Ten human traits that science can't explain. Your comments?

"7 - Adolescence: no other animal undergoes the stroppy, unpredictable teenage years"

Not true - a lot of dogs go mental when they go through their adolescence.

"altruism" - no such thing as 100% altruism in humans.

Give me any example and I'll refute it.

EDIT - whoops, sorry dude! Ok, so let's look at the motivation. Whether the act is small or large, if the donor does it because it feels good, or right, or it satisfies an impulse then it's not wholly altruistic because the person is ultimately doing it for selfish purposes.

Altruism can always be argued against and it's always down to the motivation. If the person stands to gain, even if it means an ignominious death, it means it's not 100% altruistic.

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Science does not claim to be able to currently explain everything, so pointing out that there are some things which it can not yet explain doesn't have much meaning. Science is just a set of tools which establishes reliable ways to determine whether something is true or false once it has been claimed. When dealing with humans, though, there are some particular difficulties. Ethics prevents us from performing many experiments on human beings. To determine with scientific certainty something like, for example, whether blushing is a useful trait which helps humans survive in tribal groups, we would need to isolate multiple groups of feral children, and probably genetically modify some to not be able to blush, then observe them and see how it affects their ability to survive. Obviously, this would be astoundingly cruel and no madman would permit such a thing to be done. Science does give us some tools, though, to help consider ideas that can't actually be objectively tested. If those ideas require accepting something which is obviously false, well, it can't be true. If it being true would lead to contradictions or other things which we can test and see are false, we can know that it cannot be true.

I noticed a few of the things in the list also are not 'human traits' because they are not universal. For instance, many cultures do not have 'terrible teens'. We have created that by the way we treat children and adolescents. Superstition can be fairly well-explained scientifically. The human brain operates by forming associations between different concepts. Our brain is a pattern-finding machine and it is very greedy. It finds patterns even where no pattern exists. That leads to common flaws in thinking that all people share. Many of these flaws are summarized as "logical fallacies", such as 'confirmation bias' where people pay attention to things which support patterns they think exist, and ignore evidence that shows the pattern is not real. That can lead to superstitious beliefs, like an athlete believing in "lucky socks" or similar. When they win a game wearing their lucky socks, they say "Ah! See! The lucky socks work!" but when they lose a game while wearing those socks, they say "We would have lost even more badly without the socks". If they actually experimented and kept track of wins and losses both wearing and not wearing the socks, they could see rationally that their belief is not accurate, but few people do such a thing, leading to superstition.

1) Blushing: includes an increase in temperature of the skin which suggests a reaction to the person that you are talking to. Mostly, whether you are blushing because you have to lie to somebody that you like. You do not blush if it is a cold lie to somebody you do not like.

2) Laughter: by far the best medicine if you suffer from sensitive embarassing questions all the time. The reaction to a good joke can last a long time, sometimes a life-time.

3) Kissing: the release of sexual energy between family members, it is sometimes pleasent and sometimes not. Other kissing times are: birthdays, under the mistletoe, weddings, and frequently at work if you are a television actor/actoress.

4) Dreaming: that depends upon whether you are a dreamer or a schemer. Dreaming suggests that you live in hope and that it is a connection with the future.

5) Superstition: connection with some religious dogma which is disregarded once faith in your chosen religion is achieved.

6) Picking your nose: a human rection to something stuck up your nose, and is simply to clear a blockage so that you can breathe more easily. The ingestion of such blockage is the safest place to destroy any nastiness.

7) Adolescence: a period you must go through to find your position in the world. Usually characterised by inexperienced answers with adult reactions to something new.

8) Altruism: regard for sombody else, with wisdom it becomes empathy and love. As Jesus says in the Gospel "love your neighbour as your self"

9) Art: can be anything, mostly, it is an expression of the artists skill and thoughts on the subject. Basically, it can be pictures, words, or music.

10) Body hair: important for outward appearence. A person can be shaving it, losing it, or growing it !

Before I answer each individually, some general comments. Just because an article claims that scientists can't explain it (or that you can blast that fat on your stomach), doesn't mean it is true. Magazines want to sell more magazines, and websites want more visitors so they can sell ads. Many of the things we do are not of primary evolutionary benefit but are side effects of other traits that have evolved. Remember that what spreads your genes is having the most children and having your children survive to have children. We don't do this by being stronger than the apes. We do this by having bigger brains that allow us to work together in organized, social groups that can do things that apes cannot. Apes might hang out together, but our organized social units are more advanced and give a stronger survival advantage, which is why we survived and many proto-humans did not. Pro-social behaviors are a survival advantage when your social unit is a big part of your survival. Some of the things that happen in today's society (like not mating with every female in the bushes) are modern changes that have not been around for the millions of years over which most of our evolution occured.

1. Blushing - pro-social

2. Laughter Pro-social

3. Kising Pro-social (Our social norms now say that we shouldn't kill any edible animal we see. This doesn't mean that we aren't adapted to do so, and similarly some societies have given up kissing.)

4. Dreaming is well understood. Our neurons form and reinforce new connections, triggering all kinds of odd, disorganized thoughts. If you want the details, take a class on neurobiology. Freud didn't understand it and made up his own explanation, but that doesn't mean that we don't understand.

5. Supersition. Group beliefs are pro-social. Organizing our understanding of the world is incredibly adaptive for survival, but it has side effects. Big, bright ball in the sky goes away; darkness comes; stay out of field during that time or get eaten by lion. This is an adaptive understanding of the world. The side effect is that some of our explanations (including Freud's) involve beliefs that are unscientific. Whether I think the sun is a god or a nuclear reaction, it still benefits me to know that it is dangerous in the wild at night.

6. Teenagers have imperfectly formed frontal lobes, so they do many things that are not socially acceptable.

7. Other intelligent animals do indeed have periods where their executive and emotional control is noticeably undeveloped. But only humans have a sophisticated enough society to wear dark clothing and listen to goth music. If you observe dogs, you can see a clear behavioral difference in adolescents. Other primates also show clear adolescent behavior.

8. Altruism - pro-social. Your survival doesn't matter. The survival of the group matters. Now that you can form a blind trust to build a literacy center 50 years after you die, the evolutionary advantage for your offspring might be muted, but the altruistic impulse has clear advantage for your genetic line in the smaller groups that humans lived in for most of the evolutionary time scale.

9. Art is pro-social, is mentally stimulating, and it is also a side-effect of our attempt to organize the world. Painting the hunt and talking about the hunt makes you a better hunter than just laying around until the next hunt.

10. As evolved away from thick fur due to the hot temperatures, we did keep body hair in a few places. Maybe to trap pheromones. Maybe to signal sexual maturity.

When I read that I was struck by how much of that dogs do; they dream, they smile (yes they do) they touch noses and nuzzle babies, much like kissing.

They have a form of superstition in that they shy away from a place where something bad has happened, even when they can see the threat is no longer there.

They have a very real form of adolescence that lasts from puppyhood until about two years of age where they take silly chances and make awful mistakes.

While they don't blush, they do have a ****-eating grin.

Not all traits need to have direct evolutionary advantages to take hold. Sometimes they're 'side effects' of mechanisms which have other effects that are advantageous.

If these 'secondary' characteristics aren't sufficiently disadvantageous, then there won't be enough pressure to alter or remove them and they'll continue.

So a basic approach to this is to look for what else the neurotransmitters, etc involved do.

Your point?

I once had an almanac from the 1830s that included such knowledge that the Sun burned through the heat of asteroids and meteors falling into it, and even calculated how much matter had to fall into the Sun every day to keep it burning.

Science is a work in production. We don't know everything yet. But each year, hell, each DAY we learn a little more.

There's about 10,000 other things hat could go on your list.

You forgot one:

11) Why do people come to the philosophy forum with questions that have little relevance to philosophy?

You forgot Psychic abilities...