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10 13

"Follow your ancestors!"

That's a tricky statement.

Which ancestors?

The common ancestor of all present day humans and apes who lived around 7 million years ago?

The common ancestor of all present day animals who lived around 555 million years ago?

The common ancestor of all present day animals, plants and bacteria who lived around 4 billion years ago?

So which one to exactly follow?

Well, I personally follow all the ones I mentioned in a way.

None of them followed any religion, neither do I.

Monty13 4 Mar 14
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10 comments

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0

As, by definition, all of our ancestors are dead, we all will eventually “follow” them. 🙄

0

How do you know there was only one starter cell?

For what ever the earliest single celled organisms that supposedly evolved into more complex multicellular organisms, how do you know for sure that the DNA cellular construction didn't happen in different cells being formed with out connection to other cells?

Word Level 8 Mar 14, 2021
0

Speaking here for myself, as ONLY anyone of us Truly can, I tend to think that the adage of " Following your Ancestors" means/relates to " taking note and listening to the Instinctive Moral and Ethical codes that have passed down from Generation to Generation" when it comes down to Humans in particular.
Since, imo, the MAIN Driving Force/Impetus behind Human kind has ALWAYS been to ENSURE the survival of EACH generation by nurturing and protecting each other as either a Family Group, Clan, Tribe, Community or what ever else it may be.

0

The question is why follow anyone? I trace my own path and forge my own destiny.

Well maybe. Because you did not come into a world avoid of cultural concepts, and invent your pov from scratch.

@BirdMan1 not mabe, it's what I always do, my parents sent me to school to educate myself and the reading was mine and mine only. The post days follow your ancestors, not a very good post mind you, as it rambles on amoebas or microorganisms and basically denies our own evolution, it's really a crappy post, devoid of any sense whatsoever, and starts under a false premise of having to follow something or somebody, I do not do that nor do I believe in that.

1

Michael Shermer reported an interesting tidbit in his book "How We Believe". While children are taught the beliefs of their parents, they tend to adopt or change these beliefs in relation to how the offspring related to the parents personally and how they judged the parents relationship to be. Those who judged their parents relationship to be unsatisfactory where more likely to change their personal religious beliefs. It's as if the child would look for a different belief system in hope of creating a better personal life for themselve.

To your point about how far back we should look to "Follow your ancestors", I have come to believe that DNA and fetal development tends to function in a way that makes a certain amount of tnis inevitable. Experiment with foxes in Russia to make raising them for the fur trade less hazzardous demonstrated that the disposition and acceptance of human contact was a trait that can be selectively bred into them. We would need to understand that the same sort of inherited behavioral traits would very likely exist within humans as well. They would be something existing somehow in our DNA.

"Follow your ancestors," is just a turn of phrase, having no intention, as it were, to be taken in a literal, scientific sense. Schemer's point is interesting, but I think that it does not take into account the general "flavor" of one's childhood household. One can change religion, but it may be harder to change racist, or antiracist attitudes, for instance, regardless of religion. We do not grow up in vacuums.

@BirdMan1 - I don't see how your comment relates to mine. I didn't suggest kids grow up in a vacuum, just the opposite. Changing belief systems wasn't regardless of a child's upbringing but tended to be related to its context. Changing belief systems in relation to a child's upbringing isn't an absolute but a tendency. When charted on a graph as Shermer did, the two have a positive correlation - dissatisfaction with one's upbringing and tendency to change belief systsms. It would also work in reverse (as I believe is true in my case). Shermer point is derived from 2 separate surveys; one taken from members of the Skeptic Society and the other from a random sampling provided from a professional polling company. Shermer reported that the magnitude of his results varied significantly between the two samplings but the tends were consistent.

0

In one sense, we all follow our ancestors don’t we. Otherwise they at contemporaries or descendants.....

1

Most of us do follow our ancestors in a much closer link than you are listing. This is exactly why we have so many religious people. They conclude that their religion was good enough for the parents, grandparents, and great great grandparents so it has to be good enough for them also. To deviate from this in any way is to disrespect the ancestors and nobody wants to believe they lived "holy lives" when there was never any reward for doing so. IMHO this is why people stay in church. It's a club with a sense of belonging.

That’s all it is.......strength in numbers.

2

I follow my uber-cool Aunt Betty from The Giland... (LonGIsland)!

I love your accent!

@BirdMan1 i got it from her at age 12!

@AnneWimsey Having gone to college on the westernmost part of LonGIsland, I worked hard to drop that speech pattern. I repeated Long Land, wherein one has to hesitate between the words; I know, TMI.

0

love it!

us homo sapians as we are have only been around for a couple hundred thousand years

99.9 % of species are extinct

us homo's rule the world!

3

When I hear 'follow your ancestors' I think of my great great grandparents not the missing link.

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