In reply to this comment by Skeeve:
Wow, a *quality video... both educational and disturbing.

Sorry for the late reply. Thanks ever so much for your quality on this vid, I found it truly eye opening

>> ^ant:

But humans don't eat each other in wars.
<div><div style="margin: 10px; overflow: auto; width: 80%; float: left; position: relative;" class="convoPiece"> raverman said:<img style="margin: 4px 10px 10px; float: left; width: 40px;" src="http://static1.videosift.com/avatars/r/raverman-s.jpg" onerror="ph(this)"><div style="position: absolute; margin-left: 52px; padding-top: 1px; font-size: 10px;" class="commentarrow">◄</div><div style="padding: 8px; margin-left: 60px; margin-top: 2px; min-height: 30px;" class="nestedComment box">"give peace a chance"
Sorry, can't. Biological Primate Imperative.
</div></div></div>

Yes they do. But maybe you're being sarcastic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes#Cannibalism.

>> ^raverman:

"give peace a chance"
Sorry, can't. Biological Primate Imperative.


But humans don't eat each other in wars.

I'd always be on the look out for Pockets her imaginary chimpanzee, whether she removed his teeth or not.

>> ^bobknight33:

Darwin is wrong. When you look at the Cambrian explosion, for the most part everything suddenly appears during this event is such a rapid time frame. Darwin's theory alone can not explain this event. You go from bacteria type to animals. However we all see that each species adapts and evolves as is needed.

Cambrian explosion.


Quote from the Wikipedia article you link to: "Over the following 70 or 80 million years the rate of evolution accelerated by an order of magnitude (as defined in terms of the extinction and origination rate of species) and the diversity of life began to resemble today’s."

Considering homo sapiens only appeared around 200 000 years ago, with the latest common ancestor between chimpanzees and humans existing about 4-7 million years ago, 70-80 million years seems like a fracking long time. So if humans evolved in 4-7 million, why couldn't there be an explosion of many but less intelligent/more primitive species over a 70-80 million years period? Plus, the explosion of rationality in modern humans looks to me way more problematic that an explosion of multicellular life considering the humongous advantages of multicellular organisms. They simply had to hit the right balance/combination once, and they did about 580 million years ago.

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Dear Dodge,

I believe it's disrespectful of invisible chimpanzees to call them invisible monkeys. How would you like to be called a monkey, you primate? Please change it again.

I understand he's building a giant playground and is in the market for a pet chimpanzee...

Really, though, he's easy to hate (even though the emotion is misguided if it's aimed exclusively at him and not his manipulators). He has a "my memoirs" book-biography being released next year, and he's not even old enough to drive a car.

I think he handled the incident very well.

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>> ^bovan:

Mr Tyson... If our DNA is 1% different from chimps, why are they 10 times stronger than us?
2 mindteaseers:
1. The human brain is twice the size of a chimp, which should make the difference in intelligence 50%? (or 100% from the chimps' POV)
(hope I'm not doing too much Glenn Beck math here..)
2. According to the wikipage "Chimpanzee genome project":
"Figures published in Nature on September 1, 2005, in an article produced by the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, show that 24% of the chimpanzee genome does not align with the human genome. There are 3% further alignment gaps, 1.23% SNP differences, and 2.7% copy number variations totaling at least 30% differences between chimpanzee and Homo sapiens genomes"
And the project is still ongoing, and apparently they still don't know what all the genes do, if anything, in the human genomes (source: pseudorandom wikipedia pages)


The usage of that 1% statistic always seems a little funny to me.

It's like marveling at how altering only 1% of someone's nervous system between their skull and back means they can no longer move their body. "But his nervous system is 99% the same ... Amazing!"

I think the 1% figure is something of an irrelevant measurement... the measurement we care about (can he move his body or not) clearly is on a different order of magnitude (not a 1% difference).

Mr Tyson... If our DNA is 1% different from chimps, why are they 10 times stronger than us?

2 mindteaseers:
1. The human brain is twice the size of a chimp, which should make the difference in intelligence 50%? (or 100% from the chimps' POV)
(hope I'm not doing too much Glenn Beck math here..)

2. According to the wikipage "Chimpanzee genome project":
"Figures published in Nature on September 1, 2005, in an article produced by the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, show that 24% of the chimpanzee genome does not align with the human genome. There are 3% further alignment gaps, 1.23% SNP differences, and 2.7% copy number variations totaling at least 30% differences between chimpanzee and Homo sapiens genomes"

And the project is still ongoing, and apparently they still don't know what all the genes do, if anything, in the human genomes (source: pseudorandom wikipedia pages)

^You say:

I believe that the difference between the average human being and Stephen Hawking is far larger then the difference between the average human and the chimpanzee.

But that's not true. Like he said, the average human child (and even most stupid ones) can do tasks that are just too complicated even for the smartest chimps. Also, Stephen Hawking is a genius when it comes to astrophysics, but he's not a genius at everything. I'm sure he'd agree with that. Bach was a musical genius, Shakespeare was a literary genius, Kurosawa was a film making genius, etc. But all these geniuses were pretty normal in most other aspects of their intellect. Dr. Tyson is saying, I believe, that aliens who are just 1% more genetically "advanced" (for lack of a better word), would be intellectually superior to us in just about everything. Their grasp of science would be superior, and so would their communications skills, their conceptual skills, and maybe even their art skills. Maybe they could all paint like Michaelangelo, compose like Beethoven, write like Jane Austen, and so on.

It might seem far-fetched, but just because it's hard to imagine doesn't mean it isn't possible. And "intelligent" life might be far more abundant than even the most optimistic scientists predict. So who knows? We know so very little, that it's almost laughable, really.