The divine anxiety

That’s not entirely accurate.
Adaptive genetic trade-off works that way, but not mutated.
Mutations work by countless (figuratively) variables; not environmentally retained.
What permits the continuance of the mutation is:
A) the animal survives to breed
B) the gene does not recede through breeding; especially if it dominates other potentials

If those exist, then a practical application of the end result of the genetic mutation may occur if applicable.
Meaning, if the first “giraffe” lives and breeds, then if there are trees around with which it can reach that other animals in its pool cannot, then it will retain an advantage useful.
As such, it will be more likely to survive.
As such, more likely to pass that dominant gene onward (providing it is dominant).

There is no known environmental provocation for the MYH16 gene mutation outside of a hypothesis that notes that it occurred in time around the same time as inter-hominid breeding; which may have produced the mutation.
The end result was a hominid that could not fight and dominate in the same fashion as its surrounding hominids (biting), nor eat the same diet strictly as the other hominids in the same fashion (using teeth and biting to tear and shred through).

Just as simply as the currently known three generation family that has a high number of its family members with mutations to the FoxP2 gene (which is responsible for neurologically controlling the muscle articulation for functional speech) and thereby have radical impairments to speech (you can barely grasp what they are attempting to speak though they have no mental deficiencies and are “normal” in every other respect) are not having this mutation due to the gene determining a demand that it is attempting to supply progressively.

This mutation wasn’t generated by a demand of anything.
And hopefully, it won’t convey as a dominant gene which spreads beyond their family (it’s unlikely to, but hey…never know).

The viewpoint you are speaking of is the most common vantage by which arguments against evolution are based on, and is a misrepresentation of how gene mutation passing is attributed in evolution.
The genes don’t “know” what needs to come about next to gain an advantage.

In the same way that, again, the fly isn’t a pest to humans so that humans can learn patience.
The genes survive if the whole survives and the gene is a dominant gene (and commonly found in two pair - meaning both parents had the gene).

Oh, and regarding Neanderthals:
From what science has been able to determine (through genetics tracing) the Neanderthal separation from our common ancestor was somewhere in the ballpark of 300,000 to 400,000 (some debate other ranges as well) years ago.
The MYH16 gene is factored into occurring to the ballpark of 2.5 to 5 million years ago (I favor the 2.5/3 million year range due to the skull differences and time-lines between A. afarensis and H. erectus: but that’s just my opinion and not something I can stand firmly behind with any evidences).

The Neanderthals did not have a double concaved skull.
Their skull was similar to ours in regards to roundness.
Neanderthals are quite simply (yet loosely speaking) giant variants of homo sapiens sapiens.

We are not yet entirely certain what happened that caused their extinction (as is true with all of our relatives akin to being runner-up’s for the single surviving human species [we could have easily had 5 or more species kicking it around on this planet side-by-side with us right now btw; we’re still trying to determine why these other entirely separate cousins died out completely])

Wow I love this discussion of light and dark and opposites. I think that the reality is that light and dark are nothing but directional opposites. Meaning that the darkess is nothing but the light moving away from me. Our eyes are limited in that they can only see light that is colliding head on with them. Have you ever looked out at the horizon at night and wondered why I see the tiny light of a far off star instead of all the sunlight that is flowing in between. I don’t see the sunlight because it is flowing at a ninety degree angle to my eyes and that is beyond their limitation to see. I see the sunlight because it is colliding head on with my pupils. The reality is that the same sunlight is flowing past the horizon during the night as during the day. Light and dark are the same energy just as good and evil are the same energy. The only thing that separates them is our perspective on the energy and our limitations as humans.

This talk of brains is irrelevant.

A mouse knows the same basic fundamentals as a human. We are just able to deduct farther then first process understanding.
(Who’s to say homo-sapiens will out do modern man in their environment, or vise verse.)
Hence, the inner working of the brain are the design for its outcome. Achilles Heel…

The point of the brains was a tangent derived from describing that religion is a consequence of our specific sensory facilitation and the moderating control over the frequency and magnitude for the processing of emotional perception of existential identity and inductive supposition of its inherent personality; or said, general markup of emotional expectations of experiential exchanges.

In other words, we’re really smart hominids that have to attend to a far higher range of utilitarian deductive empathy.
Tell a cuckoo bird to have a heart sometime.
You don’t need a gas regulator if there’s no gas.

We have an entirely unique sensory that doesn’t even exist in a directly physical plane of perception.
All simply because we have a subconscious sensitivity to precognitive, and thereby sub-lexical, inputs and processing of information that communicates on a cellular exchange rate of information, which then translates to electrical pulse relatives of the same information.

Or…we are natural analog to digital processors and converters.

That’s why the brain showed up in the conversation.

A squirrel knows where to find its nuts, because its necessary for survival. We just adapted to plant the nut tree.
I know why brain showed up in the conversation, I was just saying how unnecessary it was.

It may seem that way, but the fact of just how radically impactful our sense of emotion and the control therein are, both subconsciously and consciously, is often completely overlooked because most people take the emotional range of humans (which includes an impressive range beyond any other species on the planet) for granted; even though this sensory magnification in humans mixed with our manner of processing identity (not just our own, but of any given thing - to include concepts) is the single elegant difference between a human trusting their reality as real and not trusting their reality as real.

It is directly related to the OP’s discussion of suffering:

In which the tangent explains the divine anxiety of push and pull, or the pursuit of the balance thereof, is a direct analog metaphor of a literal sensory application within our biology which does contain within it a form of “stress” by consequence of the function.

There are insects which have ‘mutated’ and evolved to a specific tree, I would think of such mutations as a kind of ‘amorphous searching’ [or fluid change] of conditions and growth according to requirements. Further up the evolutionary tree the way animals think and react can also make a difference [in epigenetics], cultures can be arrived at e.g. like the monkey which has learned to crack open shellfish on a rock. Such things are not initially genetic but become genetic if kept up for long enough.

Sure but a giraffe is not arrived at in one go, there would be a very long period of change with the neck getting longer with each generation continuing the advantage in tiny increments ~ probably hundreds or thousands of generations.

Interesting. Seems a bit strange that you get a less able [in the former sense] hominid from the mix and not just another variation of the same ilk. Perhaps it has more to do with tool usage and hence differing hunting techniques. Again none of this would have occurred overnight, the MYH16 mutation [or transformation resultant of many smaller mutations] may have resulted from the weaker but slightly more intelligent hominid, having to find a way to survive beyond what its predecessors had achieved.

I thought I wasn’t arguing against evolution, so perhaps I should just butt-out here. I am going by previous debates where people made arguments against mutations being the primary factor ~ that is without the environment determining what mutations are successful.

The first image looked like a modern human so I assumed you were talking about a far more modern change in the brain, sorry.

Could you sum up where you are going with this in relation to the thread? Seems to be an argument based on genetic change without environmental influence [your suggestion], or genetic change ‘with’ environmental influence [my position]. As I say creatures are very sensitive to their environments and that would surely have an effect upon how successful they are at running away or hunting.

Dear Quetalcoatl, I think you on the verge of a great awakening in your apprciation of God. The question I would like to ask is why do you limit God? Who are you to say what God can or cannot be? Throw away what others have told you must be and what do you see?

No I’m not, been there got the t-shirt. :slight_smile: I’d ask you in return; why do you limit god, ~ the very idea [god] is a limitation.

Only the monotheist God is a limitaion. He is not God.

Nope, any idea is a limited description of reality, if your idea of god defines reality or is entire, then it’s a limit upon what that truly is.

List some definitions you have and you’ll see what I mean.

Multdimensional Mankind.

A theory that man went back into time and created himself. (Don’t take this one seriously.)

Dear quatzelcoatl, I am unaware if I led anyone to believe that I had limited God or cornered the market on what he or she is. I am fully aware that I am limited in everything I am and I think that is how I am differnt from God. What I wanted to find out was if you could free your mind from all the limitations that monotheism places on God what would you see? I say that because your statements at the beginnning of the thread lead me to believe you would see something similar to me.

Seems like a self contradictory loop to me, but fun. I think we make too much of the term ‘dimension/al, don’t you?

I expect we envision a similar thing, and I think many Christians and mystics do also. Perhaps you are right in leaving it virgin ~ untouched, and not trying to describe what is essentially indescribable. Sry I didn’t mean to sound disingenuous, more I push for ideas from people. :slight_smile:

My primary point is that we have a whole range of sense that is magnified radically beyond any other species on the planet.
Religion is a tool that has been developed to effectively control that sense by attaching senses of our empathetic emotion to identities, of conceptual or believed literal, of reality so to shape and control our own relational perspective to living.

We have gas; therefore, we have a gas regulator.

Makes sense. My objection was that everything is coincidental, as you know I don’t see things in terms of objects but that they derive from the universal world of information. We are both right [or there abouts] in terms of differing perspectives. Perhaps there is a potential refinement required those identities but that doesn’t mean they are entirely incorrect.

I don’t see it so much as coincidence.
It’s more consequence.
To me, coincidence is a human conception for saying that the factors involved are irregular of a pattern which can be identified as the motive in action.
Or, shit’s too complicated to compute.

Coincidence, to me, exceeds the physical laws so I don’t see the universe or life on Earth in that way.

Consequence, however finite, makes perfectly good physical sense with motive, cause, and effect.

Yea I am very much with you there, the term is just a vacuous way of saying; we don’t understand what’s going on.

Sure but what’s predetiminative about consequence*, surely you cannot have that* alone? …this is where info and communication come into it for me.

Predetermininative?
As in, what’s the reason the boundaries are what they are? (And we’ll just save time and take it all the way back to 0 time when it all began for this question.)

To quazelcoatl and jayson, have you ever noticed that coincidenec is really just a fortunate random experience. But random is a term that has only really entered our awareness since the enlightenment. Prior to that a random event might have been thought of as magic or divine intervention. As human awareness grew so did our ability to understand causality. Even in the stone age people were aware of linear causality. By linear I meanIf you threw a rock at something you expected it to hit it or come close. However if you wanted to hit something that was hidden behind a wall you needed luck, meaning random assistance or magic. Eventually though with the awareness of calculus, that which could only be achived by random luck became predictable. I could figure out precisely where a projectile would land even a mile away. The important thing is that as our awareness grows that which had been considered random luck became entirely known. With statistical evaluation random actually becomes a tool we depend on to make money. So there is a close correlation between awareness and the knowledge of causality.
In the modern world we generally only concern ourselves with understandable causality. Because of this when we enconter actions we cannot explain we call it evil, dark energy or a black hole. However there is probably nothing black about either. We only call them black because although we can see the effects they have on matter they are still entirely beyond our awareness. At least we don’t call them magic holes or magic energy or even random. However they are beyond our limitaion to understand because we are still extremely dependent on light to illuminate things in our mind. But the most characteristic thing about light is that it is linear (straight line) energy. When it comes to understanding causality we are still in the stone age linear awareness because of the way we have learned to be aware and depend on light. As Einstein stated light is our most fundamental relativity. Now even though I am sure one day we will overcome this obstacle, I firmly believe that God has no such limitaion. Therefor the things we call good and bad, or dark energy and light are all the same to God.