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Well here's a thought, I think television and facebook are more about indoctrination and mind control than education.

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People fought for the right to have universal education, much like health care because they know they are the big factors in enabling people to improve their lot in life (along with job opportunity).

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Is air really made up of hydrogen and oxygen or is it magical fairy dust?

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ignorance imposed by their family's flawed beliefs.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:


This is true. However, I think we can all agree that non-indoctrinating styles of education are probably best.

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I kinda think that's rare even if people ARE exposed to alternative viewpoints. I suspect that if anyone was going to grow away from preexisting viewpoints, they would do so already with or without school. What you're really asking here is, if there were no school, would they ever find the alternative answers they seek. I would guess maybe, and maybe not.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:

I'd argue that those are natural laws, more than they are government derived laws. You couldn't have a society in the first place if those rules weren't already ingrained into most (maybe even all? Even sociopaths seem to understand this one to some degree) humans.

These are laws you tend to see with very little exception across all human societies and culture, because if the society DIDN'T have them, it would quickly self-destruct. Civilization also follows evolutionary principles.

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But generally, humans tend to be frightened and disturbed by murder and rape or even the idea of committing either one. They shy away from it. So I would guess those are actually fairly unnatural, or at least not anything that is evolutionarily selected for. And if they're not behaviours that are evolutionarily selected for, my thinking is you can eventually expect them to die out, unless something prolongs the incidence of the behaviour.

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I can't think of a single 'natural law' that hasn't been violated by some culture.

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Fire will do it. Just look at the Amazon.

2) I've read that the people we call aborigines are the mix of multiple migrations, each with different tech levels.

3) The Maori are connected to the great melanesian expansion, which was definitely a wave that began in IIRC, taiwan, and went as far west as madagascar.



Hard to miss the pattern of expansion here. I agree this was an advanced society, and destructive.

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That map is very hard to read, but even can see that New Zealand is part of Polynesia, not Melanesia. You are way off on this topic. Melanesian, Polynesian and Micronesian are all considered different, although Micronesian is a mix. Quite different cultures and none of them have anything to do with Australian Aboriginals. DO a little research for crying out loud. You get your facts so skewed, but I can see as usual you will argue vehemently about stuff that you know very little about.

You might want to check out the migrationary path of Australian Aboriginals. They came a faster and completely different route to Polynesians.

You're stuff about collapse is way off. Although Australian Aboriginals have left their mark, they did not cause the desert in the centre of Australia. The desert is caused by the climate and in particular the continental climate.

You may not be aware, but we are not just a big desert as everyone often imagines. Since you like piccies.

we have rainforests



tropics



temperate rainforests - this is where i live



blue mountains outside of Sydney



tasmania where I am about to holiday



This is the desert as it currently looks with all the rain - central Austalia has unreliable rainfall, not none.



desert bloom



I have to dash. but I just want to say one thing about the Aboriginals use of fire. It wasn't destructive it was actually an agricultural tool. They did controlled burns. Fire got rid of undergrowth and encouraged edible plants. Now the Australian bush needs fire to regenerate. We now have taken on board that type of land management and do controlled burns.

I'll talk about continental weather systems another time.

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Between 60,000 and 40,000 B.P., northeastern Queensland, south New South Wales, and southeastern South Australia were drier than at present. From 40,000–30,000 B.P. a colder climate than at present is indicated from one New Guinea area. Dryness became even more accentuated in northeastern Queensland, whereas many lakes filled up in the southern mainland, probably because of increasing precipitation effectiveness there. Before the end of this period colder conditions than now were already giving rise to slope instability in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales.

The period of 25,000–15,000 B.P. saw the greatest lowering of the New Guinea treeline, reaching an extreme at 17,000 B.P. when glaciers also achieved their maximum extent. This was the time of extensive glaciation in Tasmania and small glaciers formed in the Snowy Mountains. Estimates of the lowering of mean annual temperature range from 6°–10°C. Northeastern Queensland experienced its driest Late Quaternary climate; lakes were contracting throughout the southern mainland and the final phase of substantial desert dune building took place before the period ended.

In the Snowy Mountains ice retreat began before 20,000 B.P., as did the construction of clay dunes in the southern semi-arid belt, a process demanding higher temperatures. However, in New Guinea and Tasmania ice retreat and treeline rise did not begin till after 15,000 B.P. Temperatures rose rapidly and everywhere most of the ice had gone by 10,000 B.P., when some lakes filled up in southern Australia, implying an increase in absolute precipitation.

In the last 10,000 years climate has been relatively stable although there are some indications that temperature and rainfall were marginally higher than now between 8000 and 5000 B.P. Since then, lake levels have oscillated; a brief, limited resumption of periglacial activity took place in the Snowy Mountains and there were small glacier advances in New Guinea.

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:

The most common cause of desertification is the overcultivation of desert lands.[14] Over-cultivation causes the nutrients in the soil to be depleted faster than they are restored. Improper irrigation practices result in salinated soils, and depletion of aquifers.[13]
Vegetation plays a major role in determining the biological composition of the soil. Studies have shown that, in many environments, the rate of erosion and runoff decreases exponentially with increased vegetation cover.[15] Overgrazing removes this vegetation causing erosion and loss of topsoil.[13]

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Magon,

Simple advice: if you begin a post with an insult, you will never get a positive result.

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As for migrations, I started with quoting an article I had read in a scientific publication. Sure, the author might have had no evidence, but then it seems unlikely that it would have been published. Ergo, he had some evidence. He can still be wrong, but I think that the statement "there is no evidence" is doomed.

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I would not make the same claim about natural deserts. Sure, there is evidence, as Byte pointed out above, with sandstone erosion, but also, as per wikipedia, there is also a scientific consensus.

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but not that nature would tolerate a wasteland. It just makes no sense. Not logically, not scientifically.

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Ergo, it needs a causitive agent. Something has to explain the satelite picture of Australia. I have one. It's a politically incorrect one, but this was a scientific discussion, not a political one, and it's scientifically all kinds of sound. If aborigines didn't deplete the land by farming or grazing it into dust, then who did, the kangaroos?

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Outside of that, when we move into denial of human impact or human behavior, then I lose interest. There is a scientific debate to be had there, but it is both outside the mainstream view and not particularly useful in an applicable manner to any modedrn environmentalist who wants to effect positive change.

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As for your post, I thought it was at odds with the facts posted, including what you, yourself, have post above, re:rainfall and biodivesity. The species of the desert are also present, typically in equal or greater numbers, in the non-desert. It's just in the desert there is nothing else, so they stick out more agains the sand.

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Originally posted by Niki2:
Magons: give it up doll. You are trying to debate with someone who doesn't "debate", but makes statements as flat fact which cannot be backed up and which are in some cases just plain wrong. Haven't you gotten that by now?

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Originally posted by Bytemite:
I think the problem I'm seeing here is there is a misunderstanding about arid lands and deserts going on. The primary disagreement appears to be a matter of definition.

DT seems to be using arid lands, desertification, and deserts in different ways. For example, northern Utah has arid highland prairies, and arid temperate forests. Only southern Utah is what we might call an arid desert, with lots of sand. However, Southern Utah is not barren either, and there's vegetation, meaning the soil has nutrients.

Desertification is caused by over grazing and bad agriculture, which steals nutrients from the soil and increases erosion, creating a dust bowl (often in the form of an "erg" or a "sand dune field").

That is not to say all dust bowls in history have been man made. The Jurassic age eolian sandstone I mentioned that's the source of most of Utah's southern sand, there are virtually no fossils (not even of plants), and the sand fields appear to have been very barren. But I'd agree with DT that in modern times, most dust-bowl style ergs are probably man-made.

Is the central Australian desert man-made? I don't know enough, so I'm listening to both sides of the argument here.

I think DT is probably right about the Sahara, I only meant to point out that the Sahara was predisposed by it's geological history.

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Originally posted by RionaEire:
Well teaching evolution is compulsery in my state from middle school on up, so from 11 upwards. I see no reason to teach it earlier because:
1. Kids all hear about it anyways from nature books and documentaries, so it isn't a foreign concept when they hit middle school.
2. Teachers already struggle to cover everything that is already in the manditory corriculum for elementary school kids, adding something else will just be more difficult.
3. It doesn't really seem necessary to me, yes its the currently popular and favored hypothesis about where life came from, but it isn't the only hypothesis. They can wait until middle school in my opinion.

That Dawkins charactor sounds like a terrible bore. And if he isn't careful he'll sound just as weird about fantasy stuff as those on the total other extreme of the spectrum, the content of his feelings will be different but it will still leave the folk in the middle shaking our heads.

I think everyone enjoys dinosaurs and other creatures we don't have anymore, they're interesting and an interest in them doesn't necessarily indicate a belief in evolution. I love those shows like Walking with Dinosaurs, where they use the fossils to generate computer models of what the dinosaurs and other creatures looked like and they have them digitally running around and eating each other, those shows are fun to watch because I like seeing something old that we don't have anymore, its interesting.

A DT a chara,
I'm going to say this, I don't think you would really like living in a society that is run like squirrel society is. Baby squirrels who are born different don't make it to adulthood, nonhuman creatures don't keep their disabled around, they leave them to die, or they die on their own. Because they don't raise genetically disadvantaged offspring and don't want them one could say that squirrels are totally okay with eugenics, their behavior smacks of it. And I know how vehement your feelings are on that particular matter.

Magon's, I agree that education is important but you may want to be careful not to sound like you're doing the "white man's burden" thing. You spoke a bit patronizingly about lifting people out of the ignorance of their families, I know what you meant and I do think that ignorance is a problem, but when people are ignorant of evolution's intricacies it doesn't make them kill folk or what have you. Sure a lack of education tends to lead to more of that misunderstanding and lack of tollerance stuff, but evolutionary knowledge in eight year olds isn't going to change any of that.

I'd also like to say that someone not believing in gravity and jumping off of a building is different than someone not believing in evolution and ... ... whatever Magon's thinks the intelligent design believer will do.



"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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Originally posted by RionaEire:


Magon's, I agree that education is important but you may want to be careful not to sound like you're doing the "white man's burden" thing. You spoke a bit patronizingly about lifting people out of the ignorance of their families, I know what you meant and I do think that ignorance is a problem, but when people are ignorant of evolution's intricacies it doesn't make them kill folk or what have you. Sure a lack of education tends to lead to more of that misunderstanding and lack of tollerance stuff, but evolutionary knowledge in eight year olds isn't going to change any of that.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:
propagator of the myth that altruism is a disadvantage...

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Originally posted by RionaEire:
Hi Magon's, all I meant was that I got this feeling from your post of "We need to teach evolution in primary school because we need to pull people up out of the ignorance of their families" That's not exactly what you said, but that's the feeling I got from it. Now granted I'm coming at it from a different angle than you so we see it differently, that's just the feeling I got from that basic content. I totally agree that school is to teach people so they can grow up and know stuff, pursue their dreams, discover, seek knowledge and learn more than their parents learnt. So we obviously both think school is very important. I'm definitely not one of the "who needs public school" crowd as I've made clear before, I think school is quite necessary for our society.

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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