UFOs

[Cugel]

..... however when all that has been extensively investigated and the chaff is sorted from the wheat,the wheat maybe around 1% of the whole that's still unexplained,it is that that I find of interest.

SInce wheat has come up (as a subject rather than as a seed-head) I'll mention an interesting notion posited in that Sapiens book. The author suggests that the advent of the so-called agricultural-herding mode of life in human populations is not so much the humans domesticating the plants and beasts but the plants and beasts domesticating the humans.

Since the humans began farming, plants such as wheat and beasts such as cows have multiplied vastly from the days of hunter-gatherers. They've become an evolutionary success .... as a species, although their individual lives are rather miserable of course.

It makes me titter, to see the wheat as an exploiter of the farmers, who slave and suffer to increase its spread.

[jgurney]

Since the humans began farming ..... beasts such as cows have multiplied vastly from the days of hunter-gatherers. They've become an evolutionary success

Have they, or were wild cattle just as numerous then?

[PDQ Mobile]

Taurus!; last night at 3am (don't ask) was spectacular.

Jupiter really bright is in the horns (which are actually more Ibex like).
But best was Orion, every star in the wonderful bow visible.
The hunter is abroad.
Stock up.
The winter stars return.

[reohn2]

..... however when all that has been extensively investigated and the chaff is sorted from the wheat,the wheat maybe around 1% of the whole that's still unexplained,it is that that I find of interest.

SInce wheat has come up (as a subject rather than as a seed-head) I'll mention an interesting notion posited in that Sapiens book. The author suggests that the advent of the so-called agricultural-herding mode of life in human populations is not so much the humans domesticating the plants and beasts but the plants and beasts domesticating the humans.

Since the humans began farming, plants such as wheat and beasts such as cows have multiplied vastly from the days of hunter-gatherers. They've become an evolutionary success .... as a species, although their individual lives are rather miserable of course.

It makes me titter, to see the wheat as an exploiter of the farmers, who slave and suffer to increase its spread.

As I'm sure you know it was the adoption of farming,rather than the hunter gatherer/nomadic lifestyle,that led to a more settled lifestyle and explosion in numbers of humanity.The specialisation of cereal and fruit crops,also domesticating and specialist breeding of livestock naturally followed.
I don't see how cereal crops or livestock have exploited man?

[Cugel]

Since the humans began farming ..... beasts such as cows have multiplied vastly from the days of hunter-gatherers. They've become an evolutionary success

Have they, or were wild cattle just as numerous then?

Well, I wasn't there to count them all you, know but .... others claim to have become able to extrapolate the figures from teeny-pre-farming numbers to zillions-post-farming.

Of course, these extrapolaters do often make vast assumptions ..... .

[Cugel]

..... however when all that has been extensively investigated and the chaff is sorted from the wheat,the wheat maybe around 1% of the whole that's still unexplained,it is that that I find of interest.

SInce wheat has come up (as a subject rather than as a seed-head) I'll mention an interesting notion posited in that Sapiens book. The author suggests that the advent of the so-called agricultural-herding mode of life in human populations is not so much the humans domesticating the plants and beasts but the plants and beasts domesticating the humans.

Since the humans began farming, plants such as wheat and beasts such as cows have multiplied vastly from the days of hunter-gatherers. They've become an evolutionary success .... as a species, although their individual lives are rather miserable of course.

It makes me titter, to see the wheat as an exploiter of the farmers, who slave and suffer to increase its spread.

As I'm sure you know it was the adoption of farming,rather than the hunter gatherer/nomadic lifestyle,that led to a more settled lifestyle and explosion in numbers of humanity.The specialisation of cereal and fruit crops,also domesticating and specialist breeding of livestock naturally followed.
I don't see how cereal crops or livestock have exploited man?

The Sapien book proposal goes like this: farming enabled both human and cattle/sheep/wheat/etcetera populations to increase vastly. It thus becomes a moot point as to whether the humans exploited the wheat et al or the wheat exploited the humans. From the evolutionary point of view, both vastly increased their spread and number over the planet by forming a symbiosis.

Naturally we humans, being the hubristic and self-centred little skinbags that we are, will claim that we are in charge of the wheat & beasts so therefore we did it all on purpose and are the masters. It may be, though that the cattle mooing in the fields are making a similar claim about their own clever manipulation and control of the humans.

In both cases, so says the Sapiens author, all the species involved have become evolutionarily successful but their quality of life seems to have deteriorated markedly. This applies to the humans too, most of whom (throughout history, not just in our lucky lifetimes) have lived lives of degradation, with only them at the very top of the various hierarchies having a better life, all told, than those hunter-gatherers all had.

A contentious proposition, especially to the minds of we pampered Boomers. But consider life as a peasant right up to the C19th in Britain. And, in many parts: now. Consider also life in 1930s Britain for the lower orders. And now. Not so good, even if medicine and farming can keep most humans suffering the degradations and oppressions and exploitations for longer. Mental illness, for example, is legion amongst humans; and probably amongst domesticated animals too, although on average they have less than one year of life to get that way.

[reohn2]

Cugel
Thanks but I didn't need the history lesson.As for wheat and animals having any kind of upper hand,not so,they proliferate because it suites man(un)kind's proliferation.However man isn't always as clever as he may think.

[Biospace]

...
As for wheat and animals having any kind of upper hand,not so,they proliferate because it suites man(un)kind's proliferation.However man isn't always as clever as he may think.

There were 50-60 million bison in North America before Europeans thought it sporting to shoot almost all of them.

[reohn2]

...
As for wheat and animals having any kind of upper hand,not so,they proliferate because it suites man(un)kind's proliferation.However man isn't always as clever as he may think.

There were 50-60 million bison in North America before Europeans thought it sporting to shoot almost all of them.

Very true and many other wild animals driven to or almost to extinction,but I thought we were discussing domesticated livestock?

Whatever,this a thread drift too far for a discussion about UFO/UAPs.......

[Biospace]

Very true and many other wild animals driven to or almost to extinction,but I thought we were discussing domesticated livestock?

Sorry, yes we were - but I realised the number of bison wasn't so very different to the head of cattle (many in pretty grim conditions) in North America today. Not as many, perhaps half to two-thirds, but of a similar order.

Not sure I'd call the proliferation of domesticated cattle an evolutionary success, Man has a tendency to breed in problems while attempting to maximise output and make them more 'efficient' food converters, while likely traumatising many cows with the removal of their calves shortly after birth (which has been shown to have a negative effect on the producticity of a herd).

[Cugel]

Very true and many other wild animals driven to or almost to extinction,but I thought we were discussing domesticated livestock?

Sorry, yes we were - but I realised the number of bison wasn't so very different to the head of cattle (many in pretty grim conditions) in North America today. Not as many, perhaps half to two-thirds, but of a similar order.

Not sure I'd call the proliferation of domesticated cattle an evolutionary success, Man has a tendency to breed in problems while attempting to maximise output and make them more 'efficient' food converters, while likely traumatising many cows with the removal of their calves shortly after birth (which has been shown to have a negative effect on the producticity of a herd).

Not sure I'd call the proliferation of humans an evolutionary success either, since the increase in numbers of that most rapacious of creatures not only does serious damage to all other species and to the biosphere in general but looks likely to end in an immanent total population crash of the humans too.

In addition, many humans lead very traumatised lives, at the hands of the usual suspects - one gang of aristocrats / oligarchs or another, inclusive of the regular raving nutter that uses millions as sword, cannon or missile fodder rather than the usual employment as some sort of slave or serf.

************
It often amuses / horrifies / depresses me that we humans are so hubristic and convinced that we're not only "in control" but have some sort of divine right to be so. We look likely to be a very brief blip in the evolutionary history of Planet Erf. Our abilities "to control" events seem low to absent, as human history seems to demonstrate our major feature is lack of control over nearly all of our behaviour and the motives r feelings driving it.

Still, we may be leaving a nice empty planet for them aliens. No wonder there's so many viewings from flying saucers and cigars, eh!? There's probably a galactic version of RightMove going on out there. "Desirable blue-green planet, soon to be vacated. In need of some improvement".

[reohn2]

Very true and many other wild animals driven to or almost to extinction,but I thought we were discussing domesticated livestock?

Sorry, yes we were - but I realised the number of bison wasn't so very different to the head of cattle (many in pretty grim conditions) in North America today. Not as many, perhaps half to two-thirds, but of a similar order.

Not sure I'd call the proliferation of domesticated cattle an evolutionary success, Man has a tendency to breed in problems while attempting to maximise output and make them more 'efficient' food converters, while likely traumatising many cows with the removal of their calves shortly after birth (which has been shown to have a negative effect on the producticity of a herd).

my bold
I didn't suggest it was.

[Biospace]

I didn't suggest it was.

No, Cugel said this - should have made this clearer.

...
Not sure I'd call the proliferation of domesticated cattle an evolutionary success, Man has a tendency to breed in problems while attempting to maximise output and make them more 'efficient' food converters, while likely traumatising many cows with the removal of their calves shortly after birth (which has been shown to have a negative effect on the producticity of a herd).

Not sure I'd call the proliferation of humans an evolutionary success either
...
It often amuses / horrifies / depresses me that we humans are so hubristic and convinced that we're not only "in control" but have some sort of divine right to be so. We look likely to be a very brief blip in the evolutionary history of Planet Erf. Our abilities "to control" events seem low to absent, as human history seems to demonstrate our major feature is lack of control over nearly all of our behaviour and the motives r feelings driving it.

Still, we may be leaving a nice empty planet for them aliens. No wonder there's so many viewings from flying saucers and cigars, eh!? There's probably a galactic version of RightMove going on out there. "Desirable blue-green planet, soon to be vacated. In need of some improvement".

Perhaps they'll wait until the Sahara greens over due to global warming and Siberia melts a little more?

It is truly depressing to see humans who believe they've some divine right and the high-handedness which goes with this. We seem to be entering an age which is the polar opposite to The Enlightment. Some elements of "Science" seem to be moving towards a mindset in which religion existed pre-Darwin.

[reohn2]

No worries

[Cugel]

It's the author of the Sapiens book who made the suggestion about wheat using humans to proliferate. I merely repeated it as an interesting perspective that could be applied to many things that humans believe they control but which in fact control us.

As you know, my own feeling is that what that same author calls the products of the human "cognitive revolution" (language, design and all the other notions, ideas and shareable entities of info and process) are evolving and just using our big human brains as a substrate to do so. Those things (memeplexes) have lives of their own which are both symbiotic and parasitic on us.

Just now, they seem intent on evolving to find better substrates than human brains so we may suddenly find ourselves redundant, as silicon and other materials become a better host for AI with the whole previously human stuff of language, design, maths and all the rest located elsewhere and developed far faster than our puny bio-brains can manage. Let's face it, as a species we're becoming more infantile and clueless by the year.

We've been managed by ideas of all kinds since language expressed in us. Religions, ideologies and a hundred other mad compulsions infecting us toxoplasma-like. The process has accelerated via writing, books, computers and ...... who knows what's next? We aren't in control of "next" and seem unlikely to have the capacity to understand it.

Doomed, I tell 'ee!