Human Tuning

You, as a human, have the privilege and the duty to improve your physical, mental, intellectual and social skills, as well as any others that can be useful and beneficial in any way. You may do so slowly but do so steadily.
If you were to meet someone who outclasses you in most or all major fields, you must do your best to surpass that person and/or sharpen your abilities in other areas.
You must harness your strong points and put them to a constructive use, and you may not accept your weaknesses, rather you must make it a priority to offset them.

Discuss.

 

Of course. For the sake of the survival of the human race it is necessary for every human to be the fastest, strongest, smartest, and most powerful person that they can be, so it is basic human instinct that we would want to do so. It is also only natural that we look to other humans for a comparison, seeing as they are the most accurate common source to make such a comparison from.

 

Many people believe that one of the primal rules of life is that you "have to be the strongest/fastest/best fed/smartest. My professors like to put it another way - "If you're being chased by a lion, you don't have to be the fastest gazelle in the herd, you just have to be faster than the slowest gazelle."

I say that yes, the competitive drive is built into all (or most - I'm not competitive, not that much, anyways) of us, but it's more of a way to keep us all relatively fast, so that only the slow ones get picked off by the lions, as it were. I don't need to be the CEO of Microsoft or the President of the world to feel adequate. I just have to know that I am smarter than someone else. (*coughmybrothercough* - not an intellectual at all)

 

I believe this is a primal urge that all humans possess within themselves, however I don't believe that all people tune or tap into this. I don't think you can group all of us together and say that we all try to strive to be the fastest, strongest, and/or best at anything because some peope just don't care.

And it's not that I think that some peope don't possess this, I'm merely stating that some people do not chose to use this ability in life. Some people are merely not motivated enough. It's built into us all, though. ​

 

A common misconception of natural selection is that it is the best overall that wins. As childofturin said it is not necessarily the best, just the best for the given environment. This is why a change in environmental conditions can kill off an otherwise well adapted species.

There is also no conscious drive to be "better". What makes a species become better over time is the survival of individuals through the effects of their particular genes. If they are successful in the particular environment (both external and the environment of the "gene pool", as they are technically in a form of competition with other genes) then they will spread through the population and the species will gain that trait.

I would also like to point out that group selection does not happen. There is no "what is best for the group/species". As I said genes are not conscious. If they survive then they propagate and become more populous. This happens through not only making the particular individual they are in survive but also through helping other copies of themselves survive. The common misconception arises because we are biased towards our kin as opposed to complete strangers. But it is very simple. The closer someone is related to us the more likely they are to carry the same genes as us. Therefore genes that had the affect of making us protect and save our kin become more populous because more copies of it were passed on down through the generations.

On to the point of this thread ;D I don't see that we have any duty to do any of those things. We can't pass any of those traits on to our offspring, so it won't help humanity become "better". All we can do is selective breeding (weed out the "bad genes", although this in itself is subjective).

 

Right. There is a very good example of this - Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis, now that they are no longer considered to be related to sapiens). They were, for those of you who don't know, near-humans who lived in Europe during the last Ice Ace and died out about 30,000 (I think) years ago. They were very short (about 4-5 feet tall), they had stocky arms and legs (to hold in heat), they had incredible pain and cold tolerances (probably - without cloning one and torturing it, we can't really know for sure), and they had very large brow ridges above the eyes. In short, they were hyper-adapted to Ice Age Europe. Were it not for the arrival of humans (who killed them off/interbred with them, depending on which theory you prefer), they would have gone extinct by the end of the Ice Age. They were incapable of adapting, so they died. However, they were the best example of the human races that lived in icy conditions.

 

This reminds me of Air Gear

:3​

 

Spam much? Do you have something to contribute to this discussion, or are you just spamming nonsense?