Can I have a brief roll-call of who will/may be attending the Convention this month? I was thinking of a party.Also — would the existence of said party influence your decision to come?
Can I have a brief roll-call of who will/may be attending the Convention this month? I was thinking of a party.Also — would the existence of said party influence your decision to come?
Quantum,
Just to make some comments…
No we didn’t. Chimpanzees and modern humans share a common ancestor five to eight million years ago. We didn’t evolve from chimps.
Huh?
I disagree. I think worship (in its most accepted definition) is a solely human trait.
That behavior is not clearly universal in the animal kingdom. Especially since the VAST MAJORITY of the animal kingdom never gets the opportunity to interact with a television so we can observe them and draw conclusions based upon their behavior.
How did you arrive at the conclusion that superstition comes out of “behavior learning”? From the information I’ve read, most researchers in the field of evolutionary psychology believe that the prevalence of superstition among all cultures is a product of our pattern-seeking minds. And that the specifics of the varying superstitions are largely cultural.
Making determinations as to what your dog thinks is a really big leap of assumption. It is just as likely that your dog is extremely intelligent, and is showing so by reacting to the television as you described. Whereas dogs that don’t react to a T.V. like yours aren’t even grasping the concept enough to react to it.
Just checked seeker’s long comment in a word window, and it was seven pages long.
funny though.
1) I could be wrong about my conjectures, they are my educated and/or extrapolated opinions from my own experiences. Anyhow, learning is the very act of reacting to external stimuli, if that external stimuli follows a pattern, then we learn to react in a counter-pattern so as to achieve a desired outcome. The more clear the signal is, and the less variables there are, the easier it is to learn something new. I’d say that is strictly behaviorial acting on evolutionary machinery.
2) I guess I got mixed up there, chimps are our closest living evolutionary relatives though, right?
3) One of my religious pals emailed me a video of a chimp wizzin’ in its own mouth. (I think it’s sickening to keep our closest living relatives locked up in a cage at a zoo, and I can see why the chimp did it … to get attention from the zoo visitors, that’s why)
4) Anyhow, worshipping and desire are one and the same. Animals desire stuff every bit as much as people do, they just don’t make a worship service out of it because they don’t know how and they lack the attention span.
Did someone say “party”? Count me in!