Vivian on 27/6/2009 at 13:51
Then why is it universal? Who's teaching it, and for what? I'm not saying racism is awesome or anything, but I think you're being idealistic to the point of ignorance if you say it has nothing to do with biological root causes. There is a natural xenophobia in humans, which I think very likely comes from 'oh those people are less likely to be closely related to me, and therefore are not as entitled to resources as those who are' (i.e. territoriality).
D'Juhn Keep on 27/6/2009 at 17:55
Quote Posted by uncadonego
I hope most people would agree it's not a biologically driven mechanism.
No, I think most people would agree it IS biologically driven
Nicker on 27/6/2009 at 20:10
Like all our instinctual and animalistic urges (sex, drugs, rock and roll...) racism has been gussied up with all sorts of frontal lobe lace. But it's still an ancient compulsion that predates our semantic circuits.
There is even a theory of racial origins which suggests that what we consider racial characteristics are more the result of aesthetic preference (that's what momma looked like) than environmeltal pressure (e.g. vitamin D production, etc.). This promotes group cohesion. (Our village is best. The people in the next village are OK but the people over the mountains are not really people...)
Desire for the exotic is an instinct to balance group cohesion with the need for genetic blending. So that doesn't disqualify instinct as the basis of racism. Nor does that excuse modern humans from excusing their racism as a biological prerogative.
D'Juhn Keep on 27/6/2009 at 20:45
ALSO what's up with nicked, nicker and nickie all posting at the moment
Nicker on 27/6/2009 at 20:52
We have no idea. Do we?
D'Juhn Keep on 27/6/2009 at 21:18
i'm on to you
Brian The Dog on 28/6/2009 at 10:32
Quote Posted by DDL
"Knows more" != "smarter"
Knowledge is useful, sure, but if you're not clever enough to do anything WITH that knowledge, you're not going places, but it stands to reason that anyone born after those scientists is able to learn from them, and anyone born before them isn't. So your average schoolkid is able to draw from the wisdom of all of those, whereas say...Newton would've had trouble drawing from Einstein.
I would definitely agree that most high-school kids know more than Copernicus and Kepler did (who were cited in the original example), but you can't really make the same claim about Newton, and especially Einstein. Newton developed shedloads of stuff in Optics and Mechanics, not to mention independently deriving calculus, something most school-kids only have the basic principle of before attending university.
All scientists develop ideas as developments of previous ideas - even paradigm shifts use stuff from previous work. Einstein used the mathematics of Minkowski and Lorentz for special relativity, and Riemann's curved geometry mathematics in general relativity. Newton used the work of Kepler and Galileo for his mechanics work.
Newton would definitely have struggled with Einstein's work - the maths was developed a few centuries later and drops the idea of absolute time, which Newton relied upon for all his work :eek:
