Yea definitely! Besides, afaik the function of dreams, if there is any, isn't exactly known at the moment, so it's difficult to speculate on top of to begin with lol

Even if it would, of course that still doesn't mean it has to evolve. I'm sure there are plenty of plants that would be helped out greatly by the ability to quickly retract into the ground when being eaten. But the fact that you can think of a possible possible helpful feature, doesn't mean that evolution has to arrive there

Tbh, if it is true at all that people are more precise with their fingers, it sounds like just learning and adapting on a physiological level, not a genetic one. If you lift a lot of weights, you will we more muscular, but that's not genetics necessarily. If you had an identical twin who didn't do that, they wouldn't be as muscular.

Also, that story of evolution sounds kinda...larmarckian? Of course us using our finger more during our lifetime doesn't necessarily make future generations automatically better with their fingers, right? But maybe I read your description wrong

Also the obvious thing...is it true that humans now are more dextrous with their fingers than at most points during history? I can think of a lot of things before smartphones that also require a lot of dexterity

The observable universe is literally defined to be the sphere of stuff we can observe from Earth. I guess it doesn't really matter if you are actually observing it, but it's still observable

Ah, the first law of r/showerthoughts

Almost every showerthought with "technically" in the title is not technically very true :p

Oh yea absolutely nobody is doing that lol And considering 52! Is already an unimaginably vast number, think about all the particles in the universe... it's gotta be like almost over a thousand combinations all in all :p

Yea, it's a nice one to think about right? Because if things really are shuffling randomly, then way before the universe randomly resets, you can expect lots of weird things like: by pure chance a perfect copy of your brain at this exact moment comes into existence, complete with all your memories until this point, just brought together by chance in the otherwise chaotic vacuum of space.

Isaac Arthur has good discussion of this kind of sci-fi and futurism. I recommend his channel in general but here is an older video of his dealing with these kind of infinite improbability issues haha. Check it out if you're interested

Oh okay that makes more sense actually, sorry

Hey did you forget to switch accounts before replying to your own post OP? Lol

Edit: no probably just misclicked

This touches on something called the Poincaré recurrence theorem but afaik there is no requirement for the universe to be infinitely large. If you randomly shuffle a deck of cards long enough you can expect it to return to a previous state. But there are only 52 cards in a deck, not infinitely many.

Also afaik it is not known if the universe is infinite or not of course

>we would have likely taken "human" from the older latin word "humanis".

Possibly. My point is that a loan word tends to adopt the grammar of the language it's adoped into at the time it was adoped.

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If you make some popcorn in a pan, then turn off the heat and add more kernels, the new ones aren't going to be popped. Because the condition which caused the popping has already stopped. Similarly, new loanwords by default aren't affected by a process that has already stopped.

Huh, yea that is a good resource!
I guess I just went on a journey on wiktionary, which told me that the origin of latin manus was disputed, although possibly connected. That's why I asked, so I also didn't arrive at the same root for them both.
I'm not actually a historical linguist, so I couldn't tell any more about it, but etymonline is generally pretty good afaik

I haven't heard anyone claim that man comes from the word for 'hand?' In fact, I'm not sure what that PIE root for 'hand' is tbh

Of course, the origin of the word human might also go back to PIE, but it's a later addition to English, yea

Exactly! By the time the word human entered the language, the process that led to the vowel change in man~men was already long dead. Same with geese but not (usually) *meese

Sure, that's an interesting way to look at it. Of course, ambiguity does in fact exist in many places in the language, and not all cases prompt us to make distinctions to clear it up. Case in point: almost all regular plurals can be confused with possessives: "It was my cats/cat's."

Maybe that's a factor, but the biggest thing of course is that the word human was never in a position to have a vowel change in the plural. The reason why the vowel doesn't change is a historical and etymological one, the same reason why the common plural of moose isn't meese (despite goose~geese). If it did have a vowel change today, it would have had to have been formed later by analogy, and what you said may contribute to that not having happened imo

Sheep and sheep are identical. Other compounds with man do get a vowel change, such as barman~barmen, policeman~policemen etc

Of course human is not etymologically a compound of hu+man but still

There is a perfectly logical historical explanation for this tho, it's just that most people don't know it lol

Should have stayed in the shower longer, this thought is undercooked

Yea idk. I don't even know if those questions make sense lol

What's a number between 1 and 1?
Does a barber who cuts everyone who doesn't cut themselves cut themselves?

Maybe your premises are wrong ey? Or maybe what you assume about the universe I guess

One of the main reasons evolution is possible is the fact that more individuals are born than survive to have offspring

Nah, it's not their vocabulary per se that tips me off, the words are not particularly weird. Look at their profile. They respond to every post with the same kind of cheery demeanor, saying 'wow, that's really interesting, [basically repeats the thought and gives vague overly sincere value judgement]'

They don't reply to comments, they are only active in two subs, they don't change their tone when being called bots. I am 95 percent certain they are not human, but one of a couple of bots that have been in this sub a lot, some more convincing than others

Bot :(

Why would that be any more pointless than a scale like Celsius? Instead of hotter things being denoted into the millions of degrees, they would just be into the minus millions.

There would just be an upper limit to the number instead of a lower one

That other post was silly, yea
I see what you did here and I appreciate it lol