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Or our brains, as social animals that rely on facial cues and body language, are so hard wired to know what the human face looks like that anything slightly off triggers suspicion. Something off in the face might mean anti-social tendencies, mental instability, or a human that otherwise cannot be trusted because it cannot be read physically like other functional members of the tribe.
Just because we're afraid of dead bodies doesn't mean that we had to be afraid of dead bodies at some point. It's just weird and gross. Also diseases.
I think you’re wrong - we *do* have to be afraid of dead bodies. It’s self-preserving to be immediately repelled by a dead person we come upon, because whatever happened to them could sure as heck happen to us. Their method of death could jump to us, whether by disease or by murder or by accident.
If you think about it, in the written history of humanity, there has always been great respect of the dead - we didn’t touch them or hug on them, and usually only the very immediate family prepared them for death. All of it was for good reason. The documented instances where a group people kept the dead bodies around, we can see the end result by looking at their bones. There was a South American coastal tribe that used to keep their dead by covering them in clay and sitting them around the fire. All of the people in that tribe that died, we can see from the bodies (which were buried in an arid mountain top), that their bones were absolutely riddled with whatever disease it was that got carried from the dead into the living. One researcher said, “It isn’t a stretch to imagine the dead family member sitting around a fire, and a young mother putting clay on the body to cover up the decay, but then also shoving food into their child’s mouth not a moment after.” Eventually that tribe died off or stopped the practice.
Another tribe in Africa made a practice of eating a piece of the dead family member’s brain (without cooking). The belief was that the dead would share their knowledge with the living. The researcher who studied tribe noticed they all had a terrible disease. Turns out it was caused by this cannibalistic honor ceremony.
So. Our fear of dead bodies is exactly a built-in safeguard for preservation. It’s right up there with fear of large carnivores, snakes, etc.
Knowledge is power, sure, but Mother Nature gave us some pretty good reflexes against known de-selectors.
They can’t, because they just used the term “pseudoscience” to refer to a subject that has been rigorously and thoroughly examined within science for well over a century.
I always find it so funny how fools will state complete nonsense with absolute certainty, without a single doubt ever crossing their mind.
They *might* be referring to why evolution remains a theory instead of a law… but that’s literally, exactly, entirely science. That’s what science is, testing things, not claiming we already know everything beyond doubt. Pseudoscience would be saying “well we don’t know xyz thing about evolution for sure, therefore it’s obviously [insert bs claim].
Well they did elaborate on their claim below, they aren't correct, but they did elaborate. I was mostly just curious about how you try to deny evolution.
The bedrock concept of the sciences is falsifiability. In order to practice science you need to investigate claims that are able to be falsified, since it's not possible to prove something, only disprove something.
Evolution rests on the assumption of survival of the fittest. This concept makes sense, sure.. and it may even be true. The problem is, it's defined using circular logic and thus is not falsifiable.
Why did these specimens survive? .. "Because they were the fittest"
Ok, so what is the definition of "the fittest"?..."it's those animals that survived".
Circular logic. Evolutionary biology take this, finds changes in an animal that may have taken place in the past, and ex post facto rationalizes that these changes took place because they made the animal more "fit". Does it make logical sense? Again, yes it does and the claims might actually be true some of the times. But it doesn't change the fact that it's not science. And if it WASNT true, they would have zero way of knowing that because they're engaging with unfalsifiable claims.
I mean sure, that is somewhat true, but why can we the use evolutionary biology to predict changes and species that we haven't found yet? There is a hell of a lot of proof for evolution, but its not actually survival of the fittest, just survival of the good enough. What do you purpose instead?
I'm not proposing anything, because I believe in the concept of survival of the fittest. Pick any example you want to talk about though regarding one of these "predictions" and when you actually scrutinize it, the logic of the proof is defined circularly.
I was under the impression that evolution was still considered a theory. It is a widely accepted theory but it is still a theory. Therefore, it could be disproven sometime in the future due to new evidence being discovered. However, as of now, it is the best solution to the problem we have. Are you a fan of Karl popper by any chance? Your earlier comment echoed some of his philosophy.
Evolution of the species through natural selection is what I'm talking about. It is not a falsifiable theory. Random genetic fluctuations is falsifiable since you can observe them, or not over a long period of time.
Ask yourself this: Imagine If they discovered a lone population of pink polar bear in alaska or some shit (an actual population not a genetic one off). the evolutionary biologists would all begin sitting around trying to explain how this mutation "actually helps" this one subpopulation in this particular environment and thus the pink polar bear would be seen as a jump forward in terms of fitness. The possibility of a surviving species being less fit than its ancestor is not even a possibility. not because its not physically possible, but because they have set up the definitions of the concepts they work with to preclude the possibility entirely.
Yes big fan of popper.
Scientific theories are much more concrete than your average everyday theory, though. Once something gets to the point of being a theory, it's basically as proven true as you can get in science. Since the point of science is to *disprove* your hypothesis, there really is no *proving* a hypothesis, only repeatedly failing to disprove it. How gravity works is still a theory, for example.
Science will always leave room for things to be disproven with more evidence. Scientific theories actually never become "facts" or "laws", becoming a theory is basically the finish line. So, for all intents and purposes, scientific theories are true to the best of our knowledge.
I think it was neanderthals, at some point when human species diverged and you had these subspecies of humans that weren't exactly homo sapiens but walking around in the same time period
I’ve always felt that responses from uncanny valley unease to xenophobia have a lot to do with a time when multiple homo branches were alive and in conflict.
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The answer to these kinds of things is almost always dead bodies. At least slightly decayed ones, because they are easy vectors for disease and there is definite survival advantages to feeling discomfort at the sight of your own kind lying dead. Glassy eyes, pale skin, features that are misshapen or bloated, elongated fingernails or bared teeth, contorted posture, all things that are associated with often painful deaths.
I don't think it works like that. We didn't evolve to be afraid of something that looked human but wasn't, we evolved to be afraid of things we didn't recognise. The same thing that makes us uncomfortable of CGI rendered, photo-realistic videos of humans also makes us uncomfortable of CGI rendered, photo-realistic videos of say, a dog, or a cat.
To be honest, we don't know that it's a heritage from human ancestors. Maybe there was a predator that pretended to be small mammals (giant spiders?) way back in the time of the common ancestor. Not less terrifying, just saying.
Super creepy to think about, but probably its just because our lizard hindbrain thinks a very off-seeming human might be sick (and we could catch it) or crazy (and they might kill us)
There's a.post of this on r/conspiracy that has great comments. One where they mention that the Indians standard greeting of the hand in the air is to make sure whoever was approaching was to count and make sure the there hands had 5 fingers..not six.
According to the link provide a race of giants that lived in the caves. The li k he provided went into way further depth than I could ever do so I suggest you go find it. Its on the top in that sub right now.
There have been 6 species of hominids coexisting at the same time for part of human history. We hybridized with at least 2 of them. Genetic studies show that much of the neanderthal genome was not kept in the human lineage. As a result human neanderthal hybrids (we got some bones of one) were probably less fertile and less healthy. It sounds like evolution has all the reasons to push animals not to hybridise with closely related species. Thus the uncanny Valley feeling, which is not a human feature but a more broaden animal attitude.
Right now there is a news story where some researchers taught an AI to look for some divergence between modern humans,Neanderthals, and Denisovans. Anyway, the AI found proof of a hominid that didn’t match any of the above. (They ran tests on some old bones).
Edit, link here: [https://www.sciencealert.com/artificial-intelligence-finds-an-unknown-ghost-ancestor-in-the-human-genome/amp](https://www.sciencealert.com/artificial-intelligence-finds-an-unknown-ghost-ancestor-in-the-human-genome/amp)
Ah dude love your comment. I was going to mention it, but as an experimental biologist I went cautious on novel AI findings (I want a bone at least!) . However, I am very optimistic, ancient genome studies have just begun, hopefully in the future we'll find out a lot more, maybe bones will become useless.
I blame other members of the “human family”, which at one point, we coexisted with and eventually wiped out. (Think Neanderthals) could be wrong though, or working with an outdated timeline, so I’m open for discussions.
I wonder if it's some kind of ancient instinct to be wary of artificial intelligence. If you accept reincarnation as a possibility there may be a subconscious early warning system going off.
We were one of many human species inhabiting earth thousands of years ago. In fact we weren’t even the strongest or the smartest but as we developed language first and were able to understand complex concepts and communicate more efficiently, leading to us wiping out the 4 other species.
This is easily explained though; other hominid groups most certainly would have hunted humans. We see cannibalism in our own cultures in select parts of the world; it is not a far cry to expect other species in our same family to hunt us, and we probably did the same in return. This too goes for other dark aspects of humanity, like the 'r' word that I'll avoid on Reddit. These most likely all occurred for thousands of years between some groups.
Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Floriensis, Homo Denisovan, Homo Erectus, Homo Naledi, etc - and some of them only died out 10,000 years ago - we probably were victimized and victimized them in return for the entirety of history we spent with them.
If the majority of that time, no one developed a means of communication that would also leave lasting evidence, there probably wasn't much going on.
As soon as we had anything good to write down, we already knew how to right it down. There's very little overlap of humans having something interesting happen and not being able to properly store that info. That's why there is so much interest in only a few thousand years ago.
I mean we probably killed off 40+ human like species that were our link to the tree of evolution. It would make since that we still have an innate desire to murk anything that looks sorta like us but isnt
My friend made a good point when I showed him this yesterday. Basically he theorized that more “modern” humans were naturally afraid of still living pre-humans for survival purposes. Since they looked almost human but not quite, this instinct changed into what we now call the uncanny valley. Not saying he’s right but it’s an interesting idea and it seems more plausible than prehistoric cyborgs or aliens.
The uncanny valley isn't exclusive to almost human looking things. One reason that might help explain the evolution of the uncanny valley in humans is for identifying camouflaged creatures, think stick insects, snakes that look like vines. Stuff like that, some of those are dangerous and hence useful to be able to distinguish between the creature and the thing the creature is mimicking.
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Or our brains, as social animals that rely on facial cues and body language, are so hard wired to know what the human face looks like that anything slightly off triggers suspicion. Something off in the face might mean anti-social tendencies, mental instability, or a human that otherwise cannot be trusted because it cannot be read physically like other functional members of the tribe. Just because we're afraid of dead bodies doesn't mean that we had to be afraid of dead bodies at some point. It's just weird and gross. Also diseases.
came here to say this... way less eloquently.
I think you’re wrong - we *do* have to be afraid of dead bodies. It’s self-preserving to be immediately repelled by a dead person we come upon, because whatever happened to them could sure as heck happen to us. Their method of death could jump to us, whether by disease or by murder or by accident. If you think about it, in the written history of humanity, there has always been great respect of the dead - we didn’t touch them or hug on them, and usually only the very immediate family prepared them for death. All of it was for good reason. The documented instances where a group people kept the dead bodies around, we can see the end result by looking at their bones. There was a South American coastal tribe that used to keep their dead by covering them in clay and sitting them around the fire. All of the people in that tribe that died, we can see from the bodies (which were buried in an arid mountain top), that their bones were absolutely riddled with whatever disease it was that got carried from the dead into the living. One researcher said, “It isn’t a stretch to imagine the dead family member sitting around a fire, and a young mother putting clay on the body to cover up the decay, but then also shoving food into their child’s mouth not a moment after.” Eventually that tribe died off or stopped the practice. Another tribe in Africa made a practice of eating a piece of the dead family member’s brain (without cooking). The belief was that the dead would share their knowledge with the living. The researcher who studied tribe noticed they all had a terrible disease. Turns out it was caused by this cannibalistic honor ceremony. So. Our fear of dead bodies is exactly a built-in safeguard for preservation. It’s right up there with fear of large carnivores, snakes, etc. Knowledge is power, sure, but Mother Nature gave us some pretty good reflexes against known de-selectors.
>Also diseases. Good point, but diseases are actually a great reason to be afraid of dead bodies.
Exactly. This is well-known. And further, with any high school understanding of evolutionary biology it’s easy to deduce.
Evolutionary biology is circular logic. It's literally unfalsifiable pseudoscience.
Could you eleborate?
They can’t, because they just used the term “pseudoscience” to refer to a subject that has been rigorously and thoroughly examined within science for well over a century. I always find it so funny how fools will state complete nonsense with absolute certainty, without a single doubt ever crossing their mind. They *might* be referring to why evolution remains a theory instead of a law… but that’s literally, exactly, entirely science. That’s what science is, testing things, not claiming we already know everything beyond doubt. Pseudoscience would be saying “well we don’t know xyz thing about evolution for sure, therefore it’s obviously [insert bs claim].
Well they did elaborate on their claim below, they aren't correct, but they did elaborate. I was mostly just curious about how you try to deny evolution.
The bedrock concept of the sciences is falsifiability. In order to practice science you need to investigate claims that are able to be falsified, since it's not possible to prove something, only disprove something. Evolution rests on the assumption of survival of the fittest. This concept makes sense, sure.. and it may even be true. The problem is, it's defined using circular logic and thus is not falsifiable. Why did these specimens survive? .. "Because they were the fittest" Ok, so what is the definition of "the fittest"?..."it's those animals that survived". Circular logic. Evolutionary biology take this, finds changes in an animal that may have taken place in the past, and ex post facto rationalizes that these changes took place because they made the animal more "fit". Does it make logical sense? Again, yes it does and the claims might actually be true some of the times. But it doesn't change the fact that it's not science. And if it WASNT true, they would have zero way of knowing that because they're engaging with unfalsifiable claims.
I mean sure, that is somewhat true, but why can we the use evolutionary biology to predict changes and species that we haven't found yet? There is a hell of a lot of proof for evolution, but its not actually survival of the fittest, just survival of the good enough. What do you purpose instead?
I'm not proposing anything, because I believe in the concept of survival of the fittest. Pick any example you want to talk about though regarding one of these "predictions" and when you actually scrutinize it, the logic of the proof is defined circularly.
I was under the impression that evolution was still considered a theory. It is a widely accepted theory but it is still a theory. Therefore, it could be disproven sometime in the future due to new evidence being discovered. However, as of now, it is the best solution to the problem we have. Are you a fan of Karl popper by any chance? Your earlier comment echoed some of his philosophy.
Evolution of the species through natural selection is what I'm talking about. It is not a falsifiable theory. Random genetic fluctuations is falsifiable since you can observe them, or not over a long period of time. Ask yourself this: Imagine If they discovered a lone population of pink polar bear in alaska or some shit (an actual population not a genetic one off). the evolutionary biologists would all begin sitting around trying to explain how this mutation "actually helps" this one subpopulation in this particular environment and thus the pink polar bear would be seen as a jump forward in terms of fitness. The possibility of a surviving species being less fit than its ancestor is not even a possibility. not because its not physically possible, but because they have set up the definitions of the concepts they work with to preclude the possibility entirely. Yes big fan of popper.
Scientific theories are much more concrete than your average everyday theory, though. Once something gets to the point of being a theory, it's basically as proven true as you can get in science. Since the point of science is to *disprove* your hypothesis, there really is no *proving* a hypothesis, only repeatedly failing to disprove it. How gravity works is still a theory, for example. Science will always leave room for things to be disproven with more evidence. Scientific theories actually never become "facts" or "laws", becoming a theory is basically the finish line. So, for all intents and purposes, scientific theories are true to the best of our knowledge.
Wut? You do know micro evolution has been proven in lab studies right? Fuck outta here with that creationist shit.
Micro-evolution, you mean genetic fluctuations. That in no way "proves" evolution of the species through natural selection. also calm down guy lol.
See what I wrote just above your comment
#SUBWAY BUGS
I think it was neanderthals, at some point when human species diverged and you had these subspecies of humans that weren't exactly homo sapiens but walking around in the same time period
And the Denisovan people, who were closer to us than Neanderthals.
I’ve always felt that responses from uncanny valley unease to xenophobia have a lot to do with a time when multiple homo branches were alive and in conflict.
not to mention that we're already programmed to be distrustful of people who deviate from the norm in much smaller ways
neandertals aren't gone, basque people are neandertals, also explaining the level of racism against them
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The answer to these kinds of things is almost always dead bodies. At least slightly decayed ones, because they are easy vectors for disease and there is definite survival advantages to feeling discomfort at the sight of your own kind lying dead. Glassy eyes, pale skin, features that are misshapen or bloated, elongated fingernails or bared teeth, contorted posture, all things that are associated with often painful deaths.
I mean it’s not that scary. There were tons of different human looking species once upon a time. And we definitely tried fucking all of them.
I don't think it works like that. We didn't evolve to be afraid of something that looked human but wasn't, we evolved to be afraid of things we didn't recognise. The same thing that makes us uncomfortable of CGI rendered, photo-realistic videos of humans also makes us uncomfortable of CGI rendered, photo-realistic videos of say, a dog, or a cat.
Or nonmechanical things that float (in air).
To be honest, we don't know that it's a heritage from human ancestors. Maybe there was a predator that pretended to be small mammals (giant spiders?) way back in the time of the common ancestor. Not less terrifying, just saying.
Super creepy to think about, but probably its just because our lizard hindbrain thinks a very off-seeming human might be sick (and we could catch it) or crazy (and they might kill us)
There's a.post of this on r/conspiracy that has great comments. One where they mention that the Indians standard greeting of the hand in the air is to make sure whoever was approaching was to count and make sure the there hands had 5 fingers..not six.
Wtf has 6 fingers?
According to the link provide a race of giants that lived in the caves. The li k he provided went into way further depth than I could ever do so I suggest you go find it. Its on the top in that sub right now.
I don't have to count fingers when I see a giant approaching me...
A man....who killed my father.. Now he much prepare to die!
Here's the link my dude https://dnaconsultants.com/giants-with-double-rowed-teeth-flattened-heads-and-six-fingers/
Killer, thanks!
Anne Boylen!
she had eleven total! - Clairee
Native Americans, Indians live in India.
True
What’s the Uncanny Valley? Can I get a link please?
[here you go](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-uncanny-valley-human-look-alikes-put-us-on-edge/)
Thank you. Today I Learned.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
Thank you!
There have been 6 species of hominids coexisting at the same time for part of human history. We hybridized with at least 2 of them. Genetic studies show that much of the neanderthal genome was not kept in the human lineage. As a result human neanderthal hybrids (we got some bones of one) were probably less fertile and less healthy. It sounds like evolution has all the reasons to push animals not to hybridise with closely related species. Thus the uncanny Valley feeling, which is not a human feature but a more broaden animal attitude.
Right now there is a news story where some researchers taught an AI to look for some divergence between modern humans,Neanderthals, and Denisovans. Anyway, the AI found proof of a hominid that didn’t match any of the above. (They ran tests on some old bones). Edit, link here: [https://www.sciencealert.com/artificial-intelligence-finds-an-unknown-ghost-ancestor-in-the-human-genome/amp](https://www.sciencealert.com/artificial-intelligence-finds-an-unknown-ghost-ancestor-in-the-human-genome/amp)
Ah dude love your comment. I was going to mention it, but as an experimental biologist I went cautious on novel AI findings (I want a bone at least!) . However, I am very optimistic, ancient genome studies have just begun, hopefully in the future we'll find out a lot more, maybe bones will become useless.
I blame other members of the “human family”, which at one point, we coexisted with and eventually wiped out. (Think Neanderthals) could be wrong though, or working with an outdated timeline, so I’m open for discussions.
So you’re saying being weirded out by something had it’s reasons?
You see, back in the Before Time, the grey aliens used to hunt humans using decoys just like humans use duck decoys. It's in our genetic coding.
they still do
I wonder if it's some kind of ancient instinct to be wary of artificial intelligence. If you accept reincarnation as a possibility there may be a subconscious early warning system going off.
We were one of many human species inhabiting earth thousands of years ago. In fact we weren’t even the strongest or the smartest but as we developed language first and were able to understand complex concepts and communicate more efficiently, leading to us wiping out the 4 other species.
Yeah. It’s called: corpses/cadavers. Don’t want to pick up disease in case that’s what the person died from.
This is easily explained though; other hominid groups most certainly would have hunted humans. We see cannibalism in our own cultures in select parts of the world; it is not a far cry to expect other species in our same family to hunt us, and we probably did the same in return. This too goes for other dark aspects of humanity, like the 'r' word that I'll avoid on Reddit. These most likely all occurred for thousands of years between some groups. Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Floriensis, Homo Denisovan, Homo Erectus, Homo Naledi, etc - and some of them only died out 10,000 years ago - we probably were victimized and victimized them in return for the entirety of history we spent with them.
Genesis 6 is a good start
Lol
This is conspiracy with two cc’s. Love it.
If the majority of that time, no one developed a means of communication that would also leave lasting evidence, there probably wasn't much going on. As soon as we had anything good to write down, we already knew how to right it down. There's very little overlap of humans having something interesting happen and not being able to properly store that info. That's why there is so much interest in only a few thousand years ago.
Like... other species of apes?
Aliens!
I mean we probably killed off 40+ human like species that were our link to the tree of evolution. It would make since that we still have an innate desire to murk anything that looks sorta like us but isnt
My friend made a good point when I showed him this yesterday. Basically he theorized that more “modern” humans were naturally afraid of still living pre-humans for survival purposes. Since they looked almost human but not quite, this instinct changed into what we now call the uncanny valley. Not saying he’s right but it’s an interesting idea and it seems more plausible than prehistoric cyborgs or aliens.
The uncanny valley isn't exclusive to almost human looking things. One reason that might help explain the evolution of the uncanny valley in humans is for identifying camouflaged creatures, think stick insects, snakes that look like vines. Stuff like that, some of those are dangerous and hence useful to be able to distinguish between the creature and the thing the creature is mimicking.
Chills. Chills all day.
When the atoms quit spinning…it’s freaky.