JT!

Sure that's not a picture of Mark Westlake Mike?

I'd agree with most of that. I don't think it's a case of that we're so far down the evolutionary chain, but more to do with the fact that people with bad genes don't die. Lazy people in the wild get eaten. Lazy people in the world today get looked after by the non lazy, and they'll reproduce with other lazy people and have lazy children. I think Hitler had a problem with this. The guy could have been just fine in the wild, lack of social skills as you say could have stopped him from reproducing, but maybe the reason he's awesome at WoW is because he has good strategical skills which would be very beneficial in the wild. It's not black and white, I'm just don't know enough on the subject to add colour. An emotion like love would need an entire book to to explain all the reasoning behind why we feel it. The question I ask to everyone who doesn't agree with me is, if what we do and feel doesn't come from millions of years of evolution, where does it come from?

Adrenaline rushes feels good. Alcohol also makes you feel good. Feeling good is a stress reliever. Less stress means better life in many aspects. Although these people that take these risks might be getting too much of a good feeling out of it and they're contending for the 'Darwin Award', killing themselves in the strive for adrenaline may kill them which is a good thing as it stops the genetics from being passed on. If you're a person who does nice things, good for you. But a society can't function without people doing good things for others, if a society can't function, you're on your own and you're less likely to survive. You know this subconsciously and that's why you do it. It's nothing to be ashamed of, it's how we got to where we are today.

You say you don't agree but by what you wrote it seems like you do. No one wants to boil it down to basic evolutionary instinct because it takes the romance and heroism out of everything. It's similar how penguins huddle together for warmth, the penguins on the outside of the circle exposed to the wind are only there because they know after that it'll be their turn in the middle. Not because they're just being nice for the penguins in the middle. I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine kind of thing. Human nature is the same basic principle just much more complex because of our intelligence.

Depression of a man losing his wife could be an evolved emotion to try and get him out to find another woman, depression is generally higher in people who don't have a partner and is often the cause of it. Emotions aren't perfect so his level of depression is clearly too much, but if he killed himself chances are low that he reproduced passing on his bad genes to his offspring. Riding your bike making you happy could be your body rewarding you for exercising, keeping your body in good fitness so when that lion comes you get get away from it. Everything we feel and all our actions are always somehow related to what we got from years of evolution, which is to keep us alive to reproduce, we're based from nothing else. In the wild you'll still have had them. And you'll love and take care of them.

Love is another good example, we do more for the one's we love so our offspring has better chance of survival. Every emotion we feel is to keep ourselves alive so we get to reproduce. Sex = life.

Compassion sympathy is embedded in us by years of evolution so we can survive as a society. The only reason we do good things for others is so that they'll potentially do good things for us back when we need it. I was just talking about what Ben said and nothing to do with Karma really. But yes everything we do is for our own good even if it looks like we have good morals helping others.

"Each belief system" implying the two 'systems' we're talking about are both, as you put it, belief systems. Science and religion. Or have I interpreted that wrong. Having faith in science, faith meaning "Complete trust or confidence in someone or something" is justified because of its track record.

Science/scientific method is not a belief system though.

Exactly.

I don't see how you can make that comparison. The scientific method has progressed over the years producing pretty much everything we see today, from the wheel and fire to neutrino detecting labs. Religion is at the other end of the scale providing nothing. Surely you can see science has a better track record than religion. Why is it wrong to have faith in the scientific method and good to have faith in religion?

Are you saying some people have faith in science just like people have faith in religion?

Sweet Jesus! I thought I was bad at -1.5/-1.75.

I was talking about refraction of light, so might not technically be considered light 'bending'. Sound will refract round corners much more than light because it has a bigger wavelength, hence being able to hear round corners. Technically if light refracted more w'd be able to see round corners.

No, we can't. If you're spiritual, you're believing in something which has no evidence, if you're scientific, you're working with facts and evidence. Anything tagged with 'spiritual' has zero evidence. If it did have evidence it wouldn't be labeled spiritual. Ghosts, psychics, Ouija boards, prayer, religion, theism, miracles etc all considered spiritual and have no evidence at all.

Some of the light energy is turned into heat energy, the rest is reflected back off the steel. Light cannot travel though steel unless it's really thin.

It's silly to compare sound and light, they'er two very different things. Waves are only there to serve as a metaphorical understanding of what sound is, and with regards to light it's even more useless because sometimes it doesn't even act like a wave. Sound isn't constant at all, sound's speed can change through ground, water and air. Lightspeed © is always constant no matter what. Light does 'bend', for example, make a shadow with your hand, move it away and close to the light source and you'll see the edges of the shadow become less and more defined. If light traveled in perfectly straight lines the shadow would be perfectly defined at all times. That's about all I know on the subject.

Winning at bingo and helping an old lady across the street have absolutely no link, unless that same woman actually happened to be at bingo, got bingo, but didn't call it because she knew you had it too as a reward for being nice, or maybe she was calling the numbers and somehow cheated for you etc. Whenever anyone brings up the topic of karma, you get two different types of people, people who believe in the spiritual / balancing of the universe karma, meaning if you do something good, something good will happen to you in an impossibly unrelated aspect of you life (ie helping an old lady across the street and winning at bingo is a perfect example of this) and... The other side if 'karma' (it really isn't actually karma) is what Mr Monkey is talking about, doing something good, and then something good happening to you which is directly linked. Like for example letting someone stay at your house because they missed their train, and then the next night the person you let stay at your house buys you all your drinks on the next night out. This isn't karma, this is just being a nice person to people and people being nice back.... because you're nice to them. If you believe in both these examples, you are a believer in karma, if you only believe in the second, you don't believe in karma. And if you believe in neither, you're a sad lonely person. Karma is bullshit, completely unproven and was come up with in the same way rain dances were. Indians when dancing for rain would dance in different ways until the day it actually rained, and then they would assume that dance they did was the correct one to make it rain. Same goes for karma. We remember when we do good things and good things happen to us back because it's noteworthy and fits the idea behind karma, we also remember the times when we do something bad or immoral and something bad happens to us because again it fits the idea of karma. However on a day when you rescue a dog out of a pond, but then get home to find you're locked out, this doesn't fit the idea of karma and is then forgotten about. As time goes on you remember the things that fit the ideals of karma but forget those that don't, which is like not taking into consideration all the raindances that didn't produce rain. Therefor, once you take this scientific viewpoint on karma, you can see it's clearly a bunch of tripe.

Everything doesn't accelerate, only when a force is applied.

Give them a month and they'll be as easy to put in as brushing your teeth.

We need a picture of your face to decide. Here's me in my specs sucking on a mudslide. Plain black plastic fossil frames. Be careful of the frames with no nose pads (the 1st and 3rd frames in your picture) as they're impossible to adjust as opposed to the 2nd frame in your picture which can be, and are generally more comfortable. Try and get anti reflective coating, I did on my old pair and don't on these and I miss it. Makes everything clearer and it looks better aesthetically.

I can't remember where I heard this, maybe back in the physics a-level days, but if neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light, and therefor can travel though time, the entire universe could possibly be made up of one single neutrino traveling though time and replicating it's self an inconceivable amount of times.

The expanding and contracting universe is one of the well known theories I believe. It makes the most sense to me, all mass has a gravity so eventually everything has to pull back together. Black holes will suck in other black holes becoming even more dense, eventually there's going to be just two inconceivably dense blackholes that'll merge and make the singularity and then boom, new universe.

The thing that annoys me about the whole 2012 thing is that the Mayans didn't predict the end of the world, it's just that their calendar just happens to be coming to an end, just like ours does on December 31st and no one being around to start another one on the 1st of January.

I tried that, but I found out how to do it, if you deleted a thumbnail, it asks you to undo or restore all. Clicked restore all and everything came flooding back.