QUOTE (truethat @ Feb 16 2008, 03:49 PM)
Here's the part that caught my eye. It echoes some of the Creationist arguments I've heard, so this is why I put it in this thread. I thought perhaps it brought up some interesting points regarding where Science and Creationism do seem to overlap in the way people SEE things and ANALYZE the data.
"There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good- will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us." --David Hume* Hi True, interesting OP.
My late husband had a passion for archaeology, and acquired a degree in this field solely for the purpose of enhancing his favorite hobby. I sometimes assisted him during these digs, and also helped with cleaning, categorizing & cataloging, etc. In the area that we lived, flint was the main material used to make tools, ceremonial burial bowls (contained the bones of the dead), and weapons, i.e., tomahawks, arrowheads, etc. We often found objects that looked as though they had purpose, but later discovered that these objects were actually the product of damage.
Flint can chip or splinter easily if struck by a hard object. Little info on
flintJust thought I'd post some information that might be relevant.
Apophenia: Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".
Source"Philosopher Daniel Dennett says in his 2006 book, Breaking the Spell, “Humans are creatures that crave to find order and meaning in their environment. Not only do we want to find meaning in our surroundings, but we need to do this.” A common illustrative example is this scenario: imagine you are warily traveling through a wooded area, aware that there have recently been incidents of other travelers being robbed in the vicinity. You see a dark outline behind some bushes. What should you do? If you believe the outline to be a robber and it turns out to be a shadow, well, rather safe than sorry. But if you assume the outline to be only a shadow and it turns out to be a robber, well, you lose. In an evolutionary sense, then, there is great advantage to assuming to see forms in randomness, robbers in shadows. Dennett puts this category of thinking as a “Good Trick… that is so useful to so many different ways of life that it evolves over and over again in many different species.”
Traveling through life without seeing or making assumptions about patterns would be not only dangerous, but nearly impossible. Tomatoes, introduced to Europe in the 16thcentury, were almost universally considered poisonous throughout the continent and Britain - and rightly so. They are a member of the nightshade family, have a strong resemblance to those fruits and contain glycoalkaloids, a neurotoxin, in their leaves and stems. If you’ve already learned (patterned) that fruits of one plant are poisonous, why would you eat some from a very similar plant8? We may know now that, regardless of their association, tomatoes are nutritious and safe to eat, but it would be foolhardy for us to eat anything we find, using the assumption “safe until proven otherwise.”
Pre-historic peoples learned to pattern the changing of the seasons and track game and harvests by it. But this strong inducement has become a cup that overfloweth. Now we hear of baseball players, when having a good season won’t change their socks, or thousands claiming to have “felt something so deep in my heart” because of an “image” of the Virgin Mary formed by road salt on a highway underpass in Chicago (BBC, 2005)."
Article conts/SourcePareidolia: Pareidolia describes a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hidden messages on records played in reverse. The word comes from the Greek para- — beside, with or alongside — and eidolon — image (the diminutive of eidos — image, form, shape). Pareidolia is a type of apophenia.
SourceAstronomer Carl Sagan claimed that the human tendency to see faces in tortillas, clouds, cinnamon buns, and the like is an evolutionary trait. He writes:
As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired in our brains. Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper. These days, nearly every infant is quick to identify a human face, and to respond with a goony grin (Sagan 1995: 45).
I think Sagan is right about the tendency to recognize faces, but I don't see any reason to think there is an evolutionary advantage in seeing replicas of paintings, ghosts, demons, and the like, in inanimate objects. There is, of course, an evolutionary advantage in seeing images of dinner or predators against a varied environmental background. There would be no advantage for, say, a hawk to be dive-bombing shadows on rocks, however. It seems likely that the modern mind is making associations with shapes, lines, shadows, and the like that are connected to current desires, interests, hopes, obsessions, and the like. Most people recognize illusions for what they are, but some become fixated on the reality of their perception and turn an illusion into a delusion. A little bit of critical thinking, however, should convince most reasonable people that a potato that looks like the Hindu god Ganesh, a cinnamon bun that looks like mother Teresa, or a burnt area on a tortilla that looks like Jesus are accidents and without significance. It is more likely that the Virgin Mary one sees in the reflection of a mirror or on the floor of an apartment complex or in the clouds has been generated from one's own imagination than that a person who has been dead for 2,000 years should manifest herself in such a mundane and useless fashion.
Article conts/SourceInteresting studies about brain chemistry. Take for instances Dopamine. Dopamine is an important chemical involved in the brain's reward and motivation system, and in addiction.
It appears that people with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences, and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none.
Peter Brugger, a neurologist from the University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, has suggested before that people who believe in the paranormal often seem to be more willing to see patterns or relationships between events where sceptics perceive nothing.
To find out what could be triggering these thoughts, Brugger persuaded 20 self-confessed believers and 20 sceptics to take part in an experiment.
Brugger and his colleagues asked the two groups to distinguish real faces from scrambled faces as the images were flashed up briefly on a screen. The volunteers then did a similar task, this time identifying real words from made-up ones.
Seeing and believingBelievers were much more likely than sceptics to see a word or face when there was not one, Brugger revealed last week at a meeting of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies in Paris. However, sceptics were more likely to miss real faces and words when they appeared on the screen.
The researchers then gave the volunteers a drug called L-dopa, which is usually used to relieve the symptoms of Parkinson's disease by increasing levels of dopamine in the brain.
Both groups made more mistakes under the influence of the drug, but the sceptics became more likely to interpret scrambled words or faces as the real thing.
That suggests that paranormal thoughts are associated with high levels of dopamine in the brain, and the L-dopa makes sceptics less sceptical. "Dopamine seems to help people see patterns," according to the studies.
Sources/StudiesSwiss Society for NeuroscienceScienceDirect/Brain and Paranormal PhenomenaMagical Ideation Modulates Spatial BehaviorVisions/HallucinationsSorry so long.
edited to add info/source on flint.
