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With The World Environment Day Conference.....



 
 
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Old July 9th, 2005, 10:59 PM
bob
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On Sat, 9 Jul 2005 12:16:40 -0700, "Jack May"
The evolution of humans started about 60,000 years ago with major changes in
the characteristics of people. Those changes proceeded over all these
years with difference in the genes and the resulting changes in the
characteristics of different groups of people.

Your 300 year figure is a weak argument because major changes were made in
people long before 300 years ago. There are social changes that can be
explained by the more recent past, but that is not the whole story.


your 60000 years is a weak argument because it focuses only on
genetics in determining how north american has turned out. human
behaviour and especially societal make-up (which was the original
argument) is mostly environmentally determined. North American
socioeconomic structure is a result of about 300 years of social
oddities and has nothing (or an infinitesimally small percentage) to
do with genetics.

The research to determine how much is genetic vs. environment vs. free will
has been going on for decade using identical twins (identical genetics)
raised apart from birth to fraternal twins (different genes) raised
together, to siblings.

This research has been reported so much in even the popular media, it is
hard to believe that someone could not know about it.


so let's see some conclusions then. obviously i know it's being
studied, but i've never seen a definitive nature/nurture answer and
neither have you.

Somebody really needs to talk to you about sex and reproduction. You seem
to not to understand the birth process. Are you in elementary school?


finished that a couple years ago. i can't believe you think this is
necessary...

In sex and reproduction, the genes of the parents are combined to produce
kids that are similar to their parents. Otherwise parent could give birth
to cats and dogs as well a kids. All parents talk about how a kid has the
nose of the father for example or the eyes of the mother.
Those similarities are determined by the genes of the parents.


physical appearance? no kidding. how they walk? abilities to hit a
baseball? ability to pick up a second or third language? math skills?
sure. but all of those are less likely or more likely to pan out based
on actual exposure as a child.

I didn't say "a" gene. Obviously since the body is built with the
messenger RNA by reading the instructions in DNA, the brain is also built by
the DNA instructions. There can be DNA instructions in combination that
produce a less active frontal lobe and a more active, more primitive part of
the brain at the back.


blah blah. ok so we should then take people with lobe inferiority and
put them in the best environments possible to ensure they don't kill
anyone then. you've just made a good argument for aa...

That's like saying there is a
frisbee gene... there is probably a dexterity one that might make
frisbee easier, but not for specific behaviours like murder or
fishing. Gee i feel like kicking a soccer ball. good thing someone
invented a game that relates directly to my soccer gene. There might
be genetics in people that relate to things like motivation or comfort
or stubborness, but it does not transfer that these would only relate
to math for chinese kids and english skills for white kids and
basketball for black kids (i'll use some friendly neighbourhood
stereotyping just for you!!).


All you are doing is showing your total lack of understanding of genetics
and how it works.


no all i was doing was having a bit of fun at your ridiculous
expense... i fully understand that genes are passed on to do with
physical make-up, non-specific motivation, sex drive, reactions,
left-handedness, general inate stuff, but they do not predetermine
specific behaviours. specific behaviours are learned. and again to get
back to what i was originally talking about: genetics do not determine
place in society; society determines place in society.

This is the typical social science, humanities view of society. That view
is thourghly disproved and looked on as the inability of social sciences and
the humanities to deal with knowledge outside of their fields.


there is huge correlation in every category and vice versa. to say
that it is thoroughly disproved is completely false. These are some
very well respected ideas and are actually really bloody obvious. you
are saying that motivation comes solely from genetics? or 30%? or only
in negative areas? or what? If you cannot see the correlationships
between environment and success, then you are as much a slave to
science as you think i am to social science. You personally may very
well have become a very successful engineer "against the odds" but
those odds that people talk about are social, not genetic.

Bill Gates parents were far from the richest people in the world, but Bill
is the richest person in the world.


yes, bill gates is a perfect example, mr science! you and all your
expert knowledge must surely realize that mr gates would be called an
"outlier."

The trend that has been discovered is that wealth is created by the first
generation of the wealthy. Someone had to start the wealth. The second
generation that splits the money is often far less successful. The third
generation of splitting the wealth tends to lose much of the money and even
go bankrupt.


wealth grows, it doesn't split and sit there. i think you've been
reading people magazine about the children of the rich and famous.
some of your stuff is ok argument, but it's this type of oddness that
makes you look insane. and actually you are sort of siding with the
learned behaviour argument he perhaps those who are wealthy do not
genetically deserve it because they obviously don't pass on the genes
to stay successful....

All you are doing is trying justify you hatred of people that succeed. This
is called tribalism where you hate other groups that you are not in.
Racism is a subset of tribalism. Tribalism is common tool by politicians
that essentially say our tribe is good, their tribe is bad. Follow me.


i'll never follow you... you have no idea who or what i hate.
tribalism? you're the one who's trying to divide the world
genetically.

I live and work in Silicon Valley, one of the largest wealth generators in
world. There is almost no old family money in Silicon Valley. Virtually
all of the wealth has been created by people from scratch, mainly by
engineers.


tsk tsk. you didn't do your research. the wealth where you work very
well might be mostly new money, but it is not ingrained old-family
rich that is the BULK of wealth in the us... it is a fact that the
bulk of wealth in the us is old families that made money through
slavery, invention, and investment pre home computer. simple, easily
researchable.

Typical tribalism hatred, If it were true, Silicon Valley would never have
existed because the old money families seldom have their kids go to
engineering school.


this hatred thing is weird. i don't hate successful people. what does
success mean anyway? i have some incredibly "successful" friends and i
love them. the silicon valley is an outlier too and may eventually
make a real jump on us wealth percentages, but it has not yet and the
bulk of people there making the cash are (a term i know you'll love)
"white privileged" anyway... or if they ain't white they weren't ever
poor for the most part...

The twins raise apart, etc. research was specifically done to answer the
question you raise. The result are that you are mainly incorrect.


let's see some data. let's see what kind of behaviours they look at.
let's see just how rich and poor they made the pairs... or how
supportive and unsupportive the environments are. the thing is that
this type of very specific research cannot be done accurately (and at
least one researcher i saw on tv acknowledged this) because the
environment portion is impossible to control fairly. Scientific
morality enters it because they cannot separate twins and throw one
into a poor family in a ghetto somewhere and give one to bill gates.
although now that i think about it, it might be a fantastic new
reality show!!

Nothing in you statement separates genetics from environment. That
separation is what the research was designed to do, and it accomplished that
goal.


actually my statement does exactly that. you take all white
communities (this is the genetic distinction you or someone else like
you chose: white, black, eg. blacks are on the bottom of society
because of genetics) and look at test results on either side of the
tracks, so to speak. results on the poorer side will be lower for a
whole bunch of reasons, genetics possibly being one of them, but not
anywhere near the primary one...

or all black parts of the
world. look at incarceration rates in rich and poor communities where
everyone is white. look at test scores in rich and poor schools in
every country in the world. look at separated twins who are raised by
families of different socioeconomics. holy crap, you are incredible!!!


Again you say nothing that can separate the influence of genetics vs.
environment.


you don't say anything that can entirely separate them either.
genetics affects behaviour and i firmly believe that environment
affects it way more. you cannot prove otherwise, but there is so much
correlative data that shows environment negatively or positively
affecting outcomes that it's crazy that you would ignore it...

sure research, but i never mentioned environment at this point; i was
only talking about biology. there probably are differences of some
sort but we do not know what they are exactly or at least what they
mean or how they will manifest themselves. but dumb whites and smart
blacks everywhere thank you for your knowledge of early computers.


You are constantly implying environment vs. genes vs. free will. I agree
you don't think you are doing this, but it appears your education is not
sufficient to understand the implications you are making.


you have no idea what my education is. what a weird thing to say...
what do you mean i am "constantly implying"? that doesn't even make
sense. i'm not denying that biology is a factor in human outcomes, but
you seem to be denying that environment is a factor and you won't
acknowledge that you really have no idea how much either one affects
anything.

and you totally jump away from the topic at hand which is that aa is
an effort to repair society and if it can be shown to be flawed to any
degree beyond what is good for society (which i never said it
couldn't, by the way) then you should come up with another idea
because american society is broken and needs fixing somehow and it
ain't getting better on its own. and anyway even if aa is the best
idea ever, us society needs more fixing than that...

but our dna code is WAY more similar than different... and it has NOT
been proven anywhere that biology is more important than environment
in determining human behaviour. and in fact i would go so far as to
say that anyone who thinks that your dna has more to say about your
behaviour than your upbringing or your peers or your social mores or
your environment is INSANE. i'm done....


There is only a 3% difference in genes between a human and a monkey. I
think it grows to about 5% difference between a mouse and a human. There
is a funny story that when the effort to map the human genome started, they
kept getting the same genetic map for humans and monkey. One of the
researchers walked into the bosses office said essentially, I can't find any
difference, I guess the only difference between a monkey and us is
environment. It was a joke, not the truth as was later found.


so environment IS more important than genetics in determining
behaviour then? i win.

Small genetic differences make a large difference in the animal and humans
that are constructed.


yes, and? blacks are genetically predetermined to be on the bottom of
society?
 




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