Re: Harshman says successful reproduction is natural selection

Reading from news:talk.origins,
Bob Casanova <nospam@xxxxxxxx> posted:

On Wed, 15 Apr 2009 06:00:01 -0500, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Damaeus
<no-mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Reading from news:talk.origins,
Bob Casanova <nospam@xxxxxxxx> posted:

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009 04:14:58 -0500, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Damaeus
<no-mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Reading from news:talk.origins,
"*Hemidactylus*" <ecphoric@xxxxxxxxxxx> posted:

Given that your mind emerges from your brain which developed under the
influence of your genes you stand corrected.

But the mind can be improved beyond that which you have been genetically
endowed with.

Evidence for this claim, please. And "it looks that way"
isn't evidence.

Can't you make more sense of the world now than when you were 5 days old?
3 years old? Can't you draw a better picture? Write a better story? Make
a better arguement?

All of this relates to experience and additional knowledge,
not to an increase in ability.

But you make more sense of what you see. As 3-year-old, for example, I
might have a toy action figure made out of plastic. To me, it was just a
toy. But after having lived a few more years, I didn't have to go to a
factory to see that my action figure was made out of pieces from cast
moldings, and those pieces were assmbled into an action figure. I could
see the seams on it and could instantly envision how it was made by
relating a Hershey candy bar commercial in which chocolate is poured into
a cast to make a chocloate bar with the Hershey name on it. Since I could
see that my toy was plastic, and I knew nothing like it existed in nature,
then it had to be made in the same way that a chocolate bar is made. I
accepted that as fact without ever having seen an actual action figure
being made. It's contriving facts from obvious truths about the
technologies humans have built.

Another example: when a figurine on a shelf in a gift shop says
"hand-crafted and hand-painted", I can see that since there are fifteen
duplicates on the shelf, and there's a "Made in China" sticker on the
bottom, the original was hand-crafted and used to make a mold to then
mass-produce the copies, which were then likely painted by hand since the
painting is so simple and lacking in detail.

When I was a kid walking through the forest and long dry stream beds, I
could see for myself where the water had washed the dirt away from under a
tree that trees have root systems growing into the ground. I learned that
by myself before being told about it by science.

How about the fact that languages are learned best and quickest before
the age of 6; does that mean that you've *lost* ability as an adult?
Well, yes, it does, but in a restricted sense which has little or
nothing to do with basic mental ability.

Interesting that about the age of six is when formal education starts,
too: first grade. What would kids learn if they were not put into formal
education? The only reason we put kids in school is because we expect
them to grow up and get jobs that pay money. But what if not all children
were meant to go to school? If you want to be an artist, and all you care
about is painting, you can learn to paint without an education. And if
you're going to be an artist, you'd naturally want to learn typography, so
your penmanship would develop through the exploration of your natural
interests.

So I believe that learning ability "seems" to drop, not because the child
is forgetting how to learn, but he's being made to *try* to learn things
and remember things that he's not interested in.

And it's been conclusively demonstrated that as one ages, general mental
acuity actually drops (i.e., IQ, whatever that is, goes down).

How do they determine that mental acuity has dropped? By standardized
tests? By watching body language?

Damaeus

.

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