Categories
Personal Philosophy

On Human Development.

So, I pose a question. If given identical Planet Earths and starting with identical male and female humans, would humanity develop in identical ways? In a world of infinite possibilities could two seemingly identical situations produce similar results?

I know the question is quite heavy handed. I don’t expect a succinct answer it was just something I was thinking about the other day. We have so many actions that are ingrained in us that require no thought whatsoever. If we are given a hammer we know that we hold it by the handle and hit a nail. These behaviors are learned though. What’s even more of a conundrum is that actually thinking of the hammer is also learned. There was not always hammers and we dug them up and used them. That’s really the meat of my question. Would the two humanities develop different tools? Would one develop faster than the other? Who would be the first to space?

I think the results would be even more interesting. Say the societies developed pretty much the same way. What does that tell us about out makeup? Are all these tasks ingrained in us? Are we truly not an anomaly? How about if they developed radically different. Are we special? Did we have some spark of evolutionary serendipity to get us to where we are today?

I am really curious to hear what you guys think. What do you think would happen in this hypothetical situation?

The short and sweet is that I think the two humanities would develop differently. I think that due to the incredible randomness of the universe that they would end up in very different situations given the same amount of time. That’s just my feeling. Again, I want to know what you think! Please, leave me a comment!

Categories
Nonsense

How many licks does it take?

I walked in from class today and slumped into my favorite chair to watch a little tube-o-vision. I flipped on the History Channel and they had this show called Modern Marvels on. It’s a pretty neat show. They talk about different technologies that are current in today’s civilization and discuss their origins and how they came to be. The marvel they were covering this time was snack food tech. Snack cakes, chips, candy, what have you. They ended up getting to that incredible, edible favorite, tootsie rolls. The head honcho started talking about the famous question, “How many licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop?” She then brought up the fact that many people had sent the company their finding on this, and goes on to mention that students from Purdue University built a machine to test how many licks it takes. That caused my ears to perk up. It was kind of neat to hear your university mentioned on the History Channel. It turns out some chemical engineers built a sort of “licking machine.” I looked into it further and the blueprint was actually on the tootsie roll website. The picture and website can be found here. They say that using the machine it takes an average of 364 licks to get to the center. The only real reason I’m writing this is because my university was mentioned and that was kind of cool. I wonder how many more age old questions science will answer?