Yep, it’s another one of those blog posts that covers a ton of different random things that have run through my mind lately.
A Speculation: It’s been suggested that in the past human beings “domesticated each other” breeding each other for tameness in the form of getting rid of people with violent or unstable tendencies. There was a breeding experiment on foxes in which scientists only bred the most tame foxes in a litter, and this went on for several generations. At the end of the experiment, the foxes looked like white collies. The scientists think that, because one gene often affects many different traits, changing one gene affects many traits and therefore the domestic foxes and domestic dogs share many resemblances besides tameness because of this. I’ve known many a domestic animal with human characteristics: my old land lord had a parrot with a sense of humor. One time the parrot lowered his head, as if inviting me to pet him, and when I did he bit my finger (in a playful, non-hurtful manner) and then laughed about it! I’m fairly certain this wasn’t a trick he had been taught, and the landlord recounted a number of instances when the bird showed humanoid personality traits. In fact, this is a pretty common experience among pet owners. All of that leads me to say this: If humans are the way we are because our ancestors selectively bred each other for tameness, and if the evolution of tameness carries with it a number of other characteristics (like the foxes that turned out looking like collies), then I think the domestication of certain animals has, as an unintended consequence, resulted in them having some of the same traits we humans do.
Jaclyn Glenn made an awesome video called “In a better place?” She sums up why we atheists have a leg up when it comes to moral motivation. She’s really articulate. Love it.
I saw this poster on facebook and wrote a response to my friend who posted it. Here’s the poster followed by my thoughts on it:
I’m atheist, and I think it’s good to play nice with other people, at least in conversation. I feel like the poster unintentionally misrepresents / misunderstands what atheists think. Example: It says, “Atheism is the belief that there was once absolutely nothing.” Under atheist thought, there has never been nothing: physics is eternal (or has existed for every moment of time including the original moment). Likewise, the first living things, the first self replicators, didn’t “magically” organize themselves, we atheists think that happened through the necessities of chemistry and the conditions of the early earth. There are a lot of really cool experiments that have been done (i.e. “The Miller Experiment”) that help explain how life came to exist. I’d say the same applies to the evolution of dinosaurs, humans, and everything else: there are necessities of how life evolves and develops that explains this. Well, I reckon I’ve said enough. Hope this clarifies things a little.
