Favorite Conspiracy theory
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HAHAHAHAHAHAAngloDoom said:
Oh my god I just came from that thread. Thank you.
Goddamned Skyfall, the alien conspiracy to rule our minds into watching OBJECTIVELY BAD BAD MOVIES
AAAAAAAAAA HOW WILL I THINK FOR MYSELF WHEN MAKING TOTALLY ARBITRARY CHOICES BASED ON PREFEREEEENNNNNCEEEEEEEE
OT:
Uh...
I can't decide. A lot of the ones in this thread are pretty hilarious. I think the moon landing one would be it if I wasn't an idiot some 10 years ago and thought it was TOTALLY REAL MAN.
I'll keep browsing until then.
My favourite one recently was about the comet Ison, mainly because a supervisor and co-worker of mine talked about it constantly.
Basically a comet was going to pass by earth extremely close which would making everything on earth slowly die or whatever. The best part was that a simple Google search would show scientific evidence proving that the comets path had been measured very accurately to pass earth 69 Billion miles away and that it was completely safe.
On top of that it was supposed to hit 5 days ago, and it of course never did. My supervisor came in the next day and told us some shit about how it was the wrong date and all that.
Chrystal Meth is a hell of a drug.
Basically a comet was going to pass by earth extremely close which would making everything on earth slowly die or whatever. The best part was that a simple Google search would show scientific evidence proving that the comets path had been measured very accurately to pass earth 69 Billion miles away and that it was completely safe.
On top of that it was supposed to hit 5 days ago, and it of course never did. My supervisor came in the next day and told us some shit about how it was the wrong date and all that.
Chrystal Meth is a hell of a drug.
First thing I noticed was that they were biting Extra Credits' style. Kind of insulting.Promethax said:
They had me at first with the pyramid thing ( I don't know much about them). Then a quick Google search pulled up an article where a professor explains how him and 19 of his colleagues pulled up a 2.5 ton block of granite on four ropes. So withing the first minute that video shows it's lack of knowledge.
First of, Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals are the same genus, their precursor was homo erectus IIRC. So it's the same one intelligence we are dealing with.2012 Wont Happen said:
Secondly, if Homo Sapiens murdered Neanderthals, how? Neanderthals were bigger and stronger, but Homo Sapiens was smarter. And so won.
Essentially adding evidence to the idea that Smart is evolutionary good.
Thirdly, if 65 million years was a big sausage, then slicing a single thin slice of would remove any intelligence that ever showed up, and so intelligence never happened.
Actually, that's not how evolution works. Darwin's theory isn't preventing intelligence, it's just that there are hundreds of useful adaptations for any given situation and most of them are easier paths to go down than intelligence.Faelix said:
And the truth is, we don't actually know what set of environmental factors are most likely to produce high intelligence because no other life that we know has developed as far as we have, so we don't have a lot of other creatures to look at for comparison to find common variables. We're kind of in the dark on the subject.
Trying to say that intelligence doesn't increase chances of survival is just plain openly wrong in my view. And the smart guy would be the one who min/maxes the chances of coming face to face with the tiger. And the dumb guy would be eaten.Twenty Ninjas said:
I agree that Homo Sapien brain is complex and have layers within it. But how can you say that this is a necessity, for intelligence. You are basically stating that this is the only way. So we can't meet anything in the universe who is intelligent but with a different brain structure than us?
Answer is that we don't know. We only have ourselves as observation, but this isn't a conclusive answer, as much as it just points back to the original question, why 65 million years before intelligence happened.
It's a question which is repeated in Homo Sapiens itself infact. We were there as a species 150.000 years ago, but anthropoligsts can't find any signs of us actually doing something. We just sat there with out intelligence, and came up with nothing at all.
Then 35.000 years ago, we invented... The drawing! Cave paintings.
Incredible. And then nothing again.
Untill about 6000 years ago, when it suddenly took of like a rocketship, we invented cities and streetnames and mailboxes and there was no end to it.
And it is the exactly same people, that sat for over 100.000 years unable to think of one single thing to do except eat.
Also that is a scientific mystery.
The usefull adaptations are exactly not easier paths to go down. Like wings from no wings. Feathers to fly with. New stuff. And you are also implying, that if an animal is in the million year long process of changing in one aspect, it is set and static in another. That the brain don't change because everything else is changing.RJ Dalton said:
And yet here is the brain, all have it, and mutations happen there too. A mutation that increases the amount of dendrites on a nervecell? Bingo, it works you're smarter. Just one random mutation.
Another one that makes your cells smaller, so there can be more of them in same space? That's what Einstein had. Bingo, one mutation makes something better!
Now how you get from no wing, to a feathered wing, with all intermediates being better than the one before, and better than not changing at all. That's for the cartoonists to explain.
Bottomline is, it is much easier to sit around for 150.000 years doing nothing, then invent a helicopter , than it is to sit around and wait for you to grow wings. That would take 10 or 100 times as long. Growing wings is much more complicated.
No, it's not that simple. There are dozens of different parts in the brain that all relate to different aspects of intelligence. Parts that relate to drawing logical connections, parts that relate to coordination and manual dexterity (definitely necessary if you want to build tools), parts control emotional responses (and allow more complex emotional responses), parts that help work out a balance between curiosity and the flight/fight response in a way that allows you to test new experience without getting killed. Each of these require a series of steps in order to bring them to the level of development present in the human brain. And you still need to survive while these elements are all developing. The process of developing intelligent life really is quite complicated.Faelix said:
And feathers developed before wings. Recent paleontological studies have shown that a surprisingly large number of dinosaurs had feathers. Even the T-Rex shows signs of having feathers. I haven't looked into this specifically, but with the study I've done in biology, my guess would be that feathers were an alternative to fur, used to protect animals from the elements, like heat and cold and later developed into flight.
Like I said, for any given environmental stimulus that requires an adaptation, there are thousands of paths to take and intelligence isn't automatically easier than others.
Of course, there are weird ways around it. The octopus doesn't have any of the kind of brains capable of many of the things we think of as necessary to produce what we think of as "intelligent behavior," and yet they manage surprisingly complex and surprisingly intelligent behaviors without going through any of the kinds of neural activities that humans and animals with similar brains do. When you get right down to it, we really don't know exactly what develops intelligence in the first place, much less what factors make it happen.
It is, if you'll pardon the pun, mind-blowing.
Well, you could ask this question about a lot of traits. Why didn't more animals evolve to be dinosaur-sized? Why didn't more fish evolve into shark-like species? Why haven't we discovered any reptilian-monkeys? These are all pretty neat things. Sharks eat pretty much any non-shark, isn't that an advantage? And when you think about it, intelligence isn't all that helpful to an animal. What's a few points of I.Q. going to do for a zebra in a herd? Is it really going to prevent him from being picked off like any other member of his species? If evolution were really working on min/maxing itself, wouldn't zebras be faster than lions?Faelix said:
Besides, there are so many "one in a million" scenarios necessary to develop the way we did. Intelligence really doesn't help without, say, opposable thumbs. Sapience isn't much use to you if you can't grasp the objects you intend to utilize. Opposable thumbs on the other hand have only developed in monkeys and lemurs off the top of my head, so there's that. And then there's the fact that weren't all that smart until the discovery of fire. Homo Erectus could care for the injured, coordinated hunting, and crafted tools, but that's hardly unheard of among the apes. The discovery of fire is a large part of what prompted our further development - increasing the value of consumed meat and providing more protein to the brain - and its mastery is another very unlikely event.
I really don't believe we need a reason for sapience to have not appeared elsewhere, since there was never a reason for to appear in the first place.
My favorite theory is that bat-shit crazy conspiracy theories are more widespread to obscure and discredit theories about real and legit conspiracies.
That's some serious meta we've got going on.GladiatorUA said:
The conspiricy theory that's really crazy was made by those who want to hide the facts of my slightly less crazy conspiricy theory!
Mine's a toss up between the Moon Landing being fake and 9/11 being an inside job. Both just give the American government too much credit in their ability to fool people and their ability to keep highly paid professionals quiet. A relatively small thing can get busted open easily by Snowden - how did they manage to keep the Moon Landing or 9/11 internal?
The most hopeless one I've heard really is the moon landing hoax, it's just unthinkable that somebody could be so thick. This is my favorite debunk video on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGXTF6bs1IU
Human intelligence only came about because a very specific set of environmental pressures presented itself to a very specific animal that had the very specific brain structures necessary for intelligence to be a trait that made survival more likely.
Think of a snail. Snails have been around for about 480 million years, they've never to our knowledge developed intelligence. Why? because they have no environmental pressure to develop intelligence, a more complex brain to a snail would be a liability, it would have to eat even more than it can now. If there is no pressure on an animal to adapt it won't, that's why snails have barely changed in 480 million years. Same thing with nautiloids, no pressure, no need to change; and there's no reason to assume that intelligence is the best way to make a creature more successful. The most successful life forms on this planet are bacteria and they have no abstract intelligence.
We just happen to be in the right place at the right time with the right brain for our beastly neuroticisms to slowly grow and turn into a functional planning and abstract reasoning organ.
Evolution doesn't favor intelligence, evolution only favors survivability. If an animal is intelligent, but that intelligence doesn't favor it's survivability it won't do the animal any good.Faelix said:
Human intelligence only came about because a very specific set of environmental pressures presented itself to a very specific animal that had the very specific brain structures necessary for intelligence to be a trait that made survival more likely.
Think of a snail. Snails have been around for about 480 million years, they've never to our knowledge developed intelligence. Why? because they have no environmental pressure to develop intelligence, a more complex brain to a snail would be a liability, it would have to eat even more than it can now. If there is no pressure on an animal to adapt it won't, that's why snails have barely changed in 480 million years. Same thing with nautiloids, no pressure, no need to change; and there's no reason to assume that intelligence is the best way to make a creature more successful. The most successful life forms on this planet are bacteria and they have no abstract intelligence.
We just happen to be in the right place at the right time with the right brain for our beastly neuroticisms to slowly grow and turn into a functional planning and abstract reasoning organ.