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Mankind's greatest achievement?
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Ste Manns
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sturisoma said:you mean like the Indians in the Amazon who still live the same way as stone age man? except we wouldn't be here talking about it without the transistor
Well, thats a bit of a common misconception.
The peoples of South America, particularly in the Amazon region do not live in the stone age 'still'.
Firstly they are and have for the most part, been influenced by outsiders for the last four hundred years or so. Secondly they've actually gone backwards in terms of evolution of civilisation. You've not heard of the Inca, Aztecs or mayans? The people you refer to are descended from those civilisations. Even the most isolated tribes of South America have heard of metals (which kind of is the definition of the stone age, ie before metals)
These people farm. They do also forage and hunt, but their lifestyle cannot be described as stone age.
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The ability of man (or woman) mass controlling men (or women) by a proofless fable. The ability to pull that off and keep it running 2000year is quite an achievement
On the early man /animal argument I'd like to nominate Cooking as one of our early inventions that may have boosted our intelligence through evolution. ...just to be a pain like.
On the industrial era I nominate Cheep Tea and time keeping clocks and particularly Harrison's clocks all of which triggered huge healthy cities, rail, efficient production and world commerce.
On the modern front its gotto be quantum theory, genetics, not forgetting landing a robot on mars with some awesome maths and a jet propelled sky crane and some transistors. ..I mean are we cool or what!
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If writing was invented would we all not use the same character set as defined by the inventor, so to me as there are several totally different sets it must have evolved.
A good debate thread with no right answer, but space travel, the satellite, supersonic passenger flight, understanding of electricity must all be in the mix and I throw another in there with the steam engine.
A good debate thread with no right answer, but space travel, the satellite, supersonic passenger flight, understanding of electricity must all be in the mix and I throw another in there with the steam engine.
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Forbiddenbiker said:
On the early man /animal argument I'd like to nominate Cooking as one of our early inventions that may have boosted our intelligence through evolution. ...just to be a pain like.
On the industrial era I nominate Cheep Tea and time keeping clocks and particularly Harrison's clocks all of which triggered huge healthy cities, rail, efficient production and world commerce.
On the modern front its gotto be quantum theory, genetics, not forgetting landing a robot on mars with some awesome maths and a jet propelled sky crane and some transistors. ..I mean are we cool or what!
But has intelligence really had much of a boost? I believe that intelligence is more about the environment and how we cope with it. Sure knowledge has progressed, but brain power has changed very little.
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Splog said:
Improved diet after the advent of fire/cooking has been hypothesised (by people much more clever than the likes of us) to have been instrumental in increasing brain size and intelligence rising. Unfortunately this can't be attributed to Homo Sapiens, we know Homo Erectus had fire and used it to cook. So did Neanderthal and Heidelburg Man.
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Ste Manns said:
Don't know who these people are but brain size doesnt automatically increase intelligence... As far as I know Neanderthals were a different species to modern man and where we evolved from. Similar yes, but I'm not sure Neanderthals are part of our evolution...
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They're an off shoot - we share a common ancestor which was my whole point. Someone suggested fire and cooking was mankinds (as in Homo Sapien) greatest achievement. No it wasn't we didn't discover it Homo Erectus did.
Brain size in evolving human species has generally shown to be an indication of relative intelligence, it's not the whole story but it is how science measures such things.
Brain size in evolving human species has generally shown to be an indication of relative intelligence, it's not the whole story but it is how science measures such things.
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Not quite sure what you mean. I believe it was the invention of the protein hit (by cooking meat) along side walking upright to reduce our shadow area... (an invention to forage further afield?) ... in so doing both aspects provided cooler brains with high energy levels which went onto increase our whole nervous system, including full control of our rib cage which helped early man/animal develop speech, words and detailed communication.
The printing of words for the massed with the introduction of printing presses has got to be a big key in the evolution of standardized languages though right?
The internet information age being a similar evolution of our own invention.
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It wasn't so much cooking meat that helped early man develop bigger brains, just cooking foods generally. It opened up a whole new world - before cooking man's diet was severely limited due to toxins and other undesirables. Cooking neutralises these allowing greater range of diet, the earliest evidence of control of fire (depending on your sources) is around 400,000 years ago by Homo Erectus. It wasn't widespread until around 125,000 years ago (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans)
From that source - "Richard Wrangham of Harvard University argues that cooking of plant foods may have triggered brain expansion by allowing complex carbohydrates in starchy foods to become more digestible and in effect allow humans to absorb more calories"
Regarding printing - there is no doubt it was a massive leap in the evolution of the written word. Beforehand, if you wanted a copy of a book you did just that - copy it, by hand (ha, think of the copyright issues...)
This was an incredibly laborious task and only a few people were able to do it, namely the church. This then means the church controls the written word and can say what they like without others questioning it. The printing press meant more accurate copies but that didn't necessarily happen straight away. Not many people could afford a press. Indeed most people couldn't read - the next major advancement in this respect was the King James Bible as it meant more people had access to the bible, this then had the knock on effect of more people learning to read.
However - writing was more widespread in other era's. Think egyptians and romans and ancient greeks for a start - it is thought that within these cultures the ability to read and write was much more prevalent than the medieval period, however they didn't have printing presses. The press was a very important invention of course but it isn't the complete picture, it in itself was not as revolutionary in terms of man's evolution into a more enlightened age. Knowledge was still 'owned' by the rich and powerful and most people still couldn't read, so for them it didn't really matter how many accurate copies of books there were around, they still had to rely on the few at the top of the ladder for information.
The advent of printing had little effect on unifying language though - there were just as many different languages and even within single languages it was still a case of 'make up spellings to suit'. Individual letters of a given language were more or less already standard, but things like spelling and grammar were very much a free for all for centuries to come.