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OrgoneConclusion
Blue Fish Group



Registered: 04/01/07
Posts: 45,432
Loc: Under the C
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Ants vs. People
#14500869 - 05/23/11 07:39 PM (12 years, 9 months ago) |
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Crush an ant-hill and they will start rebuilding without more than a second's pause.
Flatten a human town with a tornado and you get days of hand-wringing and tears and prayers and should-haves, followed by months of counseling and an appearance on Oprah to get non-victims to empathise. A year or so later the humans will get back to rebuilding.
Hmmm, which is the better evolutionary adaption?
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4896744
Small Town Girl


Registered: 03/06/10
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Quote:
OrgoneConclusion said: Crush an ant-hill and they will start rebuilding without more than a second's pause.
Flatten a human town with a tornado and you get days of hand-wringing and tears and prayers and should-haves, followed by months of counseling and an appearance on Oprah to get non-victims to empathise. A year or so later the humans will get back to rebuilding.
Hmmm, which is the better evolutionary adaption?
Humans have greater potential to branch out to other solar systems, therefore creating the chance of us existing longer than our sun can support us.
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EternalCowabunga
Being of Great Significance


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Re: Ants vs. People [Re: 4896744]
#14501038 - 05/23/11 08:20 PM (12 years, 9 months ago) |
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I've been thinking about ants vs. people for a few days now
Consider this. If there is a gap between two spaces where a colony of ants want to travel to, a whole bunch of ants will martyr themselves by creating a bridge of ants to be stepped on and over, and those ants will fall to their death.
The human equivalent would be something like committing suicide so that we don't run out of resources.
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OrgoneConclusion
Blue Fish Group



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I accept your noble sacrifice. It will give me one extra kernel of corn over the next 5300 years.
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4896744
Small Town Girl


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I accept it too, but i ain't sacrificing shit.
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infectedstyle
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Re: Ants vs. People [Re: 4896744]
#14502612 - 05/24/11 01:53 AM (12 years, 9 months ago) |
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The ant knows that when the ant dies the mind does not die with the body. That's why they don't need tears/prayer/oprah to comfort themselves.
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OrgoneConclusion
Blue Fish Group



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Tell me more about this fabled Ant-Jesus.
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Sleepwalker
Overshoes

Registered: 05/07/08
Posts: 5,503
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Quote:
infectedstyle said: The ant knows that when the ant dies the mind does not die with the body. That's why they don't need tears/prayer/oprah to comfort themselves.
The ant is probably not self-reflective enough to realize it's going to die in the first place. I think you're grasping at the right strings but pulling them in the wrong direction.
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infectedstyle
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Yeah i don't really think the ant is smart enough to realize . But if you put this into the human context you can see how knowledge of the afterlife would aid us in not being so overly emotional when people die
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racheltom
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Mod Edit: Don't spam our forum.
Edited by Diploid (05/25/11 11:21 AM)
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johnm214


Registered: 05/31/07
Posts: 17,582
Loc: Americas
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Quote:
EternalCowabunga said: I've been thinking about ants vs. people for a few days now
Consider this. If there is a gap between two spaces where a colony of ants want to travel to, a whole bunch of ants will martyr themselves by creating a bridge of ants to be stepped on and over, and those ants will fall to their death.
Is the observed behavior just as well explained by ants being stupid and not realizing the path they set out on will result in their deaths? Seems the explanation you offer may be a bit more grandiose than the behavior justifies, please correct me if I'm wrong.
It would seem to me that no more sophisticated behavioral traits than a collective urge to travel to the particular destination need be invoked to explain the behavior. As the ants live in a common area, they will of course walk along a common path, and those that die on the trip will be located between the two points whether their death serves a useful function or not. It seems a decent amount of anthropomorphism is required to turn ths situation into one of martyrdom and building. Is there some other evidence for this?
What kind of gaps are these, by the way, that ants are dieing by going over yet capable of being bridged/filled by ant carcasses? I could imagine wet ground, but anything else seems difficult to picture.Quote:
OrgoneConclusion said: Crush an ant-hill and they will start rebuilding without more than a second's pause.
Flatten a human town with a tornado and you get days of hand-wringing and tears and prayers and should-haves, followed by months of counseling and an appearance on Oprah to get non-victims to empathise. A year or so later the humans will get back to rebuilding.
Hmmm, which is the better evolutionary adaption?
For who? Ants and people are different. Ants are small, people are big. Ants reproduce more quickly and in greater numbers. For ants to have a highly developed sense of empathy and other emotional functions would seem to be difficult to justify in terms of cost given the ease with which they can be replaced and the relatively small resources lost through the death of an ant in a colony.
For people, on the other hand, they have both higher needs, longer times to sexual maturity, lower birthrates, and requires commited child rearing during the early years. As such, it would be likely wasteful fr a human to not be concerned about hazardous situations and danger to their young as the loss of a child represents the loss of a great deal of resources and is a much higher burden to the community's survival- whether in a hunter gatherer pack or an agricultural community. The empathy we feel and emotional attachment to the young both ensures great care is taken to protect the investment that is the group's young and helps ensure communal survival as the mother is unlikely to be able to work much while pregnant nor will the child be able to produce his own food, and thus the future of the group, or species as a whole, depends on the social fitness of the group and its ability to depend on one another to meet the needs of each other. Without empathy and such emotions, the drive to assist the mother with young at your one expense would not be there and the species would not do as well. The ants, ont he other hand, have craploads of eggs all the time with much less investment in a given individual, even relative to the numbers.
The moral here, of course, is that ants are selfish bitches.
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Simms
Fuckwit


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Quote:
infectedstyle said: The ant knows that when the ant dies the mind does not die with the body. That's why they don't need tears/prayer/oprah to comfort themselves.
What?
Even if it is true, it still sucks, because you will remember your death.
It is much better to think about that the ant will kill itself for the greater good, and since there is no life beyond that, it will dissapear and there is no pity, no regret. But the ant probably won't think of that either.
Maybe worker ants are biological probes? And humans are just a bit more complex biological probes?
Some of you suggest that if humans were more knowledgeable of the afterlife, then we would not feel so much pity... Grow a sack of balls. Why not just praise death instead? Or why not praise nothing?
If someone dies, he dies, he lived his life, died, and thats it, just like you are going to do one day. No pity, no mercy, no judgement, dead people can not feel.
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Edited by Simms (05/24/11 06:32 AM)
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MushroomTrip
Dr. Teasy Thighs



Registered: 12/02/05
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Quote:
OrgoneConclusion said: Crush an ant-hill and they will start rebuilding without more than a second's pause.
Flatten a human town with a tornado and you get days of hand-wringing and tears and prayers and should-haves, followed by months of counseling and an appearance on Oprah to get non-victims to empathise. A year or so later the humans will get back to rebuilding.
Hmmm, which is the better evolutionary adaption?
What sould be the evolutionary purpose here?
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   All this time I've loved you And never known your face All this time I've missed you And searched this human race Here is true peace Here my heart knows calm Safe in your soul Bathed in your sighs
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OrgoneConclusion
Blue Fish Group



Registered: 04/01/07
Posts: 45,432
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To grieve for a moment then get back to living; not to become near-paralyzed.
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MushroomTrip
Dr. Teasy Thighs



Registered: 12/02/05
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Sounds nice, but who ever said that this is an evolutionary purpose?
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   All this time I've loved you And never known your face All this time I've missed you And searched this human race Here is true peace Here my heart knows calm Safe in your soul Bathed in your sighs
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4896744
Small Town Girl


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Quote:
MushroomTrip said: Sounds nice, but who ever said that this is an evolutionary purpose?
What do you mean by "evolutionary purpose"?
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