Humans

[Jet Black]

why do humans have so many pointless animal reflexes and instincts if we aren't animals?

 

[Late_Cretaceous]

Oh come on now, surely someday man will find a use for being able to wiggle his ears.

 

[JohnR7]

why do humans have so many pointless animal reflexes and instincts if we aren't animals?

There is nothing pointless about them. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. All the work of God's hand's brings Him praise, honor and glory.

Psalm 139:14
I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Marvelous are Your works,
And that my soul knows very well.

 

[worship4ever]

Flip that question around, why do animals have so many pointless reflexes as man does. A Man has a conscience, knows right from wrong, it can love, love just isnt a chemical in our brain being released when we find someone compatable. Man and animals are differnet

 

[Siliconaut]

@worshi4ever:

Flip that question around, why do animals have so many pointless reflexes as man does. A Man has a conscience, knows right from wrong, it can love, love just isnt a chemical in our brain being released when we find someone compatable. Man and animals are differnet

Sorry, but there you go again on an ill-informed track of misunderstanding: Consicence, the ability of knowing right from wrong and the different kinds of love are a synthesis of biological factors and socialisation.

Conscience and knowing right from wrong are defined by the culture you grow up in - they are not inherent in humans and not the same all over the world. In some cultures, it is right to eat the enemy, others mightily frown upon it. In some cultures, cunningly cheating in daily affairs is considered virtuous, in ours, it is not. Dogs clearly can have a bad conscience - "bad" deeds are followed by reprisals, and most dogs I knew knew about that concept...

What we call love IS strongly related to fluctuations in our body chemistry - the same mechanisms have been detected in different animals and serve a simple purpose: In order to successfully spread your DNA, it is often preferable to have a partner who will care for you and your offspring. This partner may not normally be willing to enter that role, so the body chemistry kicks in and creates a powerful (and mostly timed) bond between them. The decrease of production of aforementioned chemical coincides with a loss of interest in the current partner and heightened awareness of other potential sexual partners.

I really don't see how - given all the data we have - you can come to the conclusion that we are so different from animals, when their heritage is so plainly visible in our minds and bodies...

 

[lucaspa]

Flip that question around, why do animals have so many pointless reflexes as man does. A Man has a conscience, knows right from wrong, it can love, love just isnt a chemical in our brain being released when we find someone compatable. Man and animals are differnet

Different? Man has the ability to make tools to make tools. That gives us our technology. But that really isn't the major difference you are looking for.

Every time we try to find something that we absolutely have and animals don't we find that animals also have it, only to a lesser degree. A matter of quantity, not quality.

Take your "conscience". 10. MD Hauser, Morals, apes, and us. Discover 21: 50-55, Feb. 2000.Summarizes some studies in monkeys to determine if they have moral behavior. They do. Sometimes the monkeys were much more moral than humans in the same situations. Wouldn't you say that implies a conscience?

As to love, many species mate for life. Isn't that love?

 

[Duane Morse]

Maybe we are the way we are because it is the most efficient way to survive in the world we live in.
We are very adaptable. So what we may see as useless today may not have been in the past, nor may it be in the future.
Maybe it is the bagage of useless things we keep with us that keeps us from becoming extinct.

 

[Jet Black]

Flip that question around, why do animals have so many pointless reflexes as man does. A Man has a conscience, knows right from wrong, it can love, love just isnt a chemical in our brain being released when we find someone compatable. Man and animals are differnet

no, the pointless reflexes are the ones that really primitive humans have and would have needed to survive, ones that we no longer need because we are sapient.

 

[Jet Black]

Maybe we are the way we are because it is the most efficient way to survive in the world we live in.
We are very adaptable. So what we may see as useless today may not have been in the past, nor may it be in the future.
Maybe it is the bagage of useless things we keep with us that keeps us from becoming extinct.

like babies walking reflex.

 

[Duane Morse]

But why try and nit-pick the things that are not understood or liked?

Yes, like the babies walking reflex. Maybe babies are not able to get around by themselves as well as other animals to give more of a family bond, or because we are more complex so certain things take longer to develop. If babies were grown enough to walk correctly when they came out, it would kill the mother in the process, if not before.

My wife has had two with a third on the way, and by the time she is ready to give birth she is about ready to POP it seems like.

Different animal forms, different development rates.
We can understand complex instructions and speak with complex language, and written for that matter, sooner than any other animal form I can think of.

There seem to be tradeoffs, and the babies walking reflex may be one of them.

 

[JohnR7]

no, the pointless reflexes are the ones that really primitive humans have and would have needed to survive, ones that we no longer need because we are sapient.

If you believe that we got some swamp land, err I mean some prime real estate in Flordia we can get you a real good deal on.

 

[Jet Black]

go and read prof lord Robert Winston's "Human Instinct"

 

[lucaspa]

Maybe we are the way we are because it is the most efficient way to survive in the world we live in.
We are very adaptable. So what we may see as useless today may not have been in the past, nor may it be in the future.
Maybe it is the bagage of useless things we keep with us that keeps us from becoming extinct.

I think you are using "adaptable" as developmentally, technologically, or culturally, not in terms of evolution.

The problem is that some of our features, such as the intervertebral discs, are NOT optimally adapted for how we live today. They are still adapted to being a quadruped like our remote ancestors.

And yes, it is possible that, if the environment changes, some useless allele will become very useful later. In fact, that has happened with HIV. There are a few people with a modified immune system that is selectively neutral, but protects against HIV infection. If we did not artificially protect against HIV by condoms, then this allele could easily become fixed in the population because only people with the allele would survive to have kids.

 

[lucaspa]

But why try and nit-pick the things that are not understood or liked?

Different animal forms, different development rates.
We can understand complex instructions and speak with complex language, and written for that matter, sooner than any other animal form I can think of.

How do you know this? Can you speak dolphinese or humpback whale language? This statement only makes sense if we can speak the language to see whether complex language is being used and whether complex instructions are being followed. Since we can't do that with other species, we really don't know.

 

[JohnR7]

go and read prof lord Robert Winston's "Human Instinct"

I looked at some of the reviews for it on Amazon dot com. Sounds like you could put that on the shelf next to Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. It maybe interesting reading for some people, but you only talking about a fallen human race so that makes it pretty worthless in the long run. What we need to study is God's plan of redemption. We need to study the people that God wants us to be and how the Holy Spirit can do a work in us to transform us.

No matter how good you understand man and his fallen nature, it does not profit you in the long run. We need to begin to understand what a redeemed and restored human being are to be. We need to study Adam and Eve Before the fall, and we need to study the life of Jesus, because He came to set an example of how we all should live our life. He can to show us the sort of person that God wants and desires for us to be.

Of course if your a business man, there can be a short term profit if you understand human nature and how to get people to give you their money. But there is no long lasting benifit, only short term.

 

[Siliconaut]

John, why don't you answer the points raised and stop picking a quote at random while ignoring everything else? I severely doubt this is the way your god would have wanted you to discuss - it simply sets a bad example.

Don't go running off on some wild tangent, just stick to the discussion at hand. If you have evidence that we do not share an amazing lot of baggage with animals, please bring it forward so we may study it.

 

[Duane Morse]

The whale and dolphin point is well taken, they do seem to have a complex language and intelligence.

But I also agree with JohnR7 that Man is not an evolved creature, but a created one that has gone down in stature, not up.

I personally do not doubt that the animals evolved, probably with direct intervention from God during certain periods. But I do believe that Man is a created being in the midst of that. So along that line of reasoning, it is possible that Mans genes have intermingled with some of the evolved creatures, for whatever reasons, and we may see some evidence of that in things like
"The problem is that some of our features, such as the intervertebral discs, are NOT optimally adapted for how we live today. They are still adapted to being a quadruped like our remote ancestors."
or they could have been designed that way from the beginning, for whatever reason.

 

[Siliconaut]

@Duane Morse:

I personally do not doubt that the animals evolved, probably with direct intervention from God during certain periods. But I do believe that Man is a created being in the midst of that. So along that line of reasoning, it is possible that Mans genes have intermingled with some of the evolved creatures, for whatever reasons, and we may see some evidence of that in things like...

Why take that illogical stance? Do you propose that Eve was rodgered by a quadruped and Adam had a go at wild geese?

You want to have it both ways: Animals evolved, but man is totally different, so we have to invent ways of "explaining" why we share so much of our genetic and physiological/mental makeup with animals.

This is one of the times when I think occam's razor does the trick.

 

[Duane Morse]

I do not think it is illogical. Adam was around during the creation of the animals. It is only if you must have a 24-hour day during the seven days of creation in Genesis 1 that it would only take one week as we measure time. But it does not appear to me to be so. Between day three when Adam was first formed and day six when reformed into Adam and Eve could very well have been millions or billions of years as we measure time. So Adam could have been created while the rest of the creation evolved.

And in the 2000 years between Adam and Eve and the flood many things could have occured, including selective breeding experiments between Man and some of the evolved life forms, maybe in the attempt to raise them to the level of Man.

I do know it is a lot of speculation, but that is what you all are doing when trying to figure things out like unused (seemingly) or unnecessary (seemingly) genes. Like we know all there is to know about our own genes, what they do, how they are dependant on each other from conception to death.

This whole thread is about speculating "why".

And tell me a logical reason why it can not be both ways, Man created and animals evolving? We are the only ones mentioned as being in the image of God, so we are unique. And our history proves us to be unique on this planet. For whatever reason.

 

[Siliconaut]

A good reason? Because it flies in the face of all the facts? Because your hypothesis is contradictory to the established, timed evolution of our ancestors over cro-magnon into homo sapiens sapiens (breeding experiments simply would not account for the gradual appearance of sapiens sapiens features BEFORE it was even around to breed with...)?

When I say we have unused genes, it's not so much speculation, but a pretty reliable guess based on what the mapping of our genome (and those of other species) have shown. True - we don't know the function of all genes, but we do know a few who aren't being expressed (meaning "remaining unused") at all.

Your speculation doesn't have data supporting it - or is there any place in the bible where breeding experiments between man and animal were mentioned (especially before man appeared on the scene)?