10 ms·

Humans can't perceive a lot of things, and on top of that, we have egos that makes us feel superior even though in reality, we are the only ones on the planet w

Humans can't perceive a lot of things, and on top of that, we have egos that makes us feel superior even though in reality, we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them. I'm not a big fan of humanity. We are pretty awful.

kranner 8y ago
Relevant short story from Ted Chiang et al: http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/ http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/
kpnbg 8y ago
I too enjoy watching the perfect harmony of a lion eating a live impala
- mpfundstein 8y ago
  The huge difference is that lions dont put impalas into huge factories, where they feed them afwul food, rob them of any dignitiy, slaughter them by the masses, ship them across the globe in order to throw half of it away because it didnt hit the market’s taste of the month!
  - Lewton 8y ago
    They would if they could
    - mpfundstein 8y ago
      Who knows... i don’t believe intelligence necessarily implies tendencies for mass murder
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        It's not about tendencies. Intelligence is about being better at getting what you want. A lion wants to eat impala. A smart lion would figure out how to breed them in captivity, and it's only a small step from there to factory farming.
        joesb 8y ago
        Agreed. Every hunt a lion does imposes fatal risk of its own. The lion could break its leg running and falling in some hole. It could break its teeth getting kicked in the face by the impala. Any of that even could cause it to not be able to hunt any more, and lose its status in the herd. A smart lion wouldn't want to risk itself like that just for a meal.
        close04 8y ago
        How many smart lions would kill every impala and then wonder if they can switch to grass? :) Farming is after all pretty sustainable. But how about the things that aren't? We're over-exploiting basically every limited resource we have. Ironically we kind of ignore the unlimited ones, like wind, solar, etc. We're cutting down forests like there's no tomorrow and they literally make our oxygen. And worse, sometimes this destruction is totally gratuitous and avoidable. Save for those who really need a couple more millions of $ to "survive".
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        > How many smart lions would kill every impala and then wonder if they can switch to grass? Probably a few, then they'd figure out the concept of saving something for later, just as human farmers did countless of centuries ago :). > We're over-exploiting basically every limited resource we have. Ironically we kind of ignore the unlimited ones, like wind, solar, etc. A nit, but the reason we're "kind of ignoring" renewables is because fossil fuels are better. They're much more energy dense. They're easier to handle (just burn to release energy; meanwhile, photovoltaics is a very advanced piece of technology, and we most likely wouldn't have it if we didn't start with fossil fuels). They can be processed for other things - e.g. lubricants, plastics. Fossil fuels are absurdly useful. That's why they're so popular. But we're slowly getting there with renewables, not that both the tech and the will to use it seems to be here. > We're cutting down forests like there's no tomorrow and they literally make our oxygen. And worse, sometimes this destruction is totally gratuitous and avoidable. Save for those who really need a couple more millions of $ to "survive". Here's the thing - it's a social problem at this point. Something I believe smart lions would face too. We've spawned an economy that makes us do these things to survive, even though at least some of us individually realize they're monumentally stupid. Those are hard problems, because they involve getting a lot of people to agree to something that isn't in their immediate short-term interest.
  - kpnbg 8y ago
    Hey, you're right. Although another huge difference is that lions didn't evolve to be intelligent enough to learn to farm, invent mathematics, leave the planet etc. We are hunters, and what is going on now is a logical progression of what hunters who got smarter and more powerful would do. It sounds silly but I think that if any other hunter animal evolved like us, it would lead to very similar results. I am not a fan of the mass farming, but there are thousands of variables that lead to our current treatment of cattle and so on.
    - fao_ 8y ago
      How many people do you know have left the planet, or could solve a mathematical theorem, eh? The difference is that before, we hunted enough to eat, but not so much that the species died, whereas now we are willing to exterminate a species if it means we can get rid of other versions of us ('Every buffalo dead, is a dead indian'). Seems like we've got more callous and stupid the more this 'intelligence' was displayed.
      - theNewMicrosoft 8y ago
        > How many people do you know have left the planet Not yet but she's planning[?] to leave "soon" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Carson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Carson
        novia 8y ago
        Mars One is noted as being very short on funding, lacking critical concepts about hardware, life support, electrical power supply, and has been criticized as glossing over logistics, medical concerns, and protection against space radiation.
      - adwn 8y ago
        > How many people do you know have left the planet, or could solve a mathematical theorem, eh? Infinitely times as many as there are lions which can do these things – namely, more than zero people vs. zero lions. Eh.
      - 8y ago
  - kulu2002 8y ago
    Yeah! You are right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
  - qazpot 8y ago
    >> The huge difference is that lions dont put impalas into huge factories, where they feed them afwul food, rob them of any dignitiy, slaughter them by the masses, ship them across the globe in order to throw half of it away because it didnt hit the market’s taste of the month! If they could, they would.
  - ericdykstra 8y ago
    "Awful" food? "Dignity"? It doesn't make sense to judge the lives that these animals have chosen on human standards. Chicken is the most successful bird in the world, and cattle and sheep the most successful mammals. I'd say the symbiotic relationship with humans has worked out quite well in terms of reproductive success.
    - adamsea 8y ago
      The OP may not have realized it but “the dignity of animals” is really a parsed reflection of how we treat and see ourselves. In a sense, It’s not about the animals.
  - fifnir 8y ago
    Life feeds on life. No animal would hesitate for a second to eat you, if it could without risk. Even herbivores, have you seen cows/deer/horses eat little chicks? Life then replicates without limits until all resources are consumed and it cannot be supported anymore. We are in fact, (we can't know for sure but I think it's very reasonable to assume) the only species capable of seeing this and MAYBE,hopefully control ourselves before we do the same thing. We are pieces of shit, but at the same time we're the only animal with potential to escape the bad parts of our nature
  - wruza 8y ago
    Most animals live in constant fear, dirt, with parasites and depressing social relationships. I bet that if you got to know few impalas, you would state that most of them are jerks who don’t live long anyway. Lions also may leave their prey’s parts to smaller carnivores. The only difference is that they don’t throw it out since they eat right from the floor and then walk away.
kulu2002 8y ago
I found the book "Beyond Words - What Animals think and feel" pretty interesting in this case https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/07/150714-animal-dog-thinking-feelings-brain-science/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/07/150714-animal-do...
jpttsn 8y ago
Cats, birds, and pigs are in turn happy to eat humans when convenient.
- close04 8y ago
  I think he mean the main difference would be that animals mostly kill (probably applies to most of their other actions) out of need (protection, food). Humans destroy things because they can many times. Sometimes it's not about needs... unless for example you consider greed to be a need.
  - dumb2223 8y ago
    Learning English: They kill out of need, out of seems to me more like without. They kill without need. In Spanish we should say they kill because of need. How "out of" became because? Anyway, if you are out of luck I hope it is not because you are lucky.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - close04 8y ago
      Well... "out of necessity" is actually an idiom, meaning "because you have to". Since need and necessity are very similar in meaning I assume this is a correct statement. But I'm not a native English speaker this may of course be a common mistake. Regardless, I hope the idea stands.
      - dumb2223 8y ago
        Since we are trying to learn the tree language, I hope people don't get annoyed if I wonder about what is the mental state that converts "out of" into "because". If necessity was a generator, a vector or force for movements or actions, then I could understand that use of "out of". Out of indicates the result produced by a force, algorithm or oracle. But I consider necessity not as a generator or force but as a passive state. Hence I wonder what is the mechanism for this use. If we collapse the concepts of passive and active then I think language get corrupted and poissoned. Analogies are not fruitful because they go far beyong the logical ground. I believe that if you are going to get something out of a state then that state should be a generator. I don't know if what I am trying to say is sound but I sharply feel the unsoundness of linguistic non logically generated derivations
arketyp 8y ago
I think you can be more empathetic with humans too, interpret me right. One could object that you are anthropomorphizing the natural world, meaning your sentiment is still in the end just rooted in the human experience. But I think that's fair to do. I'd just like to add, as the Swedish dramatist Stringberg once wrote: "Human beings are to be pitied!"
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. This "harmony" is really just interlocking loops of unconstrained growth, followed by running out of resources, and starvation while the food supply regenerates. It only looks pretty if you ain't looking very carefully. In fact, human beings seem to be the only ones observed with a capability for restraint. We're not very good at practicing it, but we are at least capable of it. Have you seen a pack of animals or plants jointly deciding to voluntarily forgo extra food, so that they don't exceed carrying capacity of the place they live in?
- wild_preference 8y ago
  Your definition of restraint seems based on that one example. What about when my cat restrains from eating all of its treats at once? Or the restraint any animal takes through a farming process like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism?
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Well, your cat will also likely be very cruel if it ever caches a mouse or a bird, so I'll raise you that for harmony :). And I'm a cat owner. RE ants, I'm not a biologist so I won't speculate how exactly that relationship came to be, but it doesn't seem to me that there was any meeting of minds involved - I would guess evolutionary feedback loops again. I made a pretty generalized argument, but the point is, what we observe as harmony in nature - the balance between predator and prey, the various species of animals and plants (and bacteria and viruses) living next to each other - is a dynamic process that involves lots of blood, death and starvation. The order in nature isn't negotiated - it's an aggregate of countless number of conflicts. Related, recently on HN, "Trillions of Viruses Fall from the Sky Each Day": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16839636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16839636. The money quote from the article is mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840575. "One study estimated that viruses in the ocean cause a trillion trillion infections every second, destroying some 20 percent of all bacterial cells in the sea daily." That's nature's harmony at work.
superasn 8y ago
"Humans are the most unique creatures on Earth. Well…not really. Yes we have developed technology, language, society, and have a great capacity for abstract thought. But if you look at our genetics, at our biology, we find that we may not be that unique after all. Primates share a vast majority of our genes and have organized their families into something akin to a social structure. Dolphins and whales communicate with diverse types of language using their larynx in ways similar to how we make sounds." - Carl sagan, pale blue dot
rimliu 8y ago
One of the most awful trait in humans I observe is disdain fo the own species in favour of other. There is no harmony in the nature, just an equilibrium. We are the nature as is everything else.
- chicob 8y ago
  I agree. If we're speaking about an understanding of the deep connection between all species in this planet, and how it all relates to extinct species and old ecosystems, the human being is the only species in all of Earth's history that ever became aware of it. People often seem to assume non-human species partake of some universal wisdom that humans have left behind. This is a pretty shallow narrative of "lost innocence", that ignores what other species are and how they relate to each other. If there is an animal that does care, that is Homo sapiens.
- usrusr 8y ago
  We are definitely not part of any equilibrium right now.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I think you are misunderstanding the equilibrium of nature. There's no great and beautiful mutually orchestrated harmony. What happens invariably is a predator hunts a prey to the point of scarcity. At this point, assuming that prey was the predator's primary diet, the predators begin to literally starve to death which lowers their population. This, in turn, gives the prey a chance to increase their population with fewer predators. Over time this results in a dynamic equilibrium that gives the illusion of harmony - though it's really just controlled by starvation. At times, this equilibrium is never reached and one species or another ends up completely dying off (or getting killed off). And if that species that died off had not spread elsewhere, we get an extinction. Something that's been happening for millions and likely billions of years. Long before humanity entered onto the scene in any case. I think humans today are, by far, the most harmonious creature on this planet. We have the ability to hunt absolutely anything to the point of extinction if we so desired. And while on occasion we do end up doing just that, for the most part we manage to create an artificial balance by restraining ourselves, diversifying our diet, and artificially multiplying the numbers of the species that we prefer to eat the most to ensure their sustainability. And as another aside here, even in modern times with extinctions related to human activity you'll often find that while we did play a role, it's often also driven by other animals. For instance it's often said that the Dodo was hunted to extinction. That's entirely true, but it wasn't just by humans. The other animals introduced to the Mauritius also had a taste for the Dodo and its eggs in particular. A human might begin to take note of a population becoming more and more scarce. Another animal isn't going to think twice of it until they start starving for lack of their prey. And also I do not think people just ignore the personalities of animals when choosing to eat them. If you've ever known anybody who's raised goats or even pigs. They're incredible critters that are friendly, cute, playful and in the case of pigs - even quite intelligent. Nobody, for the most part, enjoys slaughtering these guys, but meat is something our bodies have evolved to consume and is still the most straight forward means of living a healthy life. Hunting is a different story, but in many ways that's even more humane. An animal killed on a hunt undoubtedly lived a life magnitudes more free and pleasant than the conditions of many in the farms that produce the food you buy at the grocer or restaurant. In any case you'll find a strong overlap both in modern times, and premodern times, of hunters and animal conservationists. The circle of life is something those closest to it tend to understand all too well.
dmos62 8y ago
I agree and emphathise with all your points. I have an alternative perspective on the question of how harmonious we are with our surroundings. I'm not peddling a wordview here, but I think this is an interesting thought exercise. What if we are in harmony with nature? Yes, taking into account all our seemingly disharmonious traits, greed, self-obsesssion, social and environmental irresponsibility. Conceptually, it's simpler (or more elegant?) to consider that we are in harmony with nature, like every other of its elements, but our definition of harmony, in other words it's our perception that is lacking. If nature, as in life on earth, is a fractal of ecosystems, when we perceive that one fails, we change our focus by one level to the containing or a contained ecosystem and repeat the process of perceiving whether or not it is failing. The most basic example is a sickly animal that is then fed upon by predators, or medium-height plantlife withering due to expanding tree canopy. If it's failing, we again step to the next ecosystem; if we perceive that it's ok, then we consider the previous ecosystems to be ok too. As an extreme case, we could keep going this way, if we thought that everything on earth is failing, until we got to the "top-level" ecosystem of life on earth -- the earth itself. We could then just generalize the definition of nature to the cosmos as well, and the process would continue. To come back to humans, while it's true that we are killing life on earth, we don't have to step far in terms of the cosmos to find harmony in it. In this view, the deeper point is that harmony is a property of perception, not the universe. Or in other words, the universe is universally harmonious.
Yetanfou 8y ago
I assume you have - or have had - a cat? Which you watered and fed, provided with shelter and a modicum of social interaction? ...and then the cat goes out and catches a mouse. Not because it is hungry, only because it saw the mouse and just had to catch it. After discarding the mouse - it wasn't hungry, you see, just having stuffed itself with KittyPro (tm) (with Bull Elk, Nearly Extinct Herbivore and Baby Seal) - and goes on to catch a few birds which were happily hopping around, unaware of the presence of a killer in their midst. Can you blame the cat? No, not really. Cats are hunters, being hunters they are playful - play being a way to keep their hunting skills sharpened - and they just have to strike when the opportunity arises. Can you blame the human? No, not really. If the human would not water and feed the cat and provide it with a modicum of social interaction the cat would walk, simple as that. Does this mean the cat 'lives in harmony with other species'? Of course is doesn't, that cat acts like a trophy hunter in a safari park. Ever seen a chicken coop raided by a weasel? We lost 16 chickens in one night once, all of them killed by some nasty critter which had managed to wriggle its way into the chicken's safe space. All of them bitten in the neck and left to bleed out. Can you blame the weasel who clearly killed far more than it could ever hope to eat, let alone the fact that it even could not get any of the chickens through the keyhole it used to enter the coop in the first place? Can you blame the human who thought to protect the chickens against just such mayhem but failed? Does that mean the weasel 'lives in harmony with other species'? Of course is doesn't, that weasel acted like one of Stalin's henchmen, killing everything in sight. Humans are intelligent primates and as such are capable of bigger feats. Bigger in both ways, from the human equivalent of what those cats and weasels are doing to, say, a group of humans cooperating to get a beached whale back into the sea.
xd 8y ago
I'm not a big fan of humanity. We are pretty awful. Self loathing of the human race needs to stop, there are an incredible number of hard working people making the world a better place one step at a time. Our impact on the world barely registers to past extinction level events. Humanity has just as much right to exist and be as any other species. If you don't like what we are doing, work to improve things. Are you aware how many countless people have and do work to improve your quality of life, protect you, make sure you are fed and watered and provided with distractions like HN to complain about how awful we are.
- collyw 8y ago
  As a species we seem to be a cancer on the planet. We are pretty much responsive for the current mass extinction event. That doesn't mean that individuals aren't good.
  - sharpneli 8y ago
    There has been global cancers before. With the difference that we may be able to restrain ourselves. As an example see the great oxygenation event. Where bunch of selfish green algea pumped waste product into the atmosphere killing almost all anaerobic life. Then there is the carboniferous period where trees grew so much that due to lack of lignin breaking fungi they basically sucked out all CO2 from atmosphere causing global glaciation and killing themselves in the process. Life has been crapping itself since the very start. We are no worse than others, however we have the chance to be better.
  - Radim 8y ago
    "As a species we seem to be a cancer on the planet." This platitude is actually interesting in this context. It connects multiple threads: * One of the previous major extinctions was the Oxygen Holocaust [1], caused by photosynthesizing cyanobacteria. It killed pretty much everything alive back then. And turned our Earth into a snowball to boot. * This oxygen is a major contributor to CANCER, via free radicals etc. It leads to a faster (and more ruthless, more side effects) metabolism, enabling evolution of highly reactive creatures such as us. * And trees, the "speaking organisms" under discussion, are one of the major producers of this highly volatile, carcinogenic O2 substance. Tongue in cheek? Maybe. But hopefully no worse than the naive "humans are a cancer to the planet". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
mockingbirdy 8y ago
> But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them. I don't necessarily agree with your misanthropy (I don't see the broader point of it - "my plan for humanity: let's self-annihilate, we suck"?). But I'm interested in psychology. And there are studies that show that people perceive cows as dumb while eating them. When they get asked before and after eating meat, the same people said that cows are intelligent beings. So there are cognitive processes in place to make it possible that we eat meat despite the fact that we normally know about the human-like qualities of the animals we eat. I think we can learn a lot about the difference between humans and other animals when we focus our efforts on understanding the excuses and biases that we develop using our cerebral parts of our brains and the prefrontal neocortex. > I'm not a big fan of humanity. We are pretty awful. Bear with us and have a little bit of compassion. I'm glad every time a human being is able to be positive despite the fact that every human has the potential to destroy other lives.
- Swizec 8y ago
  I would love to read some of those studies. That sounds fascinating! > despite the fact that we normally know about the human-like qualities of the animals we eat. Didn't there used to be whole cultures (like the Aztec, I think) where cannibalism was a mostly normal part of life? That seems like a pretty extreme version of this cognitive dissonance. "You're human but you're tasty and I'm hungry soooo ..."
  - mockingbirdy 8y ago
    Start here [1] and see this [2] for a light introduction. Then proceed with cognitive dissonance, implicit belief systems and cognitive biases [3]. Have fun! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_eating_meat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_eating_meat [2]: https://youtu.be/ao2GL3NAWQU https://youtu.be/ao2GL3NAWQU [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Confusion 8y ago
Humans can't perceive a lot of things More things than any other organism. Already more than most organisms using our biological sense organs. Our sight and hearing are pretty good, even by animal standards. But then we developed tools to transcode signals not directly observable by our biological sense organs. We perceive more than all other organisms combined. we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. We are the only ones that partially attempt to live in harmony with other species and partially succeed. All others care nothing for any other species than their own. And often not even that. We are pretty awful. We are awesome and can become even more amazing.
stared 8y ago
In that vein there is "The Great Silence" - a short, beautiful and sad story by Ted Chiang: http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/ http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/.
honestoHeminway 8y ago
The only one? What about rats arriving on islands? The truth is ecologys are bubbles divided by barriers that any large scale migrating species punctures. The only thing preventing problems so far is a inabiliity of plants to hijack migration species as pathways and other species to transport theire offspring that way. The agah-frog could have been everywhere worldwide, if its eggs - stuck to birdfeet where able to encapsule.
coldtea 8y ago
>Humans can't perceive a lot of things, and on top of that, we have egos that makes us feel superior even though in reality, we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. Harmony is just the result of a struggle + emerging balances. Left to their own devices, even cats could eradicate entire species of birds, diseases could exterminate whole populations of animals, and so on. And of course a big rock from space could end life on earth in its entirety. >If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them. Well, there's no rule that something with feelings shouldn't be eaten. In fact animals (who you said "live in balance") eat other animals all the time. Besides, we hurt people's feelings all the time. An employee might not want to flip burgers for 10 hours every day and little pay , but we don't care about their feelings, we take advantage of their life's circumstances and need to pay the rent and have them do it. With animals, we go a step beyond, and also eat them. Besides, isn't the main story of the article that trees have a sort of language and a sort of feelings too? Which means that the "has feelings, we shouldn't eat" theory would leave us with nothing to it, since plants now have feelings too.
- wruza 8y ago
  Maybe crops and vegetables don’t feel like trees, still something. As for fruit trees, we eat only their specific reproduction phases, who I believe can’t talk to each other anyway and have no parental connections.
Angostura 8y ago
Humans have lots of failings, its true - in terms of perception in particular. On the other hand, we're also horribly prone to anthropomorphism.
0xTJ 8y ago
How do other species live in harmony? Ever listed to the into scene in lion king? We're just animals who got smarter. It's part of the "harmony" you speak of for animals to eat other animal.
msiyer 8y ago
Humans cannot perceive a lot of things. However, given the right conditions (post-apocalyptic world?), it would not take a lot of time before humans become perceptive again. A lot many will be wiped out, but as a species we will find a way. I have a couple of dogs and I know what you mean. With the level of intelligence we possess, we should have achieved more. Technological achievements mean nothing when 70+% human population of the world struggles to survive. I think we use too much of our left brain and too little of the right. A balance is what is needed. Understanding this needs intelligence.
738472527784 8y ago
> we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. Oh boy, this is a very naive and emotionally involved perception of things. A tendency to restore ecological equilibria is not the same as harmony. There is no trend for stability or perfection, that's only an illusion based on the short lifespan of humans. That's not what science and archaeology tells us. For most species there is no resting in appreciation of creation, no moment of weakness, no mercy. Most everything wants you dead. Wants your air, your food, your space, your niche. You fall, you stumble and there is already mold growing between your toes. In the eyes of a human there might be a fiction, a notion of meaning and beauty. For everything else there is just thermodynamics.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  Especially in light of the Great Oxygenation Event, we really seem more like the only species to ever have the option of creating a global ecosystem collapse and also the option of maybe not! Those early photosynthetic microbes had no choice and no idea what they were doing.
threatofrain 8y ago
> If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them. But isn't nature so metal? Through all its self-judgment, I view mankind as a way out of local maxima. A complete death might happen with or without humans, but I put my chips in humanity.
paidleaf 8y ago
> we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. That's not true. Every species can't live in harmony with other species. Go read about what happened to native species on pacific islands when rats, cats, snakes, etc were introduced. They wiped out entire ecosystems of islands. https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0725/How-New-Zealand-aims-to-wipe-out-all-rats-and-other-invasive-predators https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0725/How-New-Zeal... https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0725/How-New-Zealand-aims-to-wipe-out-all-rats-and-other-invasive-predators https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0725/How-New-Zeal... Go read about ants. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3352483/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3352483/ They won't live in harmony with each other. A single ant colony has wiped out much of the world's ant population. Even fish like the european carp in a span of a few hundred years wiped out much of other fish in the US and now dominate pretty much every lake and river in a continent. > If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them. Cats, birds, pigs and even horses eat other animals. As a matter of facts, cats are devastating ecosystems around the world and causing many birds and mammals to go extincts. https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/ https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/ https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 > I'm not a big fan of humanity. We are pretty awful. You are the one putting humans on a pedestal. Humans are animals just like cats, horses, etc. We are no more awful than any other animals. Actually, you could argue humans are less awful than other animals because we actually consciously decided to save some species. A cat or a wolf or a pig would never do that. They will consume/kill until there isn't an animal left.
jjeaff 8y ago
Umm, no, more like humans are a lot more like other animals than we care to admit. We have some oppossums ND raccoons that constantly try to break in to our chicken coop. If successful, they will, without fail, kill every single chicken they can get their hands on. They'll only be able to eat one or so. But they will kill all of them. Either out of greed or just for the fun of it.

kranner 8y ago

Relevant short story from Ted Chiang et al: http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/ http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/

kpnbg 8y ago

I too enjoy watching the perfect harmony of a lion eating a live impala

mpfundstein 8y ago
The huge difference is that lions dont put impalas into huge factories, where they feed them afwul food, rob them of any dignitiy, slaughter them by the masses, ship them across the globe in order to throw half of it away because it didnt hit the market’s taste of the month!
- Lewton 8y ago
  They would if they could
  - mpfundstein 8y ago
    Who knows... i don’t believe intelligence necessarily implies tendencies for mass murder
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      It's not about tendencies. Intelligence is about being better at getting what you want. A lion wants to eat impala. A smart lion would figure out how to breed them in captivity, and it's only a small step from there to factory farming.
      - joesb 8y ago
        Agreed. Every hunt a lion does imposes fatal risk of its own. The lion could break its leg running and falling in some hole. It could break its teeth getting kicked in the face by the impala. Any of that even could cause it to not be able to hunt any more, and lose its status in the herd. A smart lion wouldn't want to risk itself like that just for a meal.
      - close04 8y ago
        How many smart lions would kill every impala and then wonder if they can switch to grass? :) Farming is after all pretty sustainable. But how about the things that aren't? We're over-exploiting basically every limited resource we have. Ironically we kind of ignore the unlimited ones, like wind, solar, etc. We're cutting down forests like there's no tomorrow and they literally make our oxygen. And worse, sometimes this destruction is totally gratuitous and avoidable. Save for those who really need a couple more millions of $ to "survive".
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        > How many smart lions would kill every impala and then wonder if they can switch to grass? Probably a few, then they'd figure out the concept of saving something for later, just as human farmers did countless of centuries ago :). > We're over-exploiting basically every limited resource we have. Ironically we kind of ignore the unlimited ones, like wind, solar, etc. A nit, but the reason we're "kind of ignoring" renewables is because fossil fuels are better. They're much more energy dense. They're easier to handle (just burn to release energy; meanwhile, photovoltaics is a very advanced piece of technology, and we most likely wouldn't have it if we didn't start with fossil fuels). They can be processed for other things - e.g. lubricants, plastics. Fossil fuels are absurdly useful. That's why they're so popular. But we're slowly getting there with renewables, not that both the tech and the will to use it seems to be here. > We're cutting down forests like there's no tomorrow and they literally make our oxygen. And worse, sometimes this destruction is totally gratuitous and avoidable. Save for those who really need a couple more millions of $ to "survive". Here's the thing - it's a social problem at this point. Something I believe smart lions would face too. We've spawned an economy that makes us do these things to survive, even though at least some of us individually realize they're monumentally stupid. Those are hard problems, because they involve getting a lot of people to agree to something that isn't in their immediate short-term interest.
- kpnbg 8y ago
  Hey, you're right. Although another huge difference is that lions didn't evolve to be intelligent enough to learn to farm, invent mathematics, leave the planet etc. We are hunters, and what is going on now is a logical progression of what hunters who got smarter and more powerful would do. It sounds silly but I think that if any other hunter animal evolved like us, it would lead to very similar results. I am not a fan of the mass farming, but there are thousands of variables that lead to our current treatment of cattle and so on.
  - fao_ 8y ago
    How many people do you know have left the planet, or could solve a mathematical theorem, eh? The difference is that before, we hunted enough to eat, but not so much that the species died, whereas now we are willing to exterminate a species if it means we can get rid of other versions of us ('Every buffalo dead, is a dead indian'). Seems like we've got more callous and stupid the more this 'intelligence' was displayed.
    - theNewMicrosoft 8y ago
      > How many people do you know have left the planet Not yet but she's planning[?] to leave "soon" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Carson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Carson
      - novia 8y ago
        Mars One is noted as being very short on funding, lacking critical concepts about hardware, life support, electrical power supply, and has been criticized as glossing over logistics, medical concerns, and protection against space radiation.
    - adwn 8y ago
      > How many people do you know have left the planet, or could solve a mathematical theorem, eh? Infinitely times as many as there are lions which can do these things – namely, more than zero people vs. zero lions. Eh.
    - 8y ago
- kulu2002 8y ago
  Yeah! You are right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
- qazpot 8y ago
  >> The huge difference is that lions dont put impalas into huge factories, where they feed them afwul food, rob them of any dignitiy, slaughter them by the masses, ship them across the globe in order to throw half of it away because it didnt hit the market’s taste of the month! If they could, they would.
- ericdykstra 8y ago
  "Awful" food? "Dignity"? It doesn't make sense to judge the lives that these animals have chosen on human standards. Chicken is the most successful bird in the world, and cattle and sheep the most successful mammals. I'd say the symbiotic relationship with humans has worked out quite well in terms of reproductive success.
  - adamsea 8y ago
    The OP may not have realized it but “the dignity of animals” is really a parsed reflection of how we treat and see ourselves. In a sense, It’s not about the animals.
- fifnir 8y ago
  Life feeds on life. No animal would hesitate for a second to eat you, if it could without risk. Even herbivores, have you seen cows/deer/horses eat little chicks? Life then replicates without limits until all resources are consumed and it cannot be supported anymore. We are in fact, (we can't know for sure but I think it's very reasonable to assume) the only species capable of seeing this and MAYBE,hopefully control ourselves before we do the same thing. We are pieces of shit, but at the same time we're the only animal with potential to escape the bad parts of our nature
- wruza 8y ago
  Most animals live in constant fear, dirt, with parasites and depressing social relationships. I bet that if you got to know few impalas, you would state that most of them are jerks who don’t live long anyway. Lions also may leave their prey’s parts to smaller carnivores. The only difference is that they don’t throw it out since they eat right from the floor and then walk away.

kulu2002 8y ago

I found the book "Beyond Words - What Animals think and feel" pretty interesting in this case https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/07/150714-animal-dog-thinking-feelings-brain-science/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/07/150714-animal-do...

jpttsn 8y ago

Cats, birds, and pigs are in turn happy to eat humans when convenient.

close04 8y ago
I think he mean the main difference would be that animals mostly kill (probably applies to most of their other actions) out of need (protection, food). Humans destroy things because they can many times. Sometimes it's not about needs... unless for example you consider greed to be a need.
- dumb2223 8y ago
  Learning English: They kill out of need, out of seems to me more like without. They kill without need. In Spanish we should say they kill because of need. How "out of" became because? Anyway, if you are out of luck I hope it is not because you are lucky.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - close04 8y ago
    Well... "out of necessity" is actually an idiom, meaning "because you have to". Since need and necessity are very similar in meaning I assume this is a correct statement. But I'm not a native English speaker this may of course be a common mistake. Regardless, I hope the idea stands.
    - dumb2223 8y ago
      Since we are trying to learn the tree language, I hope people don't get annoyed if I wonder about what is the mental state that converts "out of" into "because". If necessity was a generator, a vector or force for movements or actions, then I could understand that use of "out of". Out of indicates the result produced by a force, algorithm or oracle. But I consider necessity not as a generator or force but as a passive state. Hence I wonder what is the mechanism for this use. If we collapse the concepts of passive and active then I think language get corrupted and poissoned. Analogies are not fruitful because they go far beyong the logical ground. I believe that if you are going to get something out of a state then that state should be a generator. I don't know if what I am trying to say is sound but I sharply feel the unsoundness of linguistic non logically generated derivations

arketyp 8y ago

I think you can be more empathetic with humans too, interpret me right. One could object that you are anthropomorphizing the natural world, meaning your sentiment is still in the end just rooted in the human experience. But I think that's fair to do. I'd just like to add, as the Swedish dramatist Stringberg once wrote: "Human beings are to be pitied!"

TeMPOraL 8y ago

> we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. This "harmony" is really just interlocking loops of unconstrained growth, followed by running out of resources, and starvation while the food supply regenerates. It only looks pretty if you ain't looking very carefully. In fact, human beings seem to be the only ones observed with a capability for restraint. We're not very good at practicing it, but we are at least capable of it. Have you seen a pack of animals or plants jointly deciding to voluntarily forgo extra food, so that they don't exceed carrying capacity of the place they live in?

wild_preference 8y ago
Your definition of restraint seems based on that one example. What about when my cat restrains from eating all of its treats at once? Or the restraint any animal takes through a farming process like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism?
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Well, your cat will also likely be very cruel if it ever caches a mouse or a bird, so I'll raise you that for harmony :). And I'm a cat owner. RE ants, I'm not a biologist so I won't speculate how exactly that relationship came to be, but it doesn't seem to me that there was any meeting of minds involved - I would guess evolutionary feedback loops again. I made a pretty generalized argument, but the point is, what we observe as harmony in nature - the balance between predator and prey, the various species of animals and plants (and bacteria and viruses) living next to each other - is a dynamic process that involves lots of blood, death and starvation. The order in nature isn't negotiated - it's an aggregate of countless number of conflicts. Related, recently on HN, "Trillions of Viruses Fall from the Sky Each Day": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16839636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16839636. The money quote from the article is mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840575. "One study estimated that viruses in the ocean cause a trillion trillion infections every second, destroying some 20 percent of all bacterial cells in the sea daily." That's nature's harmony at work.

superasn 8y ago

"Humans are the most unique creatures on Earth. Well…not really. Yes we have developed technology, language, society, and have a great capacity for abstract thought. But if you look at our genetics, at our biology, we find that we may not be that unique after all. Primates share a vast majority of our genes and have organized their families into something akin to a social structure. Dolphins and whales communicate with diverse types of language using their larynx in ways similar to how we make sounds." - Carl sagan, pale blue dot

rimliu 8y ago

One of the most awful trait in humans I observe is disdain fo the own species in favour of other. There is no harmony in the nature, just an equilibrium. We are the nature as is everything else.

chicob 8y ago
I agree. If we're speaking about an understanding of the deep connection between all species in this planet, and how it all relates to extinct species and old ecosystems, the human being is the only species in all of Earth's history that ever became aware of it. People often seem to assume non-human species partake of some universal wisdom that humans have left behind. This is a pretty shallow narrative of "lost innocence", that ignores what other species are and how they relate to each other. If there is an animal that does care, that is Homo sapiens.
usrusr 8y ago
We are definitely not part of any equilibrium right now.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

I think you are misunderstanding the equilibrium of nature. There's no great and beautiful mutually orchestrated harmony. What happens invariably is a predator hunts a prey to the point of scarcity. At this point, assuming that prey was the predator's primary diet, the predators begin to literally starve to death which lowers their population. This, in turn, gives the prey a chance to increase their population with fewer predators. Over time this results in a dynamic equilibrium that gives the illusion of harmony - though it's really just controlled by starvation. At times, this equilibrium is never reached and one species or another ends up completely dying off (or getting killed off). And if that species that died off had not spread elsewhere, we get an extinction. Something that's been happening for millions and likely billions of years. Long before humanity entered onto the scene in any case. I think humans today are, by far, the most harmonious creature on this planet. We have the ability to hunt absolutely anything to the point of extinction if we so desired. And while on occasion we do end up doing just that, for the most part we manage to create an artificial balance by restraining ourselves, diversifying our diet, and artificially multiplying the numbers of the species that we prefer to eat the most to ensure their sustainability. And as another aside here, even in modern times with extinctions related to human activity you'll often find that while we did play a role, it's often also driven by other animals. For instance it's often said that the Dodo was hunted to extinction. That's entirely true, but it wasn't just by humans. The other animals introduced to the Mauritius also had a taste for the Dodo and its eggs in particular. A human might begin to take note of a population becoming more and more scarce. Another animal isn't going to think twice of it until they start starving for lack of their prey. And also I do not think people just ignore the personalities of animals when choosing to eat them. If you've ever known anybody who's raised goats or even pigs. They're incredible critters that are friendly, cute, playful and in the case of pigs - even quite intelligent. Nobody, for the most part, enjoys slaughtering these guys, but meat is something our bodies have evolved to consume and is still the most straight forward means of living a healthy life. Hunting is a different story, but in many ways that's even more humane. An animal killed on a hunt undoubtedly lived a life magnitudes more free and pleasant than the conditions of many in the farms that produce the food you buy at the grocer or restaurant. In any case you'll find a strong overlap both in modern times, and premodern times, of hunters and animal conservationists. The circle of life is something those closest to it tend to understand all too well.

dmos62 8y ago

I agree and emphathise with all your points. I have an alternative perspective on the question of how harmonious we are with our surroundings. I'm not peddling a wordview here, but I think this is an interesting thought exercise. What if we are in harmony with nature? Yes, taking into account all our seemingly disharmonious traits, greed, self-obsesssion, social and environmental irresponsibility. Conceptually, it's simpler (or more elegant?) to consider that we are in harmony with nature, like every other of its elements, but our definition of harmony, in other words it's our perception that is lacking. If nature, as in life on earth, is a fractal of ecosystems, when we perceive that one fails, we change our focus by one level to the containing or a contained ecosystem and repeat the process of perceiving whether or not it is failing. The most basic example is a sickly animal that is then fed upon by predators, or medium-height plantlife withering due to expanding tree canopy. If it's failing, we again step to the next ecosystem; if we perceive that it's ok, then we consider the previous ecosystems to be ok too. As an extreme case, we could keep going this way, if we thought that everything on earth is failing, until we got to the "top-level" ecosystem of life on earth -- the earth itself. We could then just generalize the definition of nature to the cosmos as well, and the process would continue. To come back to humans, while it's true that we are killing life on earth, we don't have to step far in terms of the cosmos to find harmony in it. In this view, the deeper point is that harmony is a property of perception, not the universe. Or in other words, the universe is universally harmonious.

Yetanfou 8y ago

I assume you have - or have had - a cat? Which you watered and fed, provided with shelter and a modicum of social interaction? ...and then the cat goes out and catches a mouse. Not because it is hungry, only because it saw the mouse and just had to catch it. After discarding the mouse - it wasn't hungry, you see, just having stuffed itself with KittyPro (tm) (with Bull Elk, Nearly Extinct Herbivore and Baby Seal) - and goes on to catch a few birds which were happily hopping around, unaware of the presence of a killer in their midst. Can you blame the cat? No, not really. Cats are hunters, being hunters they are playful - play being a way to keep their hunting skills sharpened - and they just have to strike when the opportunity arises. Can you blame the human? No, not really. If the human would not water and feed the cat and provide it with a modicum of social interaction the cat would walk, simple as that. Does this mean the cat 'lives in harmony with other species'? Of course is doesn't, that cat acts like a trophy hunter in a safari park. Ever seen a chicken coop raided by a weasel? We lost 16 chickens in one night once, all of them killed by some nasty critter which had managed to wriggle its way into the chicken's safe space. All of them bitten in the neck and left to bleed out. Can you blame the weasel who clearly killed far more than it could ever hope to eat, let alone the fact that it even could not get any of the chickens through the keyhole it used to enter the coop in the first place? Can you blame the human who thought to protect the chickens against just such mayhem but failed? Does that mean the weasel 'lives in harmony with other species'? Of course is doesn't, that weasel acted like one of Stalin's henchmen, killing everything in sight. Humans are intelligent primates and as such are capable of bigger feats. Bigger in both ways, from the human equivalent of what those cats and weasels are doing to, say, a group of humans cooperating to get a beached whale back into the sea.

xd 8y ago

I'm not a big fan of humanity. We are pretty awful. Self loathing of the human race needs to stop, there are an incredible number of hard working people making the world a better place one step at a time. Our impact on the world barely registers to past extinction level events. Humanity has just as much right to exist and be as any other species. If you don't like what we are doing, work to improve things. Are you aware how many countless people have and do work to improve your quality of life, protect you, make sure you are fed and watered and provided with distractions like HN to complain about how awful we are.

collyw 8y ago
As a species we seem to be a cancer on the planet. We are pretty much responsive for the current mass extinction event. That doesn't mean that individuals aren't good.
- sharpneli 8y ago
  There has been global cancers before. With the difference that we may be able to restrain ourselves. As an example see the great oxygenation event. Where bunch of selfish green algea pumped waste product into the atmosphere killing almost all anaerobic life. Then there is the carboniferous period where trees grew so much that due to lack of lignin breaking fungi they basically sucked out all CO2 from atmosphere causing global glaciation and killing themselves in the process. Life has been crapping itself since the very start. We are no worse than others, however we have the chance to be better.
- Radim 8y ago
  "As a species we seem to be a cancer on the planet." This platitude is actually interesting in this context. It connects multiple threads: * One of the previous major extinctions was the Oxygen Holocaust [1], caused by photosynthesizing cyanobacteria. It killed pretty much everything alive back then. And turned our Earth into a snowball to boot. * This oxygen is a major contributor to CANCER, via free radicals etc. It leads to a faster (and more ruthless, more side effects) metabolism, enabling evolution of highly reactive creatures such as us. * And trees, the "speaking organisms" under discussion, are one of the major producers of this highly volatile, carcinogenic O2 substance. Tongue in cheek? Maybe. But hopefully no worse than the naive "humans are a cancer to the planet". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event

mockingbirdy 8y ago

> But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them. I don't necessarily agree with your misanthropy (I don't see the broader point of it - "my plan for humanity: let's self-annihilate, we suck"?). But I'm interested in psychology. And there are studies that show that people perceive cows as dumb while eating them. When they get asked before and after eating meat, the same people said that cows are intelligent beings. So there are cognitive processes in place to make it possible that we eat meat despite the fact that we normally know about the human-like qualities of the animals we eat. I think we can learn a lot about the difference between humans and other animals when we focus our efforts on understanding the excuses and biases that we develop using our cerebral parts of our brains and the prefrontal neocortex. > I'm not a big fan of humanity. We are pretty awful. Bear with us and have a little bit of compassion. I'm glad every time a human being is able to be positive despite the fact that every human has the potential to destroy other lives.

Swizec 8y ago
I would love to read some of those studies. That sounds fascinating! > despite the fact that we normally know about the human-like qualities of the animals we eat. Didn't there used to be whole cultures (like the Aztec, I think) where cannibalism was a mostly normal part of life? That seems like a pretty extreme version of this cognitive dissonance. "You're human but you're tasty and I'm hungry soooo ..."
- mockingbirdy 8y ago
  Start here [1] and see this [2] for a light introduction. Then proceed with cognitive dissonance, implicit belief systems and cognitive biases [3]. Have fun! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_eating_meat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_eating_meat [2]: https://youtu.be/ao2GL3NAWQU https://youtu.be/ao2GL3NAWQU [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Confusion 8y ago

Humans can't perceive a lot of things More things than any other organism. Already more than most organisms using our biological sense organs. Our sight and hearing are pretty good, even by animal standards. But then we developed tools to transcode signals not directly observable by our biological sense organs. We perceive more than all other organisms combined. we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. We are the only ones that partially attempt to live in harmony with other species and partially succeed. All others care nothing for any other species than their own. And often not even that. We are pretty awful. We are awesome and can become even more amazing.

stared 8y ago

In that vein there is "The Great Silence" - a short, beautiful and sad story by Ted Chiang: http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/ http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/.

honestoHeminway 8y ago

The only one? What about rats arriving on islands? The truth is ecologys are bubbles divided by barriers that any large scale migrating species punctures. The only thing preventing problems so far is a inabiliity of plants to hijack migration species as pathways and other species to transport theire offspring that way. The agah-frog could have been everywhere worldwide, if its eggs - stuck to birdfeet where able to encapsule.

coldtea 8y ago

>Humans can't perceive a lot of things, and on top of that, we have egos that makes us feel superior even though in reality, we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. Harmony is just the result of a struggle + emerging balances. Left to their own devices, even cats could eradicate entire species of birds, diseases could exterminate whole populations of animals, and so on. And of course a big rock from space could end life on earth in its entirety. >If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them. Well, there's no rule that something with feelings shouldn't be eaten. In fact animals (who you said "live in balance") eat other animals all the time. Besides, we hurt people's feelings all the time. An employee might not want to flip burgers for 10 hours every day and little pay , but we don't care about their feelings, we take advantage of their life's circumstances and need to pay the rent and have them do it. With animals, we go a step beyond, and also eat them. Besides, isn't the main story of the article that trees have a sort of language and a sort of feelings too? Which means that the "has feelings, we shouldn't eat" theory would leave us with nothing to it, since plants now have feelings too.

wruza 8y ago
Maybe crops and vegetables don’t feel like trees, still something. As for fruit trees, we eat only their specific reproduction phases, who I believe can’t talk to each other anyway and have no parental connections.

Angostura 8y ago

Humans have lots of failings, its true - in terms of perception in particular. On the other hand, we're also horribly prone to anthropomorphism.

0xTJ 8y ago

How do other species live in harmony? Ever listed to the into scene in lion king? We're just animals who got smarter. It's part of the "harmony" you speak of for animals to eat other animal.

msiyer 8y ago

Humans cannot perceive a lot of things. However, given the right conditions (post-apocalyptic world?), it would not take a lot of time before humans become perceptive again. A lot many will be wiped out, but as a species we will find a way. I have a couple of dogs and I know what you mean. With the level of intelligence we possess, we should have achieved more. Technological achievements mean nothing when 70+% human population of the world struggles to survive. I think we use too much of our left brain and too little of the right. A balance is what is needed. Understanding this needs intelligence.

738472527784 8y ago

> we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. Oh boy, this is a very naive and emotionally involved perception of things. A tendency to restore ecological equilibria is not the same as harmony. There is no trend for stability or perfection, that's only an illusion based on the short lifespan of humans. That's not what science and archaeology tells us. For most species there is no resting in appreciation of creation, no moment of weakness, no mercy. Most everything wants you dead. Wants your air, your food, your space, your niche. You fall, you stumble and there is already mold growing between your toes. In the eyes of a human there might be a fiction, a notion of meaning and beauty. For everything else there is just thermodynamics.

whatshisface 8y ago
Especially in light of the Great Oxygenation Event, we really seem more like the only species to ever have the option of creating a global ecosystem collapse and also the option of maybe not! Those early photosynthetic microbes had no choice and no idea what they were doing.

threatofrain 8y ago

> If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them. But isn't nature so metal? Through all its self-judgment, I view mankind as a way out of local maxima. A complete death might happen with or without humans, but I put my chips in humanity.

paidleaf 8y ago

> we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. That's not true. Every species can't live in harmony with other species. Go read about what happened to native species on pacific islands when rats, cats, snakes, etc were introduced. They wiped out entire ecosystems of islands. https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0725/How-New-Zealand-aims-to-wipe-out-all-rats-and-other-invasive-predators https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0725/How-New-Zeal... https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0725/How-New-Zealand-aims-to-wipe-out-all-rats-and-other-invasive-predators https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0725/How-New-Zeal... Go read about ants. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3352483/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3352483/ They won't live in harmony with each other. A single ant colony has wiped out much of the world's ant population. Even fish like the european carp in a span of a few hundred years wiped out much of other fish in the US and now dominate pretty much every lake and river in a continent. > If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them. Cats, birds, pigs and even horses eat other animals. As a matter of facts, cats are devastating ecosystems around the world and causing many birds and mammals to go extincts. https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/ https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/ https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 > I'm not a big fan of humanity. We are pretty awful. You are the one putting humans on a pedestal. Humans are animals just like cats, horses, etc. We are no more awful than any other animals. Actually, you could argue humans are less awful than other animals because we actually consciously decided to save some species. A cat or a wolf or a pig would never do that. They will consume/kill until there isn't an animal left.

jjeaff 8y ago

Umm, no, more like humans are a lot more like other animals than we care to admit. We have some oppossums ND raccoons that constantly try to break in to our chicken coop. If successful, they will, without fail, kill every single chicken they can get their hands on. They'll only be able to eat one or so. But they will kill all of them. Either out of greed or just for the fun of it.