/sci/ - Science & Math

>>5776321
Like?

So you don't fall out of a tree.

There are stuff that's evolutionary neutral, ya know.

There is no evolutionary advantage to dreaming.

When we are asleep, our brains are processing short-term memory and are deciding what needs to be added to long-term memory.

Dreaming is simply the other parts of the brain not responsible for the process mentioned above attempting to decipher what is going on.

FMI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GGzc3x9WJU

>>5776322

Maybe dreaming?

Jesus fucking Christ. You've never heard that dreams are often the training grounds for real life situations?

What's the evolutionary to sleeping?

what is the evolutionary advantage of your mom?

#rekt

>>5776319
That sounds stupid. If you wake up from a bad dream you will be much more likely to fall from a tree than if you weren't dreaming in the first place.

>>5776322
Any mutation that does not lessen or increase natural selection -and- doesn't impair the ability to survive in an animals environment.

http://www.evolution.mbdojo.com/evolution-for-beginners.html

I fucking hate when people say "evolutionary advantage." Traits are selection against not for. For fuck's sake.

>>5776338
Yes, there are studies that evidence that in our dreams we often rehearse tasks from our waking lives, and in doing this gain proficiency at them. Sleep deprived individuals performing worse.

>>5776344
*evolutionary advantage

Fine then, what's the evolutionary disadvantage to not dreaming?

>>5776374
That's double negated you fool

>>5776374
>I asked a dumb question
>let me rephrase it even though it won't be any better

>>5776374
>training grounds

>>5776322
Homosexuals. You can't prove me wrong.

>>5776389
Hey! I'm OP and I definitely didn't post that. And again, it's the same question as it's just double negated.

>>5776397
That's the whole point of life.

what is the evolutionary advantage of having children

>>5776356
Any trait that increases fitness (such as a higher sex drive, to pluck the low hanging fruit) will be "selected for".

>>5776399
Love confirmed as the meaning of life
>b-but muh asexual reproduction
No. Love is just narcissism anyway.

>>5776391
It's the same question, that's why it's dumb.

Things die off because they can't survive. That's natural selection. Who cares if you dream or not, you're unconscious at the time anyway.

>>5776421
>>5776399
>That's the whole point of life.

no, thats the mean that life has to be continued.

the objective is to be happy, thats all we seek constantly. And love, understanding, having a clean mind, etc. are our means to get there.

I believe that analitical thinking about life is trying to explain what buddhism found.

>>5776490
That's what I meant. Happiness by way of love is the meaning of life.

>>5776510
What is the meaning of existence for a rock?

>>5776512
>confusing rocks with humanoids
ISHYGDDT

>>5776517
>discriminating other species
Fucking xenophobe.

dreaming might not have evolved. dreaming may simply be leftover action points in the game of genetics.

possibly dreaming is simply what a isolated brain does late at night for no evolutionary advantage, but to simply pass the time.

>>5776519
>implying
Sorry I just don't have a stone fetish

>>5776523
>2013
>not having a stone fetish

Oh jebus, this thread. Broscience everywhere.

Happiness is not an 'objective' but pleasure is an incentive to do things that are beneficial to the survival and propagation of our genes, that obviously extends into myriad ways and behaviours thanks to our social brains.

>>5776532
Okay... I laughed.
Fuck you.

>>Be sleeping
>>Have dream
>>Approach female
>>I want sex, saw you in dream
>>Sex

A cheap way of getting interdimensional, and or, time travels accomplished. You need a lot of energy and focus to remember it tho.

>implying there is a singular meaning to life, when meaning is a subjective experience projected onto external reality
>people think they know jack shit about why we dream

we don't.

>>5776595
http://psychologytoday.com/articles/200710/dreams-night-school
Also have you ever enjoyed a romance or fallen in love?

I recall seeing a documentary on the discovery channel or some such place where they explained it was your brain trying to solve various problems for you. This can be argued as its not uncommon to dream about activities you do regularly. Your brain is trying to make things easier for you when you wake up.

How often what you dream is actually applicable or helpful is another matter entirely.

>>5776600
>http://psychologytoday.com/articles/200710/dreams-night-school
interesting theory. i'll refute it by dismissing you as a faggot.
>Also have you ever enjoyed a romance or fallen in love?
Yes, but that doesn't make happiness the absolute meaning to life, when happiness is but one part of our emotional spectrum.

>>5776392
Isn't the current theory that homosexuals were an advantage to the overall fitness of a community?

As I understand it, a lot of dreams are the brain running through various future scenarios. It's like imagining how tomorrows challenge is going to be - how you will deal with it.
Thus, people who dream a lot tend to do better at any task they anticipated. In other words - they needed to know they will face a particular challenge AND dream about it.
Those who did not anticipate the challenge, or did not dream about it did demonstrably worse than those who anticipated the challenge AND was allowed to dream about it.

>>5776611
>i'll refute it by dismissing you as a faggot
How immature can you get?

what is the evolutionary advantage of masturbation?

>>5776625
wow, looks like someone has difficulty towards losing an argument.

>>5776634
Indeed you do

>>5776639
>I no u r but wut am I?
shouldn't you be busy with your coloring books?

>>5776645
>rebutting a tu quoque with a tu quoque
ISHYGDDT

>>5776656
>circular rhetoric
nigga u dumb

>>5776634

Third party here. I nearly spit my excessively sugary drink all over my laptop. Funny shit.

can i have sex and nine months later a baby on a dream? would that be enough evolutionary advantage?

>>5776613
You mean...men that thought like a woman but could do tasks better than women?

To quote Debbie Harry, AKA Blondie, "Dreaming is free."
See music video of "Dreaming."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjGvAI8eji0

>>5776350
So why do these mutations exist in the first place? Is it possible that we're just ignorant of their function or is your statement a legitimate scientific view?

>>5777498
Mutations occur from natural degradation, which is a normal thing in everything on this planet.

The evolutionary advantage of dreaming is that when you achieve true intelligent consciousness, you have to face the reality of suffering, death and entropy. Dreaming allows the intelligent mind to escape the raw abrasion of those truths.

Note well how many people in societies end up drunk or stoned for a lot of their lives. When you take sex, alcohol and drugs into account, and perhaps playing games and the like, the majority of people indulge in diversions, which are like dreams. Humans can't handle reality. They dream and drug themselves in response.

>>5776317
If you don't dream you will get bored, and then want to do something else.

I can't believe so many people don't even know why dreams are beneficial.

Holy christ the internet is a cesspool.

>>5776602
>Your brain is trying to make things easier for you
So I am separate from my brain? Maybe I do have a friend after all!

>>5776322
Like that blood is red
its not that its easier to detect wounds or anything, its just a random feature of hemoglobin

maybe dreaming is just a random byproduct of the way our brains work and not soemthing that had to be developed

>>5778381
>its not that its easier to detect wounds or anything,
Except, YES, it fucking well is. Red is the most striking colour in the visible spectrum.
>>>/b/

>>5778388
it's a coincidence moran

>>5778390
American detected.

>>5778390
>moran.
IRONY!

>>5778388
>Red is the most striking colour in the visible spectrum.
Says who?

>>5776358
Maybe sleep deprived individuals perform worse because they're sleep deprived, not because they aren't dreaming.

Why do dogs dream? If they don't dream, why do they sometimes run in their sleep? And why do they snap at me when I wake them up while they are running in their sleep? They never snapped at me otherwise.

Guessing it stops your brain from getting rusty while you're unconscious.

>>5776317
Is better saying that we need to find an animal who doesn't dream ro see if there's some advantages.

>>5776317
It's a big thought release. Your mind is letting off steam. We take in so much stuff every day, and it's become more and more as we've evolved and built more.
You take in so much information, so many faces, so many different colours every day that it is necessary for your mind to have a bit of a spaz and let go for a while.
Just my take on it, I know it probably isn't correct.

>>5776322
Like the grey color of brain tissue, or the fact that your heart muscle has a particular size etc. etc.

Plenty of facts in biology are just byproducts of something else, they don't exist because of some particular selective advantage.

I won't claim to know whether dreams are part some evolved trait, but you should dispense with the idea that for something to exist it must have some kind of evolutionary purpose. The great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote extensively on this kind of fallacious "adaptationist" thinking and gave many good empirical examples of biological traits and structures that were simply the byproducts of chemical and physical mechanisms related to development and so on, which were never themselves "selected for".

For example, your heart has a certain volume in order to pumpt a certain amount of blood. It may weigh maybe 300 to 600 grams as a consequence of the total amount of muscle, yet we wouldn't care to postulate that the "feature" of your heart that it weighs 600 grams, was ever directly selected for. It's a byproduct of the amount of muscle required to pump a certain amount of blood.

In this way, many "emergent phenomena" have no specific selective evolutionary purpose. Like the fact that your fingers prune when they get and stay wet for a while. Also no "reason" for this, it's just a byproduct of the features of the skin that cover your fingers that happens to them when they get wet.

Some features show clear adaptation, some clearly don't, and some are hard to tell. If you spend a lot of time thinking of a specific selective benefit for something but can't come up sith something credible, that's perfectly okay. Unless it has a considerable metabolic cost to the organism, the feature can perfectly well exist as a byproduct for a long time without selection acting on it.

>>5780180
>>There are a lot of animals that sleep half the brain at a time. Ducks do it, as one half of the brain is asleep the other is awake and it watches out of one eye for danger while the other is closed, one leg is standing, the other in sleep mode. Advantageous when they are side by side too so they can see in both directions between them when they're side to side. Dolphins sleep like this too.
Apparently humans used to before we looked anything like human, apparently once we started using burrows for shelter and could finally shut off the other half.

>tfw I have sex with many beautiful women in my dreams

hahahaha

>>5777069
I can't wait till qt traps take the place of women :3

>>5779882
to practice running

>>5776317

Is there? Dreaming might be a spandrel.

Were there not a reason, biproducts of helpful things would work too.

>>5776522
are you saying my brain gets bored when I'm sleeping? well I'm soooo fucking sorry Mr. brain, how can i better accommodate you?

>>5776336
I xd'ed

>>5777600
was going to say something along the lines of >cant handle reality so assumes no one else can, but then i just got sad because i realized you're right...

>>5780196
SJG was a fraud though. Adaptationism is valid in many cases. SJG hated EP because it debunked his left wing egalitarian bullshit, so he lied and lied.

>>5780903
If you had enabled your reading comprehension you'd have discovered I already said adaptations happen. Just not in any and all cases, so SJG was right.

0/10 troll on the EP and "fraud" thing.

a nigger stole my bike!