What is missing from the theory of evolution

you answered your own criticism in that "inherited instincts" means they are traits which are sourced in our genes.

Is it common for you to take a single section of a post and ignore the rest? I will cease talking with you if you do this again, please don't assume you "won" if I do this.

I explained were such ingrained traits come from and I did not include" intelligent programming"(which seems to be what you're saying) at all.

I said the following

quote:

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DC85 said:
It's more likely that in the pre-modern world people without such instincts died. For instance there are a number of social instincts and reactions that have proven beneficial for a complex social species, people without such traits may become outcasts or less liked within the population meaning they were less likely to reproduce. These social instincts are such a part of human behavior that we say that people without them have a disability. One example I believe is Asperger's syndrome and varying forms of it.

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Edited by DC85, : spelling

We are directed yes.... but by behaviors often needed to be part of a population. Those that didn't have them in the past died or were less likely to reproduce.

Again, you just described evolution that has been directed by traits in us that aid in our survival. These traits are now instinctual reactions inherent in us from birth but learned from those experiences which eliminated other people as we survived and evolved beyond their extinctions.

The Instinct to Survive is the basis of our direction, and the path is the Almighty Reality that forever unfolds into the future.
As conscious man, Modern Homo sapiens has been directed by the collection of information and experiences which have formed a model of the external world we exist within.

This model in our mind is one that corresponds with the Reality we encounter from birth.
The Model is what we can call Truth.
Truth is the Unconscious reservoir holding the memories from an experiential collection of insights and understandings about ourselves and our relationship with the other entity, this almighty Reality to which we must bow before.

Truth is the Holy Spirit, the light of the world.
Truth is an entity inside us, already existing.

We, who will acknowledge it as lord and the light into Reality, are capable of a personal relationship with this Truth.
Truth is our Christ and savior.

Again, you just described evolution that has been directed by traits in us that aid in our survival. These traits are now instinctual reactions inherent in us from birth but learned from those experiences which eliminated other people as we survived and evolved beyond their extinctions.

You are FALSELY claiming that I said the humans have always had these traits when I am actually saying that they evolved through the course of human evolution because the more "social butterfly" you are the better your chance of survival.

You appear to be taking me out of context.

Edited by DC85, : No reason given.

I would argue that since Instincts are formed from previous life experiences of our species, they evidence an example were we "remember" things that took place in previous generations, after the people had been born, and because they found responses to certain experience were effective.

That is not instinct. That is magic.

Instinct is a stereotypical behaviour that is not learnt and is species wide.

I can't believe you can survive in the real world unaided by social services.

We are often caught between what we have learned from our culture, society, parents, religion and what we learned from our education; or say we are often caught between our heart and our mind. But truth cannot be two. It has to be and is one. But to reach that truth, we should leave no path and opinion unsampled, if it has any slightest of appeal to our heart or mind, no matter how many times it has been held invalid in past. This is what I feel. But I will always respect your views.

Our experience as a species has been to hold Truth invalid time and again.
We love the lies which agree with our heart so full of Feelings.

The Feelings we have drive us blindly to ignore Reality, and the very Facts-of-Life which are the very beacons by which we could construct a model of the Truth.

We saw the Age of Reason use Feelings as the rule by which to define Reality, assuming that what we thought or could think, was good enough argument that Nature ought abide and reveal itself as being so.

Then, as part of the Age of Enlightenment, we discovered the Scientific Method.

That method of revealing the Reality before us all was so devised as to produce the exact same empirical evidences for all men who would set up the exact same conditions as an experiment which illustrated a Fact of this Reality.

By such means, by now, man has constructed a whole edifice of Truth using these planks as the building blocks.

We now KNOW that a singular Reality exists for all men in spite of their diversity of a dozen or so perceptions of that reality which differ from one another to some degree.
We now realize that Truth is tangible and concrete, even mathematically analogous to our thinking.

But we know more, that Truth is our personal savior in every way and the lies and fantasy worlds are for the insane.

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God is all there is, ie; Reality itself... the whole external existence beyond our mind is the almighty God to which all life must bow:

...Truth inside our head, is the Holy Spirit, the image of God, is present inside our mind when our thinking correctly images the TRUTH, or the picture of Reality inside our mind.

Edited by kofh2u, : No reason given.

Yes, but not from past lives.

There is no evidence we have past lives. If it were true there would be many new lifers with no instinct at all.

So that theory does not work.

Yes, but not from past lives. There is no evidence we have past lives.

I am going along with Carl Jung and Freud on this, though I am sure you have a strong personal following yourself and you people will perfer to disagree with those two.

Nevertheless,...

Carl Jung:

The Collective Unconscious is a storehouse of all the experiences of humankind, transmitted (genetically encoded, we now realize today), to each individual.
As the repository for all past experiences, it includes even our pre-human animal ancestry.
(Assumably through the genetic processes, though unknown to Freud and Jung at the time.)

It becomes the primary base of a person's psyche, directing and influencing behavior.
It is the deepest and most inaccessible level of the psyche.

Jung believed that a person accumulates and files all of his past experiences, so does humankind, collectively.

Jung was supported by Freud in that Freud predicted our eventual discovery of what he called "Phylogenetic Memory."
Jung said, "the form of the world into which a person is born is already inborn in him, as a virtual image." (Jung, 1953, pg 188).

Hi DC85,

The defies most definitions of what instincts are. Many inherited instincts are observed and pretty constant from culture.

I would say that instinctual behavior is not a learned behavior, nor a rational behavior (ie - based on rational thought processes resulting in a conclusion), but one that occurs at a subconscious level. Breathing (when not under conscious control) would be instinctual.

It's more likely that in the pre-modern world people without such instincts died. For instance there are a number of social instincts and reactions that have proven beneficial for a complex social species, people without such traits may become outcasts or less liked within the population meaning they were less likely to reproduce. These social instincts are such a part of human behavior that we say that people without them have a disability. One example I believe is Asperger's syndrome and varying forms of it.

Anti-social and\or a-social behavior, a lack of empathy with others -- not necessarily restricted to asperger's or even to other forms of autism.

We are directed yes.... but by behaviors often needed to be part of a population. Those that didn't have them in the past died or were less likely to reproduce.

I believe that learned behavior, especially those passed on by social mentoring, can override most instinctive behaviors (you can learn to control your breath in times of crisis, for instance). These "memes" can be "inherited" through social interactions and they can lead to survival\reproduction success: we learn from our parents and teachers.

Enjoy.

There is no evidence of these being learned behaviors in fact the opposite is true. We observe chemical reactions involved that can even be modified by medication.

Learned behaviors or "Habits" tend to create new pathways in the brain. Very very different things.

The thing that you need to know about Jung and Freud and psychoanalytical tradition in general is that they are not based on empirical evidence.

They have no ecological validity and are just culturally generated constructs used to (ineffectively) describe human behaviour.

Freud and Jung did not arrive at their theories by the scientific method: in formal technical terms they pulled their ideas out of their arse ex nilo.

You may personally like these personal ideas but the rest of the world has moved on.

"would say that instinctual behavior is not a learned behavior, nor a rational behavior (ie - based on rational thought processes resulting in a conclusion), but one that occurs at a subconscious level. Breathing (when not under conscious control) would be instinctual."

Indeed, and large portions of how humans do around other humans are subconscious or seem to be to many studies.

Anti-social and\or a-social behavior, a lack of empathy with others -- not necessarily restricted to asperger's or even to other forms of autism.

Of course it isn't, I however used it as an quick example and I believe the most well known and studied.

The thing that you need to know about Jung and Freud and psychoanalytical tradition in general is that they are not based on empirical evidence.

1) "The thing you need to know about" Experiment Psychology is that it is empirical and always starts with what is called a Hypothesis.

A Hypothesis is an idea which occurs to a scientist because it seems to answer a number of unexplained observations.
It was once called Oscam's Razor, before the Age of Enlightenment.

These Hypotheses ARE NOT, "in general... based on empirical evidence."

The next step in the scientific Method when applied to Experimental Psychology, or any other field of scientific inquiry, is to find exactly that, some empirical evidence that the idea is credible.

2) This evidence has been well developed by one of the most respect Physicists and researches who recently turned his interest to the subject of the Unconscious mind.

Leonard Mlodinow wrote an extreemely interesting and valuable book explaining his observations and the evidence to which i refer:

Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior
Publication Date: April 24, 2012

The whole discussion we have here gets turned upside down when we realize that we have a personal friend we have been unconscious to, one which actually "rules us."

It starts to dawn on the reader that we are the visitor accompanying an ancient of ancient being locked inside our mind who has been here before for millennia after millennia.
This friend is that Third Eye so often represented in art and philosophical discussions.

"He" is the real "us" in the sense that our initial clean slate of the Conscious mind has merely been experiencing life as if a new born babe.

Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of The Drunkard’s Walk and coauthor of The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking), gives us a startling and eye-opening examination of how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world and how, for instance, we often misperceive our relationships with family, friends, and business associates, misunderstand the reasons for our investment decisions, and misremember important events.

Edited by kofh2u, : No reason given.

Hi Kofh2u,

Even if you are correct, a hypothesis is the first Scientific Step into considering an idea.

This does not make an hypothesis scientific. I can take a step, and I can note that taking a step is the first stage of walking across the US from here to California, but the actual step can be in any direction, and thus may not be on the path to California. I can end up walking back and forth and never make a dent in the distance to California, yet still take a step or a series of steps.

What makes an hypothesis scientific is the ability to test it, and the test must distinguish the particular hypothesis from an anti-hypothesis.

Here the hypothesis in question is whether evolution is directed or not.

At this time I am unaware of any means to test whether there is (or has been) a "director" to this process -- a means to distinguish it from a purely natural (ie not directed) process -- and thus I cannot consider this a scientific hypothesis, so it remains a philosophical one.

Curiously, it is a philosophical hypothesis that I agree with, but I have no need to pursue a more scientific investigation at this time: I can note that it is untestable, that there is no empirical evidence that invalidates the concept, and I can wait for further evidence while remaining theistically agnostic (agnostically theistic?).

And I think it important to realize the limitations of science in pursuit of such a topic, and that those limitations do not restrict our imagination from further considerations.

Enjoy.

This does not make an hypothesis scientific.

1) I guess if the hypothesis is discarded because no empirical evidence can be found to support it, you would de facto have a good argument against, in regard to thereafter being science.

2) But I was referring to the first step in what is calld The Scientific Method.

The investigation of some observable phenomenon or anotber always begins with an idea, one that my have been brain stromed along with a number of others.

When we look back at accepted sciences, we always find this first step present, followed by the experiment that thereafter follow and support what was initially a mere suggestion.

Do we agree on this or will you google scientific method and check me out?

3) You need to read the book I recommended above.
There has been a great deal of work done especially using MRI technigues to study thinking by "seeing" what lights up inside the brain.

excerpt:

Your preference in politicians, the amount you tip your waiter—all judgments and perceptions reflect the workings of our mind on two levels: the conscious, of which we are aware, and the unconscious, which is hidden from us.

The latter has long been the subject of speculation, but over the past two decades researchers have developed remarkable new tools for probing the hidden, or subliminal, workings of the mind. [/B]

The result of this explosion of research is a new science of the unconscious and a sea change in our understanding of how the subliminal mind affects the way we live.

Plagiarist.

kofhu2 writes: Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of The Drunkard’s Walk and coauthor of The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking), gives us a startling and eye-opening examination of how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world and how, for instance, we often misperceive our relationships with family, friends, and business associates, misunderstand the reasons for ou...more

Article writes: Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of The Drunkard’s Walk and coauthor of The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking), gives us a startling and eye-opening examination of how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world and how, for instance, we often misperceive our relationships with family, friends, and business associates, misunderstand the reasons for our investment decisions, and misremember important events.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13058637-subliminal

You show your true colours. You have no understanding of psychology and simply parrot what you have read.

You have been called on this by others.

You take the position of an armchair theorist. Tell me: what accademic standing do yo have?