Stefan Molyneux Exposed.

[windwalker]

4 minutes ago, cold said:

Natural kind of ends when we get to be messing about eh?

 

I really think your confused, any thing man does is part of nature, how could it not be.

 

We are a part of nature.

 

You seem to be confused between the actor, action and motivator what ever one calls it.

my last comment on this here. 

Its Friday the weather is nice...

[ralis]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/shakespeares-cure-for-xenophobia

 

Well written and thought provoking piece.

[ralis]

On 7/7/2017 at 0:38 PM, windwalker said:

 

I really think your confused, any thing man does is part of nature, how could it not be.

 

We are a part of nature.

 

You seem to be confused between the actor, action and motivator what ever one calls it.

my last comment on this here. 

Its Friday the weather is nice...

 

That is an excuse for any aberrant behavior you can imagine?

[windwalker]

1 hour ago, ralis said:

 

That is an excuse for any aberrant behavior you can imagine?

 

 Rather than detract from the topic I choose not to comment 

 

Do you have anything of substance to add to the topic.

 

 

Edited July 9, 2017 by windwalker

[ralis]

7 minutes ago, windwalker said:

Yes you do it very well.

 

Rather than add something to the topic you choose to address a comment interesting.  Rather than detract from the topic I choose not to comment 

 

 

 

I do what very well? Further, I was referencing your misunderstanding of the Dao and excusing aberrant behavior as being part of the Dao. You specifically state that any act performed by humans is part and parcel of the natural order. I disagree!

[windwalker]

1 hour ago, ralis said:

 

I do what very well? Further, I was referencing your misunderstanding of the Dao and excusing aberrant behavior as being part of the Dao. You specifically state that any act performed by humans is part and parcel of the natural order. I disagree!

 

Why would one even question anothers' understanding of it. It should be self evident. 

There can be no misunderstanding of it, if one is in accordance with it, this by itself allows 

for differences and levels of understanding with out judgement of others. 

 

we are human, part of nature, all that we do or not is in accordance with this, we can not escape being part of the whole. 

 

The question is whether the influence is good or bad, which is an artificial judgment, does not exist in nature.   

 

 

was this not part of the natural order or not

Quote

What is clear is that a massive die-off took place around 66 million years ago. It is visible in the layers of rock that mark the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods. Fossils that were once abundant no longer appear in rocks after that time. Studies of fossils found (or not found) across the boundary between these two periods — abbreviated the K-Pg boundary — show that some three out of every four plant and animal species went extinct at about the same time. This included everything from the ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex to microscopic plankton.

https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/dinosaurs-extinction-asteroid-eruptions-doom

 

Or is natural, an event that is not influenced by human kind.  In my view we are part of what is natural and are subject to its laws what ever one calls them....We as any species either  adapt to it, or change it  as all species do within the species ability to do so.

Humans seem to have an ability that allows for them to change it, with out having to change "adapt" much themselves as other species have done, and did.   

 

Edited July 9, 2017 by windwalker

[MooNiNite]

On 6/29/2017 at 5:14 PM, Apech said:

 

Really?  Explain.

 

We were talking about distinguishing races and i read this recently which reminded me of our conversation. 

 

It would seem every race but African is part Neanderthal. 

 

https://www.seeker.com/all-non-africans-part-neanderthal-genetics-confirm-1765302858.html

 

Then I also read this from a comment:

 

"Believing the races are equal is a sign of a person so saturated in political correctness as to have lost their ability to reason. Blacks are the only race with no Neanderthal DNA, therefore they share no common ancestor with the other races. Are they then a separate species? A strong case for this can be made because Blacks have a genetic distance from Whites and Asians. That means Blacks are more closely related to archaic hominids than to modern man. Whites and Asians are more closely related to Erectus. "

 

 

[Apech]

6 minutes ago, MooNiNite said:

 

We were talking about distinguishing races and i read this recently which reminded me of our conversation. 

 

It would seem every race but African is part Neanderthal. 

 

https://www.seeker.com/all-non-africans-part-neanderthal-genetics-confirm-1765302858.html

 

Then I also read this from a comment:

 

"Believing the races are equal is a sign of a person so saturated in political correctness as to have lost their ability to reason. Blacks are the only race with no Neanderthal DNA, therefore they share no common ancestor with the other races. Are they then a separate species? A strong case for this can be made because Blacks have a genetic distance from Whites and Asians. That means Blacks are more closely related to archaic hominids than to modern man. Whites and Asians are more closely related to Erectus. "

 

 

 

 

This has been known for some time - non Africans have 1 - 4% Neanderthal DNA.  To address the points made in that blog:  If you accept the categorisation of 'races' no-one as far as I know says this means everyone is the same.  Saying they are equal means they are all equally human and entitled the same respect and so on.  So the writer is confusing equality with sameness.

 

The fact that we interbred with Neanderthal suggests more than anything else that we were closer than formerly thought and indeed possibly the same species - so traces of Neanderthal DNA does not make whites and asians a different species to black people.

[MooNiNite]

10 minutes ago, Apech said:

 

 

This has been known for some time - non Africans have 1 - 4% Neanderthal DNA.  To address the points made in that blog:  If you accept the categorisation of 'races' no-one as far as I know says this means everyone is the same.  Saying they are equal means they are all equally human and entitled the same respect and so on.  So the writer is confusing equality with sameness.

 

The fact that we interbred with Neanderthal suggests more than anything else that we were closer than formerly thought and indeed possibly the same species - so traces of Neanderthal DNA does not make whites and asians a different species to black people.

I agree about the species thing, dunno why they made that point. 

So zero African people interbred with Neanderthals? 

Edited July 24, 2017 by MooNiNite

[Apech]

6 minutes ago, MooNiNite said:

I agree about the species thing, dunno why they made that point. 

So zero African people interbred with Neanderthals? 

 

 

That's because the interbreeding happened in Europe where the Neanderthals lived - the modern humans moved in an replaced them.  Those humans who stayed in Africa did not meet the Neanderthals so therefore obviously could not interbreed.

 

 

[MooNiNite]

Just now, Apech said:

 

 

That's because the interbreeding happened in Europe where the Neanderthals lived - the modern humans moved in an replaced them.  Those humans who stayed in Africa did not meet the Neanderthals so therefore obviously could not interbreed.

 

 

See I thought all human originated from Africa and evolved from the same more primitive form of human (neanderthal).

So then according to your comment, from what did the ancient african humans evolve from? 

[Apech]

1 minute ago, MooNiNite said:

See I thought all human originated from Africa and evolved from the same more primitive form of human (neanderthal).

So then according to your comment, from what did the ancient african humans evolve from? 

 

No - we modern humans came from Africa (or such in the standard theory) - we evolved from earlier hominids.

 

Here it is possible to look this up!

 

Quote

Neanderthals, or more rarely Neandertals,^[a] (UK: /niˈændərˌtɑːl/, also US: /neɪ-, -ˈɑːn-, -ˌtɔːl, -ˌθɔːl/;^[6][7] named for the Neandertal region in Germany) were a species or subspecies of archaic humans in the genus Homo that went extinct about 40,000 years ago.^{[8][9][10][11][12][13]} Neanderthals and modern humans share 99.7% of their DNA^[14] and are hence closely related.^[15][16] (By comparison, both modern humans and Neanderthals share 98.8% of their DNA with their closest non-human living relatives, the chimpanzees.)^[14] Neanderthals left bones and stone tools in Eurasia, from Western Europe to Central and Northern Asia. Fossil evidence suggests Neanderthals evolved in Europe, separate from modern humans in Africa for more than 400,000 years. They are considered either a distinct species, Homo neanderthalensis,^[17][18][19] or more rarely^[20] as a subspecies of Homo sapiens (H. s. neanderthalensis).^[21][22]

 

[MooNiNite]

nevermind

Edited July 24, 2017 by MooNiNite

[Apech]

3 minutes ago, MooNiNite said:

nevermind

 

I never do

[CedarTree]

On ‎6‎/‎12‎/‎2017 at 4:20 AM, Marblehead said:

Just more separating of the peoples instead of bring people together.  Anti-productive.

 

Sums it all up there.  Wisdom.

[MooNiNite]

2 minutes ago, CedarTree said:

Sums it all up there.  Wisdom.

Not always. There are a lot of very helpful programs that involve separating people ideologically. 

Such as the projects by western modern medicine professionals focused on restoring eyesight to the people in Burma. 

Edited July 24, 2017 by MooNiNite

[MooNiNite]

Edited July 25, 2017 by MooNiNite

[CedarTree]

1 hour ago, MooNiNite said:

Not always. There are a lot of very helpful programs that involve separating people ideologically. 

Such as the projects by western modern medicine professionals focused on restoring eyesight to the people in Burma. 

 

Context MooNiNite is important. 

 

[Brian]

So...

 

We are all African natives, then?

[Marblehead]

3 hours ago, Brian said:

So...

 

We are all African natives, then?

If you want to be.

 

But remember, if you are a white person from South Africa living in the USA you do not qualify for any of the African/American benefits offered by any governments or institutions.

 

 

[Brian]

17 minutes ago, Marblehead said:

If you want to be.

 

But remember, if you are a white person from South Africa living in the USA you do not qualify for any of the African/American benefits offered by any governments or institutions.

 

 

That's racist!

 

That's OK, though -- I'm used to it.   I rarely talk about it here but I identify as a physically differently-abled black Asian lesbian Muslim transsexual.

 

<counts_on_fingers>

 

Yep!

[Marblehead]

I didn't realize you had so many labels.

 

 

[MooNiNite]

18 hours ago, Brian said:

So...

 

We are all African natives, then?

 

I wonder how valid this claim is? It would seem to be a universal modern understanding though. 

 

Well, just looking around im starting to see viable counter arguments..

 

Peking Man

http://www.nature.com/news/how-china-is-rewriting-the-book-on-human-origins-1.20231

Edited July 25, 2017 by MooNiNite

[MooNiNite]

The African origin theory is only based on fossils: it is just who ever has the oldest. So they found old fossils of modern humans in Africa, thus every human originated from Africa because that is where the oldest fossils of modern humans were found. 

 

But wait, they found even older fossils of modern humans in China and possibly else where... 

[redcairo]

OK, I was reading the thread Ralis mentioned, but I'm on page two and you guys are just killing me. If it gets any worse you'll be arguing about the meaning of the word IS.

 

Besides, it's all distractors. It doesn't matter what words we use when the issue that brought it to argument is merely the idea that people actually DO vary by genetic group/sub-group which is "generally" recognizable by what we call race. We all know what that means, regardless of what pedantic and semantic detail could be argued about terminology or whatever. And the fact that there may be a lot of (even more) variance 'within a genetic group' than that group compared to others, does not mean that there is no difference between that group on average and some others on average. There are physical differences between genetic groups that are basic facts about biology, and what we do know suggests there is more we likely don't.

 

Molyneaux said in the OP quote -- though I think it's being deliberate misconstrued -- that the original meaning of the word racist is or should be simply one who believes in or studies the differences in genetic groups we call race, but the term has gradually devolved to carry multiple baggage meanings all bad, including "is a bigot" and "believes white people are inherently better" and so on, which are a totally separate thing from simply having a belief that "genetics matter" and that race -- for lack of a better word -- matters.That doesn't mean one is better or worse, merely that "it matters." HOW it matters is a whole separate topic.

 

As an example that I hope is less controversial than some -- because it's now officially ok to take every natural *ism humans have and levy it thusward it seems (alas) -- let's talk about obesity and genetics.

 

Couple decades ago the big news was that "obesity had doubled" in the USA and so on. It was nearly hysterical from the media all the time for awhile.

 

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman is a molecular biologist who runs a genetics lab at Rockefeller U. He runs the team that discovered the hormone Leptin, which makes him one of the rock stars of modern science. In an interview, he had this to say about genetics and obesity.  At the time their lab was studying (among many other things) very closely huge people who'd had bariatric surgery.

 

Quote

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: ...some of the most powerful evidence that this is a biological problem and not a "behavioral one" (in quotation marks) is genetics. And so there are a number of ways to assess the genetic contributions to a trait. It turns out if you look for obesity it is probably the second most heritable trait, second only to height, with which it is quite close.

 

Based on estimates that can be done by analyzing twins, 80 percent of the variability in weight can be accounted for by genetic factors. ...the ironic thing is that I think the more of an outlier one is for weight, the more obese, the more difficult it would be to actually normalize weight. And so if anyone should be stigmatized it would be someone like me who could easily lose 10 lbs. and doesn’t. I think for the people who are really significantly overweight, it’s just who they are -- to a very, very large extent. ...It’d be much better to forget about the stigma and assume people weigh what they weigh, and then encourage people to do what they can to improve their health.

 

(Question from audience: When someone has a surgical intervention such that a massively obese person of, let’s say, 400 lbs. or 500 lbs. removes part of his colon and attains a weight more normal to his size, for his height. Does that rewire the person or does that then remold itself into the norm and the body strives to achieve the larger weight yet again?)

 

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: ...when you do this procedure you limit the intake of a person to about 700 calories a day. Just so you know, none of you could consume 700 calories a day for very long; it is a very small number of calories. Despite that fact, these people still end up being clinically obese at the other end of the procedure. They lose a lot of weight but they would still on average be definable as significantly obese on average after the procedure. Now think about it, they’re eating 700 calories a day and they’re still obese. I mean if that doesn’t say that there’s something metabolically different about the obese than the lean, I don’t know what does.

 

...Now the problem for feeding is that the time frame with which this drive expresses itself is out weeks to months to actually years. And so by the time the drive exercises its power people don’t recognize it as a drive, and they simply imagine that it’s a loss of will power, not thinking of it as rather an expression of a basic biological drive.

 

...A very classic study was done about 15 years ago by a guy named Claude Bouchard. And Claude gathered up a set of identical twins and overfed them 1,000 calories a day for 84 days. And he asked what happened. So these people were in a room, they were given calories, they were forced to eat 1,000 extra calories a day; they should have put on a lot of weight. Some people put on a lot of weight, other people put on hardly any weight at all. And when they looked, the twins were highly similar to one another, suggesting that there was some genetic predisposition to either put on weight or not put on weight when you were given extra calories. ...this observation that some people can eat whatever they want and never put on weight and other people put on weight just by looking at it has been more or less proven based on that study, which actually was observed as far back as the 1700s.

 

...they were then redone with identical twins reared apart compared to fraternal twins reared together. So you’re actually biasing against the identical twins so now the hereditability falls from 80 percent to 70 percent. Still 70 percent -- and the other 30 percent could not be accounted for by the environment for those kids.

 

...take kids who are adopted and ask on average, do they resemble their adoptive parents or their biological parents, making the assumption that some go to one environment, others to the other. They, to a very large extent, resembled their biological parents independent of the environment that their adoptive parents provided.

 

...people say, "Well, there’s a huge change in a short period of time in the amount of obesity and that therefore it can’t be genetic." First of all, actually, that’s wrong. Genes in a population can change very rapidly as environment changes. In fact that’s the whole purpose of having variation in a population. As the environment changes in acute circumstances certain variants are selected and then predominate.

 

...It turns out that that weight increase isn’t uniform across the population, and there’s actually really good epidemiologic evidence to suggest that. ...a lot of the weight gain is concentrated in specific ethnic groups. ...what we’re seeing now is ethnic groups that are predisposed to obesity are now getting access to unlimited calories. And I think that has a lot to do with that weight increase. And there’s some evidence to support that but it’s not definitive... It turns out actually that these really obese kids are concentrated in particular ethnic groups and the gene pools are different in different ethnic groups.

 

 

So as it turns out the "obesity has doubled!" was true but hype; really the 'average weight' increased 7-10#. However, what this doesn't mention but I've read about in research elsewhere, is that what really REALLY changed, is that the people on the far right side of the bell curve -- those who gain weight easily and do not lose it easily if at all -- the "degree of change" is very high. So for example, in the US, we are likely to see people who weigh 300-600# vastly more often now than 50 years ago.

 

The last 20 years in particular just keeps finding more tragic evidence that the impact on children based on prenatal conditions, and based on the mother in general, and the grandmother in general as well (geez!) is pretty big. So for the genetic subgroups at the far side of the bell curve, the results on how fat is added and not lost becomes "exponential." (And that doesn't even start on Lipedema, which affects an estimated 10-11% of women in our pop, yet is not taught in medical school though established in 1940, and creates indefinitely stored fat that cannot be lost through undereating even starving, through exercise even insane amounts, etc. Or gut bacteria which is directly correlated to weight loss/gain at this point and is wrecked by antibiotics so only the last few generations suffer its overprescribing.)

 

The fact that the super-obese are "concentrated in particular ethnic groups" is a big deal. For example there is often public discussion about whether authorities should seize superfat young people from parents who are assumed to be force feeding them oreos or something to make them that way. In Australia one couple otherwise healthy and financially stable were denied adoption because the woman (who worked on her feet 40 hours as a pro chef so was obviously not inert or anything) was 'too overweight.' But what this really means is that it biases heavily against people of certain races, as we call them, "ethnic groups" as Friedman puts it -- some are very unlikely to be huge, some very likely.

 

Gary Taubes in his amazing book 'Good Calories, Bad Calories'[1] gives the example of the Pima indians in the US who were farmers and ridiculously healthy when the land was first getting resettled and they were encountered, eventually ended up on government welfare with flour-sugar-etc. and at this point tend to be huge, have massive diabetes problems, etc.

 

[1] Stupid title. Great book. You really gotta be a serious reader for it though. It's an interesting review of a century of study on "the process of science" in a few areas. It's not a diet book.

 

So two different people can eat the same things, same amounts, exercise the same amount (btw, amount of energy 'burned' by exercise can vary *radically* with the individual, and is less for former-higher-weight people), and at the end of a year, one person may be the same or slimmer, and the other 40# fatter. Multiply this by multiple years and you have a disaster on your hands, for the one person. (It's kind of a not-conspiracy-just-business related to our agri-chem-food-medical systems intertwine to a great degree.) And while these people can be anybody, the one that's uber-fat is very likely to be in SOME genetic groups (e.g. the Pima native american) more than others.

 

So the point I'm making here is that this one topic alone (and there are tons of them) makes clear that people really DO differ between "ethnic groups." If they differ in this way, and other ways we know of, then it doesn't seem like rocket science to say that they may differ in ways everybody seems too afraid to talk about. I don't think I believe that 'raw' IQ varies based on race for example; but I do believe that the "response to cultural food" can vary based on ethnic subgroup, and I do believe that the response to food can have a fairly dramatic effect on nutritional status of the body and hence the development of every part of a person -- which could certainly affect intelligence. So this not only examples people physically differing based on ethnic groups, but differing specifically *in response to cultural food supply.*

 

I think it is a mistake to have a knee-jerk reaction to studies that indicate a difference in IQ (there are quite a few by now) between 'races' -- even though all of us immediately know that 'environment' and more is a huge part of that, the people that do this stuff actually do consider those things, and research with people adopted as infants, or growing up in different environs/economies and things like that, comes in here and has also been done.

 

For example, if the food supply -- particularly wheat and sugar, or artificially processed lipids -- have an even slightly disparate impact on one ethnic group versus another, that would be important to know! But we're never going to learn anything if we keep pretending nothing related to 'race' can possibly be anything but racist and untrue. It's a huge disservice to human beings if we prevent science, funding, attention, etc. for something that might, actually, end up helping people.

 

RC