Survival of a species means survival of genes, not individuals. Individual survival can be detrimental to species survival if the number of individuals becomes too large for its environment to support, in which case the species as a whole can become extinct.

Note also that civilization is new in both human and evolutionary terms (around 10,000 years old), so the jury is still out on whether it turns out to be something that helps with our long term species survival, or ends up being something whose short-term benefits were achieved at the cost of the species as a whole.

Some points: (1) All figures in the article are from organisations who are known for their exaggerated estimates (the article itself says that the figures are "inflated"); and (2) even if that were not the case, the 115,000 figure is for primates, the vast majority of which will have been monkeys that are specially bred for the purpose to ensure that they aren't carrying any diseases which could effect experimental results. Chimps are very rarely used as lab animals because they are slow breeders, and sexually mature chimps (without which they cannot be bred) require special enclosures and trained handlers, because pissed off adult chimps that get loose tend to rip peoples' faces off.

It should also be noted that vivisection and animal research are not the same thing at all, although the organisations who produced the figures would like us to think that they are. Biologists, geneticists, gerontologists, congitive and behaviour specialist, and various other types of scientist publish a large body of research every year which based on animals, many (but far from all) of which are in labs, but the very nature of the research precludes harming the subjects, either physically or psychologically. Given the history of the sources, I doubt that they even tried to filter out these types of research from their figures.

You are forgetting that in a society where everything is communally owned, there is no need for organised violence to deal with uncooperative people. All they need to do is withdraw your right to access to the community's property (i.e. everything), because no matter how stubborn you are, helping a team to clean toilets for an hour a week will start look like a pretty pretty good deal after you've spent acouple of months living under a bridge and eating rotting food out of trash cans.

Communism (as described by Marx) is an entirely classles system in which there is no concept of personal property (everything is communally owned). An interesting effect of being classless is that states and governments cannot exist in a true communist system, because governments by their nature put some people above others, thereby introducing a separate class into a society that is by definition classless (i.e. everybody is de facto equal, not merely theoretically equal).

Fascism is a political system in which the state is embodied in a leader who occupies the post for life; everybody who is not part of its elite or their cronies is entirely subservient to that state. This includes the military, police, and judiciary, who are controlled by, and and exist for the benefit of the state, and it is common for them to swear allegiance to their leader, not the nation in which they live. Being seen as infallible by the population is considered to be vital in fascist states, so they strictly control the information that reaches their citizens, and will use propaganda to shift the blame for any failures too big to hide onto others such as foreign powers, minorities in their own countries, or partially or entirely manufactured enemies.

Note that the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, North Vietnam, etc. were/are not, and never have been, communists, American propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding.

Buses require a lot more energy to keep warm than cars though, because buses open their doors at two minute intervals (and on some routes, at 30 second intervals) , and leave them open while people faff around trying to find change that they could have sorted out while waiting for the bus, or when they were waiting in line for the dweebs in front of them to faff around trying to find change.

I fully endorse the above viewpoint, because as any loyal Daily Mail reader knows, Britain was an utter paradise on Earth before Johnny EU Foreigner turned it into a miserable dump out of sheer spite and jealousy. And to add insult to injury, Britain is the only country in the EU that actually implements all those EU rules properly: the rest of them just carry on as if political correctness legislation didn't exist, and health and safety laws only applied to places of work. They even sell curved bananas and apples that aren't all the same size, despite the rules clearly saying that they're not allowed to!

I'd say the use of fire was very obvious 125,000 years ago, because there's plenty of evidence to indicate that Homo Erectus was using it in a controlled way around 400,000 BCE, and and some evidence that they may have been using it even earlier (perhaps as early as 1.9 million BCE). We know Homo Erectus used fire both for cooking and firing clay pots, and they possibly had other uses for it that didn't survive the ravages of time (e.g. heat-treating wooden spear points to make them harder, etc).

It's actually quite hard to find anything that early Homo-Sapiens did (that we know of) that wasn't already being done by other variants of the same genus long before we appeared. And given the fact that Homo Erectus survived alongside Homo Sapiens for tens of thousands of years in Africa, we may well have learned to use fire and crafted stone tools (and perhaps other things) from them instead of coming up with such things independently for ourselves, because there doesn't seem to have been very much to differentiate Homo Sapiens from other genuses of Homo in the technological sense until between 30,000 and 40,000 BCE. That's when when we suddenly start to see things like cave art, and tools (both stone and bone) start to become more finely crafted and therefore distinctive from those of (for example) Homo Neandertalensis, whose tools had been pretty much the same as ours prior to this.

We have no idea why this big change took place when it did, but it's interesting to note that it happened in the same time frame as the decline, and then extinction of the other two surviving members of the genus Homo.

"Tell that to Geordano Bruno http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno [wikipedia.org] and all the others who were burnt at the stake for heresy."

Only one of the charges against Bruno concerned any his scientific views (specifically, the one about there being a plurality of worlds). All the others were about various non-standard theological ideas he'd been espousing, and his investigations into, and writings on several types of prohibited magical practices.

It should be noted that (a) Bruno's trial lasted for seven years, so this wasn't a case of him being railroaded to the stake on a set of trumped up charges and invented evidence; and (b) although the Catholic inquisition found him guilty of heresy, it wasn't them who burned him, or even asked for him to be burned (they actually petitioned for him not to be executed because he'd partially recanted), but Rome's secular authorities, who had legal jurisdiction over him once the trial had concluded.

"Scientists have recorded a decline in winter precipitation over the past 60 years in Spain"

There isn't any reliable Spanish national weather data (and little hard local data) prior to 1947, so there's absolutely nothing to compare these figures with to see whether they're anomalous or not. However, carbon isotope discrimination studies of charred grain from archaeological sites indicates that water availability in the Iberian Peninsula as a whole, and especially the drier parts of Spain, appears to have been in decline for about 7,000 years, and the extensive agricultural irrigation networks built by Iberians, Romans, and Moors in some parts of the country are also good indicators of how arid they were in antiquity. This study of flood distribution and frequency over the last thousand years indicates that periods of low and high flood occurrence in different parts of the country go in cycles that last for several centuries, and have a variety of climactic causes, thereby highlighting the fact that a mere sixty years of data isn't enough to be statistically significant without any longer term baseline information to measure it against:

http://sp.lyellcollection.org/cgi/content/abstract/115/1/85

" large parts of Spain are turning to desert right now [iberianature.com]"

Whilst this is both true and a demonstrable case of anthropomorphic environmental interference, most of Spain's problems with encroaching deserts have nothing whatsoever to do with global climate change, but are directly attributable to the (largely illegal) diverting of vast amounts of water to coastal tourist playgrounds, huge numbers of new property developments, and gigantic Andalucian agricultural projects, many of which are directly funded by the EU.

It's been estimated that there are over half a million illegal water boreholes in Spain, some of which are of considerable size, and they're doing tremendous amounts of environmental damage. One example of this was the complete drying out of the Doñana river, reservoir, and areas of its marshes / wetlands in 2005, which a number of both international and Spanish studies have shown was entirely caused by the large number of illegal boreholes (over a thousand of them) drawing water from it. This is an important habitat area for (among many other animals and plants) the severely threatened Iberian Lynx.

NB: global climate change has recently become the fashionable excuse for Spain's problems, largely because it's a convenient political scapegoat for the real causes, i.e. the fact that successive governments have done absolutely nothing to either prevent or alleviate the problems that are directly attributable to property developers, large-scale intensive farming (as opposed to more traditional farming techniques, which are actually suffering because their water supplies have been diverted elsewhere), industry, vandals who deliberately cause large numbers of forest fires, and industry from damaging the environment in countless, and unfortunately, in many cases now irreparable ways.

"SOME biologists and neuroscientists will always be around who say what you want. If you can show that the mainstream opinion is against me, I'll happily concede the point, and thank you for enlightening me, but I doubt it."

Some studies of insect locomotion (which was where this discussion started) which use experimental data, modelling, or a mixture of the two to show that a great deal of locomotion sensing and control happens either in the limbs themselves before they reach any nerve centres, or in the thoracic ganglia. Nerve stimulation experiments have also shown that the characteristic "dual tripod" gait of hexapods is a mechanical oscillatory cycle that runs automatically when single nerves in the brain or mesothoracic ganglia are stimulated. The same is true for wing beats (which is some types share both muscles and central ganglia with the legs), which will cycle repeatedly when nerves in the thoracic ganglia are stimulated. The notable similarity in the data gathered from not only animals of the same species, but but those of different but closely related ones indicates that these movements are produced by a fixed "hardware" pattern generator, similar in principle to the electro-mechanical sequencers used in dishwashers and washing machines before microprocessor control became common:

  (Note I apologise in advance for some of these only abstracts. Full scientific papers and book texts are hard to find on the web):

http://jn.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/82/1/512
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/45436/abstract

http://pt.wkhealth.com/pt/re/ejnr/abstract.00009274-200419070-00019.htm;jsessionid=KwpKVK0J1jTLRRXsZmb2QJJ53LlxD8s1Tnhv6l5Fqj9qNF2ncS7l!-1104825961!181195629!8091!-1

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v283/n5749/abs/283768a0.html

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/109692463/abstract

http://www.cell.com/biophysj/abstract/S0006-3495(65)86706-6

http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:5jTmyj1E8ywJ:biology.queensu.ca/~locust/Publications/locust%2520flight.pdf+insect+proprioceptors+ganglia&cd=75&hl=en&ct=clnk

"Oh really? You read it's mind then?"

There is absolutely no evidence that insects have anything that fits the description of a "mind" to read. Note though that some spiders may well have minds, e.g. Portia labiata, which displays a level of intelligence that makes many small mammals look like warm-blooded morons.

"Humans are predictable too. Doesn't mean they're not intelligent. They're just creatures of habit."

Humans are predictable en-masse, but not individually. Most insects on the other hand are entirely predictable individually, i.e. they always react in precisely the same way to the same sets of stimuli as another insect of the same species.

"Well, Jellyfish ARE pretty dumb, you know. The most complex behaviour I know of is in Box Jellyfish, which use simple visual contrast to avoid obstacles."

All jellyfish are sensitive to a variety of external factors such as light, orientation, water currents, temperature, and a variety of types of touch, so they're by no means as unsophisticated as you're trying to make out. It's notable that you avoid trying to deal with echinoderms, which like most animals with radial rather than bilateral symmetry, also lack central nervous systems.

"A kid's home robot project could probably outsmart it."

Which proves what, precisely? I had a clockwork beetle when I was a small child that walked with a dual-tripod gait and changed direction when it bumped into things, but that doesn't prove anything whatsoever about real insects.

"Nothing about that is disproportionate to what I'd expect from a simple nerve net, vs. what I'd expect from more intelligent creatures with complete, well developed brains."

You are transparently and obviously avoiding answering the question I asked, which I will repeat: where does the software that allows jellyfish, echinoderms, and other creatures without central nervous systems to interact with their environments in a variety of ways reside?

"This only backs up my argument that flies have more complex brains, and so more complex behaviours."

What this actually does is display a desperate and transparent attempt at building a straw man because you can't back up your original claims, which were: (1) walking around without falling over or bumping into things requires intelligence; (2) flies are running software; and (3) that fly preening behaviour is intelligent.

"Your argument that insect legs are mainly hardware would make some sense, if it were true, but it's not."

Because you say so, so that's the final word on the subject despite the fact that biologists and neuroscientists who've spent their entire lives studying the subject and performing countless experiments say otherwise.

"watch a fly put its legs up onto its back to clean its clean its wings, stop when it thinks it's done, wait a moment, then clean a little more before flying off"

The fly doesn't "stop when it thinks it's done", it stops periodically (and entirely predictably) to check for danger signals before continuing with a process that can only be performed when not flying, which also happens to be when it's at its most vulnerable. Unlike you, biologists know a lot about flies of many types because they're extremely popular subjects for laboratory experiments, so the fact that their behaviour is entirely mechanical and therefore completely predictable given a particular set of situations has been not only known, but amply demonstrated for at least a century.

" If you can still claim that there's no intelligence or insignificant "software" control there, you're just being wilfully ignorant."

Then please prove you're not a case of a man with a hammer thinking everything is a nail by using your "software" and "intelligence" claims to explain how jellyfish and echinoderms work, because they manage to move around (and in the case of echinoderms, walk around), predate, and respond to a wide variety of external stimuli without having a central nervous system, let alone anything that could remotely be described as a "brain", even using the loosest possible definition of the term. So where then do they run this software that I'm so wilfully ignorant of, and where does their "intelligence" reside?

"it's precisely because we don't have true AI yet that such robots aren't perfectly able to walk"

Insects must be pretty bright then, because they not only manage to walk and fly around an extremely complex and variable environment without bumping into things, falling over, or falling out of the sky, but can even do it whilst simultaneously performing a variety of other tasks.

"However, that's rapidly changing, with things like BigDog"

Which can walk nearly as well as any arbitrary insect in two dimensions (many insects of course can walk up vertical surfaces too), but not while doing any of the other things they manage at the same time.

"ASIMO II"

See above.

"military grade exoskeletons"

See above.

"planes/drones that fly with AI"

An AI that can't even do what a housefly does in terms of negotiating obstacles in three dimensions, and houseflies are notably poor when compared to some of the predatory flying insects such as dragonflies.

"If you aren't seeing any progress towards real AI, you're not paying attention."

It's people who cite the ability to (poorly) emulate a small subset of the capabilities of simple arthropods as being advances in machine intelligence who aren't paying attention. Social insects like ants for example are pretty well-endowed in the brain department compared with the non-social ones, yet theirs still only have 250,000 cells, so they aren't six-legged chassis carrying biological supercomputers running complex sets of software at blinding speeds. And the fact that other insects with much smaller brains manage to perform the same basic physical tasks at least as well as their bigger-brained social brethren is an excellent indictor of the fact that these physical tasks are mostly inherent in, and managed by their basic hardware, hence their ability to function quite effectively after sustaining massive amounts of damage to a wide variety of systems.

Nature used basic engineering to solve the problems of swimming, flying, crawling and walking quite a long time before anything we'd describe as a central "brain" appeared, so claiming that machines should require anything remotely approaching any reasonable description of "intelligence" to do the same things is utterly ludicrous.

"MS on the other hand have saddled themselves with a multi-core PowerPC architecture, that even Apple was moving aware from in their competition with MS."

Apple moved away because IBM repeatedly failed to produce a low-power G5 suitable for laptop / notebook PCs. Being stuck with the ageing and increasingly anaemic-looking G4 line for portables was making Apple's offerings look worse in comparison with the competition every year, so Jobs eventually got fed up with being made to look like an idiot by repeatedly promising things that IBM said would be Available Real Soon(TM), and then failed to deliver.

NB: the Cell microprocessor is a member of the IBM POWER line, so Sony are just as saddled with the PowerPC architecture as MS (and indeed Nintendo).

"This is like the EU deciding what oil individuals should use in all their cars."

Except of course for the fact that nothing in the current strategy is concerned with citizens or companies, and nothing in any proposed future ones will have an effect on them either. The existing EU open source strategy is solely concerned with software the European Commission uses internally, with the document that all the current furore is about being a proposal for future legislation concerning procurement policies in other EU institutions and national / local governments in member states.

"The decision to use open source is not a governmental decision."

The decision to use open source within a government is very much a decision for that government.

"If a government says to me "build a bridge from point A to point B," then I decide what piece of software is best for calculating the mass of the bridge. I can use an open source product, or a closed source product."

And you'll still be able to make that decision under both current and proposed future EU legislation. The only limitation will be that you'll have to use software that's capable of working with the same data as the government you're contracted by, and if your chosen closed source software can't do that, then it's your problem if they pass you over for a company who is willing to use software that's compatible with theirs.

"But it would be absurd for my decision to be affected by what some guy in another country, who has no idea what software is, to make that decision for me."

Then it's a good thing that they're not proposing to make your decisions for you.

To make things clear:

-- The proposals do not place any limits on any proprietary closed source software vendor's ability to offer their products at at retail or via OEMs.

-- They do not limit any proprietary closed source software vendor's ability to sell corporate volume licenses to companies under any terms that both sides are willing to accept (subject of course to whatever contract and other laws may be applicable).