mass extinction event since then has sped us towards humans? We are complex lifeforms, but we developed from the absence of other complex lifeforms more so than their propagation. It's more accurate to say that you need a series of mass extinction events, rather than the timeline as it played out. You don't need 2 billion years between one mass extinction and another, so much as you need a mass extinction which makes that kind of evolution more likely to survive. Evolution moves far more quickly at those moments than it can in inertia. Wiping out megafauna would not make us evolve more quickly than wiping out 96% of all species did. The idea that we need to recreate some unspecified (and probably humanoid) complex lifeform but not the earlier lifeforms so you can have something there to be destroyed by boiling oceans sounds like an obsessed sci-fi fan who refuses to kill his darling.

>would not make us evolve more quickly than wiping out 96% of all species did.
None of the global extinction events wiped out 96% of life (hell, the most recent one only wiped out 18% of land vertebrate families, and the worst one wiped out 95% of all species, but left nearly half of those in the oceans alive). There were tons of complex lifeforms about when modern man first evolved, and that's true all the way back to the first proto-mammals going all the way back to placentals.

It's not that, come every major extinction event, all that was left was bacteria and shit in the ocean, and it just magically "remembered" where it left off and evolved straight back into complex land life. It's simply that enough complex life was left to fill the niches left behind.

But not every possible extinction event is so kind, and plenty of them leave no possibility for complex life to ever evolve again. Given man's ability to alter his environment, any extinction event that wipes him out, while it might make room for life to grow again, the conditions left behind are going to be among the worst the world has ever seen. Less, mayhaps, it's the result of germ warfare that only wipes out humans. Even then, civilization isn't something inevitable - it's largely dumb luck, and even under ideal conditions, there may never be another species capable of this again, particularly considering the total time you have remaining is less than a quarter of what it took to get this far. (And that, only if you're lucky.)

...

this is what happens when liberal humanist nincompoops exhaust philosophy because they never understood it to begin with and turn their devouring eye on the sciences, also misunderstood

Congratulations. You've blamed one subset of the hyper-rich cutthroats.

You get your "named the jew" medal.

I hope you wear it proudly during the nuclear fallout when the rich are hiding underground and you're feasting on the lungs of children to survive.

t. Fox News

I never see conservatives suggest alternatives or solutions. They always just blame liberals and insist the status quo is correct (except for those members of the status quo they don't like, who are degenerates.)

Could this be because conservatives are retarded and have nothing to offer outside of genocide?

The Frankfurt School strikes again!

>they think "liberal" in this context refers to American left-right political entertainment newspeak

Nothing in the sentence suggested the word was used intelligently. Care to explain what it means in context?