Ancient Egyptians considered dung beetles sacred, and believed that they were responsible for rejuvenating the sun during the night. Egyptians also had a keen spiritual and scientific interest in astronomy.
Now it's revealed that dung beetles can perceive the galaxy. Coincidence? I think not.
Obviously dung beetles are descended from a race of astronavigators who taught the Egyptians everything. They are the ancient astronauts. [Cue theremin music]
Actually they were named khpr as a manifestation of the deity Khpri who is the morning sun, having emerged from the night. The Ancient Egyptians described the sun as navigating a great river in the sky which was the Milky Way and a reflection of the Nile River on earth.
>If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a common semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
I am on HN since many years, a user just recently. I was not implying that HN turns in to Reddit. I was implying that this comment is worthy Reddit, not HackerNews - a professional website that strives to hold on to some standards.
This is true. However, while jokes are not expressly against the rules, the community moderation rarely favors them. Personally, I read a lot of Slashdot, and to some degree enjoy the level of humor, political debate, and anonymous commentary there. I find that the signal to noise ratio here is somewhat better. I don't think it likely that anyone would be banned for exclusively making joke comments, but generally I think the expectation is that while informative or insightful commentary may also be humorous, the primary purpose here is not entertainment.
As it turns out, the only website found to have a sense of humour is Reddit. There are no other websites on the Internet on which humour is found in the wild /s
This is less surprising if you imagine evolution to be a reinforcement machine learning system. The dung beetle actors are given all the sensory inputs of their environment. Those that used the inputs (which happened to be our galaxy) where better at satisfying goal and thus had higher selection rate for next iteration of system. The actors, much like machine leaning, AI, don't have any logic nor any reasoning. They simply are a ludicrously complex, but deterministic state machine of inputs -> mess -> outputs. The mess being seeming unintelligible, not rational, with lots of "cruft".
I think that's a relevant metaphor, to look at evolution as a kind of machine learning system - especially the aspect of actors not "knowing" or understanding the logic/reasoning behind their (seemingly?) intelligent behavior. That might be a way to explain "intelligent design" in nature, without bringing God or consciousness into the narrative.
Are you that desperate for a God that you recoil when scientists and mathematicians find a natural explanation for some phenomenon?
The more you break apart the world through science, the more you realize that even the simplest of rulesets can give rise to an incredibly complex network of of structure, behavior, and incentives — no deity required.
There is nothing natural about a dung learning to navigate using the stars. Nothing that great either. A creature will always try to figure its way using objects as a reference point.
An incredibly complex network of structures is more proof of a higher order.
Enjoy your belief in a perpetually self-correcting field of science and a perception of the world that never ceases to change. By definition, you'll never find peace.
> There is nothing natural about a dung learning to navigate using the stars.
Yes there is, it's perfectly natural as was just explained to you above. No magic required, simple evolution.
> An incredibly complex network of structures is more proof of a higher order.
No, it isn't. It's well established that very simple rules can create incredibly complex network of structures with no higher order whatsoever.
> Enjoy your belief in a perpetually self-correcting field of science and a perception of the world that never ceases to change. By definition, you'll never find peace.
Nonsense. If you require iron age superstition to achieve peace, that's you; others don't have that requirement.
> I honestly wished you made better backup points to your arguments. I'm left with nothing to go on as it is now.
I don't need to, you either understand evolution or you don't; it's not an opinion to be argued, it is how the world works. There's nothing you can refute, any refutation is simply evidence you do not understand the facts of reality. You can't argue with someone who denies evolution, their mind doesn't value facts.
> Nature by my reasoning is magical though.
Then your reasoning is flawed. Magic is that which breaks the rules of nature, like your god for example. Nature is not magical, the natural world is the very definition of not magic.
> Simple rules fail in the subject of the Heisenberg principle.
You don't understand evolution, you're nowhere near ready to approach the topic of quantum mechanics.
I give up. An atheist is not an atheist by logic. But rather by arrogance and ignorance. And the nature of your tone seems to prove it. My only advice is to tone down your hate and aversion to all things theological and reduce your pride in the explanation of science. Because when it gets old and stale and the excitement wears off, you will see things in a more "connected sense." Like theology is just another version of science kind of thing.
> Because when it gets old and stale and the excitement wears off, you will see things in a more "connected sense."
No, reason and logic don't get old or stale, and they prevent me from thinking how I "see things" has anything to do with reality. Nature is what it is, it doesn't care about your beliefs and fears and need for an afterlife. Never mind the humor in the one with an imaginary friend he's trying to push on others calling others arrogant and ignorant, lol, don't project your flaws on me. People are here talking about a dung beetle story and you're prothletising, it's disgusting; keep that shit to yourself.
You can easily be agnostic from logic which can be functionally identical to atheist.
After all you have zero evidence what you believe is more true than the flying spaghetti monster, Thor, or any other past religion real or imagined. Thus logically any of your beliefs are vastly more likely to be false than true and are thus safely ignored.
Heisenberg principle is not magical, it's not just the way you are used to looking at the world.
CPU designers on the other hand really do need to pay attention as it's a significant real world issue for them. Past that, Quantium computing actually uses the Heisenberg principle while producing very consistent results.
People who are talking about science and don't want to bring God in the mix generally don't want to do so because they believe gods are silly superstition; you cant' be afraid of things you don't have any reason to believe exist.
> Honestly though, the more you break apart and put together the world through science, the stronger are the signs of a higher order.
People who reject God are still religious, they still believe; atheists simply don't believe it. They don't "reject" God, they think he's fantasy, nothing to be remotely fearful of.
But how do they know it's not based on just a few bright stars? Milky way is pretty hard to see with our large human eyes. Insect eyes are good for panoramic views, but much less efficient at low light acuity.
(Be careful, at the CC we accidentally were "those guys"- there were no lights at all except red headlamps, and our car kept lighting up like a Christmas tree)
I once used Google sky on my phone, and I learned what the milky way looks in my light polluted sky. It has become easy since then, but it becomes very difficult on days of full moon.
To show that the beetles were focusing on the Milky Way, the team moved the table into the Johannesburg Planetarium, and found that the beetles could orient equally well under a full starlit sky as when only the Milky Way was present.
If you are somewhere dark, the milky way is very easy to see . . . possibly the most obvious feature in the sky. It is just that light pollution makes it difficult to see from human-inhabited areas: a point which is actually raised in the article as a potential concern for animals that navigate by the night sky.
Yeah, but the bright stars are a part of the Milky Way. So that doesn't address my question.
I really think it does . . . in a planetarium, you can turn on or off whatever you want. In my experience, the milky way switch includes the background glow and not the bright foreground stars which are rendered separately. In these situations, I tend to give the researchers the benefit of the doubt; they generally aren't dumb people.
And I assume these beetles do just fine in light-polluted areas.
I make no such assumption, but even if true, it means that they are using other points of reference (like street lamps) in addition to or instead of the milky way when it is not available. That does not render the conclusion that they use the milky way as one of their references incorrect. Also, we do know that light pollution is a serious problem for some species. If there are bright lights above a beach, hatchling sea turtles will go the wrong way, heading inland instead of out to sea. Apparently, they evolved to head toward the relative brightness of the moon reflecting off the sea.
Now it's revealed that dung beetles can perceive the galaxy. Coincidence? I think not.
Obviously dung beetles are descended from a race of astronavigators who taught the Egyptians everything. They are the ancient astronauts. [Cue theremin music]