Purpose of mankind.

[Little Faith]

Yeah! A poll with an attitude.

[dsm]

Our purpose is to make our part of the universe a little more interesting.

[Fredrik]

Absolutely none at all.

[Spike]

The purpose of all life is to evolve.
Unfortunatly, evolution also means we tread on 'lesser' species and the planet itself.
If i could vote twice, i'd say 'to become better' and 'to destroy ourselves'.

[Little Faith]

Yeah, my bad. I discovered my mistake when I was about to vote myself.

So you are also on the transhumanist side?

Better than just being a misanthrope.

You could vote in the "to be replaced" spot.

[Spike]

I don't really class myself as anything. By transhumanist, you mean 'pro-evolution'?

I just think that human nature can be wonderful yet brutal. On one hand we're intelligent, affectionate, reasoning, constructive and open-minded.

On the other, we're murderous, torturous creatures who view any difference as a threat to be destroyed, hanging desperatly to outdated beliefs.

Sometimes i think we should hurry up and evolve, or just wipe ourselves out in nuclear war and let Mother Earth tend to herself.

[Little Faith]

Yeah pro-evolution.

I believe that certain problem in our society can only be fixed by alterations in the flesh.

I'm also in favor of "speeding evolution a bit up" since the whole Darwinian system is a bit outdated.


And besides I want horns, a bullet-resistant chitin carapace, an extra pair of arms, mm, maybe wings also?

[Spike]

I think most men would breasts.

Anyway, i agree that evolution seems to have been hitting a dead end over the past few thousand years. However, technology has taken over where evolution left off.

Have you read Arthur C. Clarke's views on evolution? They're pretty enlightening, and i can't see them being all that ridiculous in a few hundred years or so, with the rate that technology is advancing.

[VileSlay]

Spike said:

Anyway, i agree that evolution seems to have been hitting a dead end over the past few thousand years. However, technology has taken over where evolution left off.

the problem with evolution is that it occurs as an adptation to a stressed environment. animal build new defenses against predators, predator learns to overcome defenses, blah blah yackity smackity. since we as humans are on top of the food chain, we have nothing chasing us down, nothing trying to kill us on a daily basis(except our felolow man). in fact instead of adapting our bodies in order to survive in our environment, we adapt our environment to suit our needs. I'm just waiting for the alien invasion/killer plauge/astronomic mishap/nuclear holocaust thats gonna put us in our place. then we'll see(or not)who takes back the Earth.

[Little Faith]

So basically we have thrown down the system of evolution but we don't take responsibility for creating another system in it's place.

[Spike]

I think that an interesting kind of forced evolution is on it's way, tho not for a few thousand years at least. The technological leaps and bounds that have been made lately will see to that.

[Fredrik]

Consider how humans live and work today. If evilution works the way it's supposed to, 300 years from now we will be three times smarter, have ten thin, extremely agile fingers on each hand, hardly any muscles and be extremely well adapted to mental stress :p

[Little Faith]

Fredrik, my friend your observations are semicorrect. A thing you forget is that future generations of humans would also be very disease and poison-resistant since humans are very often exposed to various diseases and poisons.

What I was saying was that one of the basic mechanisms of evolution: The natural selection does not fit with the present realities, since human survival is affected more by socio-economic factors than the ableness of the individual.

The only place where we are seeing old-school human evolution in effect is in Africa where some people have developed AIDS-resistance.

Weirdly enough (and slightly gaming-related) young people in Japan with a peculiar mutation have been sighted. The mutation grants increased mobility and greater rotation of the thumb. People with the mutation are also more likely to use the thumb for various operations where other people would use the second or the third digit.

How exactly this mutation has developed is a mystery. The mutation seems clealy as an act of evolution adapting the individual to it's environment (which includes more thumb-operated devices). But the conditions that has warranted it's necessity has appeared in the cause of a single generation and the survival of the individual is hardly at stakes in the business. Therefore it cannot really be the effect of any Darwinian systems.

Such cases might be evidence that we don't really know how evolutions happens at all. In fact the only thing we know about evolution is that it appears to alter creatures so that they fit their surroundings better.

[IMJack]

To live and die a pirate king.

[læmænt]

The purpose of mankind is to entertain me.

[Linguica]

Little Faith said:

Weirdly enough (and slightly gaming-related) young people in Japan with a peculiar mutation have been sighted. The mutation grants increased mobility and greater rotation of the thumb. People with the mutation are also more likely to use the thumb for various operations where other people would use the second or the third digit.

This sounds like BS. URLs please.

[Sharessa]

Linguica said:

This sounds like BS. URLs please.

They were bitten by a radioactive Famicon.

[Little Faith]

Linguica said:

This sounds like BS. URLs please.

I got it off a newspaper. You know, one of those rags of plant material printed with ink letters and pictures.

[Zaldron]

Oh yeah, newspapers never lie.

[dsm]

Zaldron said:

Oh yeah, newspapers never lie.

And neither do info on the net.

[Scientist]

Mankinds purpose is the same as any other life form:
Reproduction (passing on the genes)

[fodders]

Little Faith said:

Weirdly enough (and slightly gaming-related) young people in Japan with a peculiar mutation have been sighted. The mutation grants increased mobility and greater rotation of the thumb. People with the mutation are also more likely to use the thumb for various operations where other people would use the second or the third digit.

How exactly this mutation has developed is a mystery. The mutation seems clealy as an act of evolution adapting the individual to it's environment (which includes more thumb-operated devices). But the conditions that has warranted it's necessity has appeared in the cause of a single generation and the survival of the individual is hardly at stakes in the business. Therefore it cannot really be the effect of any Darwinian systems.

Such cases might be evidence that we don't really know how evolutions happens at all. In fact the only thing we know about evolution is that it appears to alter creatures so that they fit their surroundings better.

I saw that report, all it was saying was that because young Japanese use txt msg on their phones so much, their thumbs are becoming more flexible, NOT a mutant gene.

In a quiet technology-driven change, young Japanese are developing hyperagile thumbs, the fruit of childhoods spent furiously thumbing hand-held computer games and now young adulthoods spent thumbing out e-mail messages on cell phone key pads.
.
"Their thumbs have become bigger, more muscular," said Sadie Plant, author of a new report of "On the Mobile," (PDF) a study financed by Motorola of cell phone habits of people in eight major world cities. Talking from Birmingham, England, she said that Japan's oya yubi sedai, or thumb generation, was "the most advanced in the world."

[Little Faith]

Bacteria Control the evolution game.

They use open source.

[Black]

Humanity no longer has a purpose. To the world we are the equivalent of cancer. To each other we are all misanthophic 'ants' that try to create a purpose in vain. Anything and everything people believe in has all become shit. If you don't believe me then take my test:

Take anything you feel is important (purpose orientated), then think of how the world would be without it. Do you think the world would stop? I didn't think so.

I would have agreed that our purpose was to reproduce/pass down the genes, etc., but now that we have cloning, where a human being can be created more or less at will, that seems trivial. Everything is wrong but we pretend everything is right. I guess that we are all just worthless things with irrelevant apitudes that try to fill this void between birth and death with what we call purpose. Then when we really think about it, our purpose isn't really a purpose. It's just a 'filler'. Leave it to the human mind to glorify everything. Even itself.

The King of Thieves,
Black

[Black]

One other thing... Do you think that humanity could ever achieve perfection? You might as well throw away "to become better" because things aren't getting better, just more complicated.

The King of Thieves,
Black

[Spike]

In all honesty, the human race will destroy itself long before we evolve THAT far. Our nature is too animalistic - after all, we're just animals that can reason.

[Black]

Technically.

Black

[Sharessa]

WE'RE ALL MONKEYS

[Black]

True.

: )

Black

[Little Faith]

Perhaps humanity is one of those great cataclysms that scours the biosphere periodically and kills off most life in order for the evolution to take a new turn. (Like the great unknown calamity that eliminated the synapsids and the great meteor that did an end to the dinosaurs).