Yawning isn't just for flushing the lungs of CO2, it's also for sucking colder air up into the sinus cavity to meet the blood/brain barrier and cool your frontal lobes. |
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Yawning isn't just for flushing the lungs of CO2, it's also for sucking colder air up into the sinus cavity to meet the blood/brain barrier and cool your frontal lobes. |
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A lot of these questions seem simple on the surface, but I wonder how simple they really are. I'll bet they mostly have fairly simple functional answers, but to be fully explained I bet would be very, very complex. You could probably just keep asking questions about them and going back further and further into the complexities of the function of nature. You speak of consciousness, you must understand how it works, how the brain works, how the molecules of the brain interact and why they interact that way. To understand that, you must understand why the atoms of the molecules cause them to behave like they do. To understand that, you must understand the subatomic particles, etc. To understand fully where the sock goes and why it went there, you have to understand the dynamics of the sock, the specific properties of the material it's made of and every material it comes into contact with including your own self; You'd have to likewise understand your own behavior, then, and subsequently all the mind and molecule stuff I just said. It makes you wonder; Could, theoretically, the entire function of the history of all nature and the universe be inferred from a single missing sock? |
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Fuck all this "consciousness and free will" stuff. I want to know about INSTINCT. |
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Still can't WILD........
Look at it this way: Mother birds that were less inclined to guard their eggs had them eaten by predatory species, hence they didnt have as many children, and their lines died out. Mother birds that had genes which coded for more maternal nurturing behaviour towards eggs would ensure their eggs survived maturation, so their offspring would live, passing on the genes for being more maternal to their own eggs. |
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Dude...i think you misunderstood me. |
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Still can't WILD........
I don't see how genes which happen to code for instinctual behavior should be any more or less baffling than genes which code for any other feature. Behavior is biologically based just like everything else, so genes that subtly affect brain chemistry will have behavioral consequences. Coding for a specific, precise behavior isn't any more wondrous than coding for the specific, precise shape of one's ears, intestinal track, or whatever. (Although you could say, and I would agree, that both are pretty extraordinary.) |
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DuB, I don't think he is questioning how it comes about, I think he is questioning the actual mechanism that leads from amino acids to complex behavior. I think you might agree that this is at least a little more mysterious than a shape arising from a code. |
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Art
The ability to happily respond to any adversity is the divine.
Dream Journal Shaman Apprentice Chronicles
Art
The ability to happily respond to any adversity is the divine.
Dream Journal Shaman Apprentice Chronicles
Here are some good places for you to start: |
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Alright. Thats what I figured you'd do. Behavioral genetics is much more complicated than the genetics of physical attributes. We have been able to splice genes that alter the animal's appearance but we have not been able to decide behavior based on gene splicing. |
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Art
The ability to happily respond to any adversity is the divine.
Dream Journal Shaman Apprentice Chronicles
More complicated? Maybe mathematically. (Some pretty hardcore statistics get thrown around by those guys.) But it's the same basic process. It's no more "mysterious" than the genetics of eye color, it just takes longer. It's only mysterious to the extent that behavior itself is mysterious--which it undoubtedly is. If behavior is what you guys are talking about, then say behavior, not the genetics underlying instinctual behavior, because that's just genetics. |
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I'm just going to have to continue to disagree with you. The behavior is complex, no doubt about it. But the specific combinations of genes that control specific behaviors are more varied than the specific combinations of genes that control specific physical attributes. That is pretty much the definition of 'more complex'. Not only that, but there is a much larger argument for the role that 'nurture' plays in behavior than there is for physical attributes. Physical attributes are affected by the environment in early development, but are pretty much set beyond that, whereas behavior is altered pretty significantly by environment throughout development and into adult life. |
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Art
The ability to happily respond to any adversity is the divine.
Dream Journal Shaman Apprentice Chronicles
The variance in relationships between gene combinations and behavior and the shifting role of environment are mathematical problems, not conceptual ones, and as I admitted earlier, no one's denying that behavioral genetics is more mathematically complex than other fields of genetics. But the point is that both can be explained using the same set of scientific tools. You're not going to find any behavioral geneticists who think that the genes they study are any more mysterious than the genes that other geneticists study, because they're not. |
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I can't think of anything simple that isn't just as easily explained... |
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Jfk |
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Why dogs kill themselves by jumping off the overtoun bridge in Scotland. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtoun_Bridge |
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A lot of the traits that we see in humans are also seen in some aspect in various other animals on the planet, so why aren't there any other known species with a spoken language? |
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Art
The ability to happily respond to any adversity is the divine.
Dream Journal Shaman Apprentice Chronicles
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