/sci/ - Science & Math

They're called black people, and it was caused by white oppression.

>>8890687
We are apes.

You aren't an hyperborean super race developed by aliens.

>>8890709
So why aren't apes using at least bows and arrows by now?

>>8890718
There is no evolutionary pressure for them to do so.

>>8890726
And there is for us?

>>8890718
There's nothing to create incentive for it. Unarmed apes can still eat and mate just fine. Apes could probably use a bow and arrow just fine if handed them and demonstrated, but they lack the intelligence to assemble one or conceptualize one. The question is whether or not they really need to.

>>8890718

Because they're developing superconductors. That guy literally just said we are apes and you ignored him completely but responded anyway. Are you dumb?

>>8890727
Yes. Millions of years of natural selection resulted in a smaller, weaker, hairless ape with bipedal locomotion and a larger brain. We found success in tools having brainpower to develop them and hands free to use them.

Have the intelligence of apes changed in the last few millenniums?

>>8890734

Yes, see humans

>>8890687
complex language and abstract reasoning

>>8890736
>humans are apes
>but we're also not apes

>>8890741
>>but we're also not apes

Who said that?

>>8890744
>apes developed technology
>however, apes didn't develop technology
Which one is it now

>>8890732
Ok but how the F did we survive those millions of years if we were essentially getting weaker and weaker.

Some kind of weird bootstrap logic right there.

>>8890745
>however, apes didn't develop technology

Who said that?

>>8890747
Prodecural development. Our capacity to communicate and use tools developed as our strength and size diminished. One came to replace the other. A couple monkeys armed with big sticks who know what they're doing could beat the fuck out of a gorilla.

>>8890718
Supposedly Apes are entering into or already are in the stone age.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150818-chimps-living-in-the-stone-age

Hey /sci/ I used to be a brainlet but I'm movin on up.

>>8890687
Evolutionary pressure to develop intelligence
+
Ability to manipulate objects with precision
+
Access to fire
=
Sentience

Octopi, Chimpanzees, Crows, Elephants are all realtively intelligent species. Dolphins in fact could be argued to be very close in intelligence to Humans, if not even smarter, and would be prime candidates for uplifting.

So this suggests intelligence is not such a rare miracle, but something that can arise due to evolutionary pressures.

Sentience, on the other hand, is much more rare since it needs the 3 factors outlined above.

>>8892228
cuttlefish > octopie

>>8892191
If mere tool use is required to say they live in the stone age, then chimps are already in the iron age. Belgian imperialists taught chimps in the Congo to use machetes.

Tool use is not sufficient to say they're in X age, they need to be able to manufacture tools.

>>8892249
Holy fuck you are retarded.

The crude tools they encountered were manufactured by the chimpanzees themselves fucktard.

>>8890687
cuz apes r dumb

>>8892237
>octopi*
Alternatively, octopuses or octopodes find usage in English as plural forms of octopus.

>>8890687
why are some of the lines so squiggly

what's the point

>>8892261
i like the idea of several octopuses being called an octopie

>>8890718
they're christians

>>8890718
Because if a small group of them evolved then they wouldn't be apes anymore.

>>8890718
We do it all the time, we even do it in the Olympics. I don't get the question.

>>8890747
We made tools the entire time. Judging from your responses though not all of us evolved far beyond the stage of knuckle dragger.

>>8890753
But why?
What was the pressure to become weaker and smarter?

>>8890687
Everyone here is missing the point

If the smartest human was the equivalent of the tardest Downs, we'd still have become the dominant species

If you can make fire and sharpen a stick, then you can kill anything.

Modern humans are far smarter than that.
The reason for this excessive amount of intelligence is unknown, but like everything else excessive in nature (e.g. peacock tails), it's probably due to sexual selection.

>>8892518
A possibility is that dwindling food supplies led to only apes who were capable of thinking ahead to their next meal being the ones to survive to the next generations.

A smarter, perhaps also weaker ape who stores food, and guards food with his co-operative family groups would be far less likely to starve than an ape who searches for food only when he is hungry.

Once these co-operative family groups appeared, and homo sapien's ancestors moved away from plentiful food and water sources, the pressure to think ahead to the next day, month, year, etc. also became greater. That humans generally mate for life, or at least intentionally very long-term, shows how females and males would sexually select only those mates who were capable of providing in the long term, defending their group, planning, etc. Competition from other proto-sapiens also played a significant part, especially as remembering and managing vegetative food sources slowly turned into large-scale agricultural societies, which, combined with the ability to craft weapons and homes, freed humans from any significant evolutionary pressures indefinitely, and allowed the formation of the 'non-producing' members of society, who now had enough free time to forget about managing crops and begin managing other people, building roads, making inventions, etc.

The nutritional abundance that came with farming and herding also allowed for the brain and other parts of the body to grow further than necessary, and war, culture, and economy keeps most people from becoming complacent from the easy food and shelter available to our species, and incentivises humans to strive for improvement.

>>8892559
That's making a lot of assumptions
For one, you're assuming that modern level intellect is required to survive a food crisis. If modern chimps were a modicum more intelligent, just enough to develop spears, they'd overrun all of Africa.
We're far far too smart to be just a response to environmental pressures.
The intelligence to make sharp sticks is all it takes.

Your second idea with regards to farming is also faulty.
Not just by supposition but by real facts
Modern humans have been painting on walls and making tools and art for a lot longer than farming has existed.
Farming is fucking recent
Anatomical modern humans have existed for 10X longer than farming.

>>8892563
>if modern chimps were a modicum more intelligent, just enough to develop spears, they'd overrun all of Africa
But isn't this exactly what happened? One variety of intelligent chimp proved successful and overrun literally everywhere. It's entirely likely there were more apes with potential in intelligence back then, but homo sapiens hunted them or out-hunted them to extinction. This would mean that the only apes today descended from species that stayed away from or posed no threat to homo sapiens.

The pressure from this explosion of other proto-humans likely was why groups were pushed farther away from their homelands. There just wasn't enough room for this exploding population, and if they got to close to each other they'd probably chuck spears and kill each other. This expansion led to varieties of proto-human who were incentivised to manage their food.

agriculture may be recent, but the idea of following/maintaining herds is ancient. humans are well suited to this due to our endurance and foresight, tracking and remembering the motions of animals and herds. Domestication also plays a role in this, hunting animals predate recorded history as well.

All these are examples of how intelligence may have developed and impacted the way humans lived. We have few traces of truly ancient human cultures because they no doubt were a migratory race who found the most success following flocks/herds/families of animals and occasionally dabbling in art.

farming isn't the only way to manage your food supply, and it takes a lot of skill and knowledge to learn to singlehandedly provide for yourself without foraging or migrating

>>8892613
You're describing a moshpit of evolution
Like there was a bunch of apes that speciated a bunch of times in a local environment and only the smartest survived.
But we don't have evidence of that
Hominids walked
That's our thing, right?

If there was pressure in a location, they'd just walk away.

Erectus made it all the way to Java
Shit, he may have made it to America too.

Your idea of a tight environment of hominids fighting each other and using intelligence to reign doesn't make sense when you consider how wide ape fossils go.

As for your herd maintenance shit, it doesn't hold water when we look at real nomadic tribes
When Europeans came to America, they found Native still using cliffs to kill thousands of buffalo.
There was no preservation there

>>8890687
>while apes didn't move past using sticks?
but we did.

>>8892633
There was pressure. It's the reason Neanderthals went extinct. If moving out was so easy they would have done so.

Instead they stayed in Europe to be outcompeted and hunted down by H. Sapiens.

>>8890687
Because God made us special.

>>8892518
Not quite as detailed as the other anon, but I would assume that if one species starts to gain the ability to develop tools, the benefits of a more developed brain (better tools, better communication, finer motor skills) outweighed the benefits of strength, and so the species ends up "reallocating" the limited nutrients available to invest in the more developed brain

>>8890687
Energy advantage, hominids are really good at getting food which eventually freed up power for the brain and led to a cycle of each generation promoting more and more intelligence.

>>8892228
>if not even smarter
If dolphins are so smart then why do they get killed by obvious nets?
Mankind: 1
Fish mammals: Fucking NOTHING

>>8892559
Weaker apes are also more efficient, because if you can use tools you do not need to pay the price of up-keeping a ton of muscle mass.

>>8892406
Space management? There's also layers upon layers of connections on these.

>>8893046
They have intelligence but no culture or knowledge to speak of. They are basically in the stone age, using primitive tools like sponges and lacking opposable thumbs to develop anything else.

Some argue that if we could manage communicate with them and help them develop and teach them a complex language, they could be uplifted.

All the signs of intelligence are otherwise there - Dolphins have one of the highest brain-to-body mass ratios in the animal world, engage in tool use like sponges to scout for food, learning & technology transfer (parents teach children to use tools, it's not an instinctive behaviour), they herd fish, pass the mirror self-cognition test, mourn their dead, fall in love, can follow orders and complex commands, have sex for pleasure and not only reproduction, and so on...

>>8892191
Wow monkeys are going to become civilized before black people

>>8892249
>I gave my cat a cat toy, so now he's in the pre-industrial era

>>8890687
>we
Most people couldn't develop those, so they might as well be apes

>>8892559
So what you are saying is, Humanity got to the stage its at now, in order to ward of death and get max comfy?

And that we will eventually try to ward off death of the universe by increasing our technology and others parts of life

>>8890687
>How come we were able to develop this

Making rocks calculate isn't that impressive on the grand scale.

If roasties selected for intelligence for millions of years how come I don't have a gf?

>>8890718
because they all end up in brazilian cooking pots before achieving this

>>8893481
Yeah, since that's so common in the universe

>>8890687
Language, division of labor, specialization and trade. Those are the main ingredients.

>>8892524
>If you can make fire and sharpen a stick, then you can kill anything.
>>8892228
>Access to fire
Several hominids learned to tame fire. Apart from homo sapiens all of them died out.
Fire is a boon but not at all decisive.

>>8890687
It's because some men have decided to let go of women and pursue passions.

Animals let their sexual desire control them.

We must let the intellect rule and our desire fade.

>>8890687
because I'm fucking better than you.

>>8893816
abstraction capability
better understanding of cause/effect
better mnemonic capability

>>8893262
>wasting space by making connections take unnecessary turns all over the place
>space management

>>8893926
>abstraction capability
Hard to estimate or even devise a system of finding out how this contributes. Therefore unknown.

>better understanding of cause/effect
Animals can do that just as well.

>better mnemonic capability
Animals can do this better than humans.

Why are we so vastly superior to all life on Earth?

Nothing even comes close to our greatness, why are animals so retarded?

>>8894012
Opression

>>8893291
>You will never genetically engineer a race of dolphins with hands

>>8893834
>Several hominids learned to tame fire. Apart from homo sapiens all of them died out.
Yes but they were sapient hominids.
I was listing the requisites for sapience.
Whether they died out or not is irrelevant.
They got there.

>>8890745
"apes" isn't a species you retard it's a grouping containing hundreds of species. Which has several supergroupings and subgroupings, humans are apes.

Makes one feel all high and mighty doesn't it?

Don't get too cocky. There's probably a species out there that has outdone us by lightyears.

>>8893980
>Animals can do that just as well
Most cats can't even understand that the human is the one moving a watering hose and that its not just a giant snake monster.

>>8890732

t. Mad nigger

>>8890687
Jesus. Obviously.

>>8892228
>Dolphins in fact could be argued to be very close in intelligence to Humans, if not even smarter, and would be prime candidates for uplifting.

Is it even possible for two sapient, tool using species to coexist and compete for a long time frame? It seems like it's an impossible balance to maintain.

>>8896498

whenever humanoids started to branch off into subspecies it seems like a convergence episode happened between them

>>8894848
>I was listing the requisites for sapience.
Then you failed answering OP's question.

>>8890687
Autistic attraction to shapes and symbols.

>>8890687
The ability to imitate each other/learn from each other.

>>8892214
what site?

>>8890687
>How come we were able to develop this while apes didn't move past using sticks?

Cuz they was kangz n sheeet.

Their warm climates, inbreeding, poor nutrition, inability to master their environment, low position on the food chain, culture based on rudimentary mud huts, hand tools, and oral traditions limited their ability to work with microprocessors or conduct complex business negotiations with bankers in Zürich.

>>8890728
What was different for us?

>>8897110
Less hunting and more mating.

>>8890687
This is a silly question to ask. It will happen over time. Humans are more evolved than apes but they'll also get where we did eventually. By then, humans will be even more smarter.

>>8896699

shahschool.org

>>8890747
Monkeys live in trees you turbotard.