this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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I don't think they were saying that two cave men banged and out popped Ryan Gosling.
But at some point? The very nature of incremental evolution means that "homo sapiens" was indeed born and, for however brief a moment, there was truly one single "human".
That said, nobody will EVER be able to figure out when or where that was for obvious reasons. And it truly doesn't matter since it would still have been raised and live the same as its parents and even its less evolved siblings and so forth. And it probably happened multiple times until there was critical mass to even make a shift from erectus to sapien feasible.
Unfortunately no it does not mean that. At least according to the current science of taphonomy.
Populations evolve, individuals do not. Individuals can have genetic mutations that improve their ability to reproduce which impacts evolution.
Parents of one species cannot give birth to a new species. Sure their offspring may look closer to what we associate with one species or another, but those genetics are held within the parents and greater population. You can have an individual born that appeared strikingly like a modern human, but if their population hasn't genetically changed enough their offspring go right back to looking just like any other precursor to modern humans.
It's messy and annoying. People love to have a definitive starting and ending point, but the world just doesn't work that way. There's are reason the start of a new species is given as an estimate that ranges tens of thousands to even sometimes hundreds of thousands years.
Although there are lots of ongoing arguments on where we draw these lines because it is arbitrary to a degree. However, there is absolutely no acceptance that parents of one species can give birth to another. That just isn't evolution.
Now that's the scientific answer. I think the more philosophical questions around what is human are much more interesting. Where should that line be drawn in our deep past? When is the psyche truly human?
Again. Nobody is saying there is a definitive starting point of "In the year 0 ICBA, the first homo sapien was born". There fundamentally cannot be without omnipotence.
But... there was. Or, to be less precise, there were probably multiple definitive starting points before one took hold.
Yes. The individual was, potentially, "evolved". But the population "reverted" back. That doesn't change the fact that there was an individual who had reached the next stage. Because... a mutation/defect is isolated until it isn't.
But for the purposes of a thought experiment/"shower thought"? Yeah, there was very much a point where a single human existed. We just will never know beyond "it probably happened in this very large span of time".
Which is actually how most science works. You cannot ever know what the first molecule in a rockslide to start moving was (without, again, omnipotence). But you can decrease the granularity and understand what the first rock to fall or even what part of the rock tipped over first and so forth.
For all scientific and "meaningful" purposes? That is sufficient and it is just not worth even discussing which molecule "started it".
For the purposes of philosophy and thought experiments? There was very much a first molecule. It just doesn't matter outside of that domain.
Unfortunately that's still not quite right.
Individuals cannot evolve, but more importantly there is no "reverting back" evolution moves in one direction. It's the slow slow change in the genetics of an entire population.
Additionally, rocks slides and evolution are not really comparable. As you said only one rock needs to fall to cause an event that has a definitive start and end. Evolution is an ongoing proccess that never ends and it is infinitely more complex than a rock slide. The issue is we as humans are attempting to categorize an ongoing never ending proccess.
I disagree with science I guess then.
I consider like life and death. I can point at someone alive and I can point at someone dead but in between it gets tricky.
There’s is an exact line between life and death but it’s impossible to really say exactly where that is.
At a certain point you have to call an individual a human. Their parents would therefore not be “human”
We may not know exactly where that line is and that line is probably arbitrary and basically meaningless but there has to be a line where you say “okay that’s a human “
Think of it like language, was there ever Latin speaking parents that gave birth to a French speaking child? No, it's a gradual change. Or take a color gradient from blue to red there's a definite change taking place but picking out one specific spot in the middle might be purple
I see what you’re saying and I’m sure science wise it’s technically correct.
Even with your language example… yes a a certain point you have do say “okay that’s French”
Much like the color too. Yes the middle is purple but that doesn’t change the fact that at some point in the gradient it becomes blue.
There the old saying “at what point do grains of rice become a pile of rice”
It’s impossible to say sure, but theirs is a point in my opinion.We draw distinctions for things all the time for other things too.
We have a line where you’re too drunk to drive. A whole movie about people turning a hill into mountain.
100.4 degrees is a fever according to my last hospital visit.
It’s not strange for us to look for “here’s the line”