Posts by ruggedraven36

Harold Doyle3 said:It's simple natural selection. It makes sense as long as it favors survival. Anything that doesn't tip the scales toward staying alive loses its purpose, and nature just tosses it in the trash.

Ethan Gomez82 said:Exactly. It usually takes some time to play out. Nature might even weed out the philosophers next. Who knows.🙄

You two are looking at nature like some kind of dictator. Just like a tyrant wipes out anyone who won't fall in line, that's how your "nature" works. If one thing doesn't deserve respect, then neither does the other.

Harold Doyle3 said:It only makes sense if you can adapt.

Whenever people start rambling about "meaning," you’ve gotta ask—meaning for whom? At the end of the day, you're the only one sitting in the driver's seat who gets to decide if your life actually matters. If you feel like it doesn't, then even your own survival instinct is basically pointless. Nobody else gets a vote in that.

Sam Martinez9 said:Are you suggesting that the survival instinct alone should be enough to keep an organism from dying? It seems a bit optimistic. What happens if a boulder falls on them? Or take the people of Pompeii—they were lost to a volcanic eruption; how exactly was their instinct for self-preservation supposed to save them then?

That’s the question, isn't it? It feels like survival instinct only actually works if you're some kind of all-powerful deity.

"A hunger for life" sounds way more meaningful than just some "survival instinct"—at least when you're talking about people.

According to Freudian psychoanalytic theory, there's this instinct that works directly against our survival drive—it's called the death instinct.

Amy Howard18 said:Recognizing how absurdly fleeting life is... that realization should really push us to think deeper about all of this. Maybe what we're experiencing isn't the whole story:
Because if everything is destined to end, then why bother having a beginning at all?

Look, every story—from a Hollywood blockbuster to the mess of our own lives—has a beginning and an end. That doesn't make the story meaningless just because it finishes. It’s the middle part—the aimless drifting in between—that usually makes the whole thing feel pointless.

Harold Doyle3 said:That goes for you too.

To all sounds the same to me—I don't see any real difference. One is just being uninformed, whereas you? You're just being intentionally dense.

Harold Doyle3 said:Yeah... just the gays themselves!

If you want to spout nonsense, go jump in the chat—that’s where everyone goes to talk trash.

Sam Martinez9 said:The common ancestor for all humans can be traced back to Australopithecus afarensis. From that lineage, we see the emergence of Australopithecus africanus, which is widely regarded as the direct precursor to the Homo genus—specifically leading to Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and ultimately Homo sapiens sapiens.

Honestly? To me, they all just sound like the same word.

Jessica Gonzalez said:There isn't really a specific date or a particular pair of ancient ancestors that marks the start of Homo sapiens. Evolution is such a continuous process, so I guess what we call "species" is mostly just a human invention used for classification.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy A50 on Reddit

I'm with you on the first sentence, but the second one? Not so much. Sure, evolution is a continuous process, but calling it *only* that is a stretch. And I don't buy the idea that species aren't objectively real or that they're just something humans made up. Look, humans didn't invent elephants or giraffes. They exist.

Kenneth Cruz67 said:Well, I'm not so sure about that! From what I understand, a species is actually defined as a group of animals that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring.

Still, it doesn't make sense to me—at least not logically—how one species could ever emerge from another if a species is defined as a group? If it's a closed loop of animals breeding within themselves to produce more of that same group, how does the "human group" even get started?

I think Engels hit the nail on the head. Labor is what actually made us.

Amy Howard18 said:I shouldn't say Aboriginals specifically, but rather their ancestors... I used the term a bit loosely in my previous comparison. It's not even fully settled yet that every single human being descends from one solitary African pair. There's actually evidence suggesting that certain groups of hominids might have evolved independently in various regions, which explains why we see so many different (and now extinct) subspecies of primates in the fossil record.

This brings up a pretty interesting question—can we even talk about a "first" human pair, whether you're looking at the big picture or just a local population? Or was there always this massive "gray zone"—maybe spanning countless generations—where the line between what counts as human and what doesn't is just too blurry to call?

"Man is rational because he has hands." (Anaxagoras)

Doesn't that hit pretty close to Engels's argument—that labor is what actually made us human? (The role of labor in turning apes into people). Engels even breaks down how speech evolved right alongside work:

"If this explanation—that speech emerged from and alongside labor—is the only correct one, then comparing us to animals proves the point. The tiny bit of communication even the most advanced animals manage to pull off doesn't require articulated speech. In the wild, no animal feels like they're missing out just because they can't talk or understand human language. It’s a totally different story once humans domesticate them. A dog or a horse gets so used to interacting with people that they develop an ear for articulated speech, easily picking up any language within their scope of understanding. On top of that, they develop emotions like loyalty or gratitude that were foreign to them before. Anyone who spends enough time with these animals will tell you it's hard not to feel like they actually sense their inability to speak as a genuine limitation now."

hiddeneagle98 said:Honestly, this whole argument is on the same level as that old joke about the guy whose computer runs out of disk space, so he just opens every single Word document he owns and shrinks the font size, wondering why it didn't solve his storage problem.

That’s not how this works. If genes are physical objects—which they are—you can only transfer stuff that's actually physical and contained within them. In other words, whatever you're moving has to be smaller than the gene itself.

Kenneth Cruz67 said:Totally. But does that mean instincts and drives are actually passed down through our genes? I guess my own bad luck might be 😁

I’m not sure, but if what Amanda Jackson5 is saying is right—that genes only carry the blueprints for protein synthesis and nothing else—then it makes sense. If we were passing down deep-seated drives, fears, and all those other traits people talk about through DNA, they’d have to be microscopic to fit inside a gene. Some of these impulses are massive, so it’s hard to believe they're tucked away in something that small.

Kenneth Cruz67 said:Do you think instincts or primal urges are actually inherited genetically? 🤔

Nope. Instincts and raw drives were around long before we even knew what genetics was—that field didn't even kick off until the mid-1800s.

Amy Bennett said:Maybe we shouldn't reduce all of history down to war as just physical combat, but perhaps we could look at it as conflict in its purest sense. History essentially requires that kind of asymmetrical dynamic to move forward.

Well, through genetics.

Conflict isn't war—it's the other way around. War is just conflict that finally lost its cool.

Amy Bennett said:Maybe we shouldn't reduce all of history down to war as just physical combat, but perhaps we could look at it as conflict in its purest sense. History essentially requires that kind of asymmetrical dynamic to move forward.

Well, through genetics.

Look, I’m telling you—I don't get how you can claim something non-physical is passed down through genetics. And then you just shrug and say, "well, it's genetic"??? That's not an explanation—it's just a circular argument.

Amy Bennett said:The thing is, a nest or an anthill aren't physical traits—they're inherited.

Look, I didn't say it wasn't hereditary—I just don't get the mechanics behind how that even works.

Amy Bennett said:Of course it can. War is the engine of history. That’s exactly why people talked about the "end of history" after the collapse of the Soviet Union—because there was this belief that liberalism would achieve global hegemony through the USA and its empire.

Not quite. War might kickstart certain events—sure—but it isn’t the engine driving history, much less an essential one.

Amy Bennett said:Have you ever watched birds building their nests? Or even just stood next to an anthill?

I've seen birds build nests—sure—but I can't say I remember ever standing by an anthill.

Sam Martinez9 said:The real question is where we draw the line between what is truly inherited and what is simply a product of upbringing. In my view, whether something is passed down through genes or via epigenetics is actually secondary. Since we were discussing philosophy, I leaned toward saying it’s passed through genes because that’s a concept we all intuitively grasp. Determining exactly what is hereditary versus what is shaped by nurture is an incredibly complex issue, and as far as I am aware, there is no single, definitive scientific consensus on it.

I don't get it. I can wrap my head around physical traits being coded in DNA—that makes sense. But feelings? Thoughts? Desires? I fail to see how you pass a damn emotion down through a genetic sequence.