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Animals Use Social Distancing to Avoid Disease
- jacobush 6y agoDo you have many fishes?
- werdnapk 6y agohttps://www.grammarly.com/blog/fish-fishes/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/fish-fishes/
- mrburton 6y agoThis proves humans are not animals. We're not that smart ;)
- paganel 6y agoWe probably traded off getting some very contagious diseases but sticking together to living off by ourselves. In the long run it seemed to have been a good decision for our species.
- lambdaba 6y agoExactly. The same applies to the individual, and exposure to bugs is beneficial to the immune system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- PostOnce 6y agoSick people are sort of viscerally gross, we're repulsed by wet coughs, even the sound of vomiting some people can't cope with, not even on a movie -- it's an evolutionary response, I think. Animals probably have similar feelings around sick people.
- coldtea 6y ago>even the sound of vomiting some people can't cope with, not even on a movie -- it's an evolutionary response The later is probably devolution at play, from having fallen into a too cushy a life in non-evolutionary time ranges (modern cities)...
- simion314 6y agoCan you explain why you think this is a modern thing? IMO if someone in your group starts vomiting can mean the food we just ate is bad so would be safe to throw up sooner then later. I was raised with animals in a village and I have no trouble with cleaning animal excrement but human excrement's smell instantly has an effect on my stomach(I had to get some samples for a medical test from my son poop). But sure there are daily working with such thing and they get used to it.
- coldtea 6y ago>Can you explain why you think this is a modern thing? Because past societies were much more open to bodily functions and accepting some degrees of "dirt".
- simion314 6y agoWhy do you think so? People were not shitting in the corner of the room like animals(if they had a choice), they would go shit outside and i am not aware of any historical ritual involving shit but let me know if there is some perspective I am missing. I think there are still many people around the world that are living in extreme poverty and I am sure they still feel disgusted by shit,bad food and putrefied bodies - so are you basing your theory on something you read or is something you think is correct , I will be happy to change my mind so please inform me.
- Gibbon1 6y agoIn an article on Cholera or more it's solution in London building sewers the author reposted a letter to the news paper that castigated the upper classes. The gist of it was 'You say we don't mind living in filth and stink. Assuredly we do not like it at all'
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mrburton 6y agoWhen HN becomes Twitter. People are so serious and sensitive these days. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoThe kill rate for the disease the example animal (lobster) the article spends most of its time discussing is ~50%. It isn't surprising that avoiding it is a highly consistent and avoidable behavior since the competitive advantage is so large. Humans kick people out far before the stakes are that high. I'm reminded of how people with Leprosy were treated before there were drugs to treat it. Generally speaking "hanging around with the least fit members of your species" is a losing strategy if you want to not starve long enough to reproduce so it should come as no surprise that evolution selects for the trait of avoiding the least fit members of one's species to varying degrees (depending on the specifics of the species and the type of "least fitness" in question).
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y agoWould you say public shaming is en evolutionary adaption? I don't have a problem with your argument. I am curious about your thoughts though.
- coldtea 6y agoI'd say that the universe (and evolutionary processes) don't care much about ethics and morals and feelings. They "care" (in as much as they care for anything) about results...
- jacobush 6y agoYes. The caring bit is up to us sentients.
- collyw 6y agoBeing cast out from society appears with many other animal spaces according to wildlife documentaries that I have seen. Public shaming is more difficult to match to animal behaviour.
- 082349872349872 6y agoA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_herd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_herd forms when young mammals start to get edgelordy, and are driven from their natal herds?
- macspoofing 6y agoNot surprising. Fitness (or lack thereof) in general is discriminated against by social animals because unfit animals attract predators and are a burden for the herd or the pack. Certainly diseased animals would fall into the 'unfit' category. Humans are no different and have been segregating or quarantining sick individuals for all of history. The similarity doesn't quite fit with COVID polices however. The slight discrepancy is that we are practicing social distancing with healthy or asymptomatic individuals.
- human 6y agoExactly this. We’ve also been doing this forever. If I go somewhere and someone has a runny nose and is coughing, I am going to stay away. Nothing new here. COVID is different in the sense that we assume everyone has it. We distance from healthy looking individuals.
- tomrod 6y agoCOVID-19 is highly infectious before symptoms appear.
- _red 6y agoYes, but Stanford says the CFR for those under 70 is 0.04% https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v2.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v...
- tingletech 6y agothat pre-print says median of 0.04% infection fatality rate for people < 70, based on other pre-prints they analyzed. That is a 1 in 2500 probability of dying if you are infected. 0.25% is what the preprint says for overall infection fatality rate -- 1 in 400 probability of dying if you are infected.
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
- dsign 6y agoWhen did the rest of the humans ascended? Am I the only one who is still an animal? OMG! Or is that a social study article that takes a look to how the majority of the homo sapiens (the prevalent animal species in this rock) are now under social distancing recommendations?
- ak39 6y agoIs this an example of "evolutionary psychology"?
- goalieca 6y agoIf someone is coughing and sneezing do you give them a hug? But if they aren't do you? This is a ridiculous article.
- mrfusion 6y agoI guess if animals do it, it’s ok to not hug my mother again.
- prescojan 6y agoA lot of articles that start with a personifying narrative return to that narrative by the end. This article never did, so I guess I will never know what happened to the poor lobster that had to flee his home.
- rswail 6y ago"Birds do it, bees do it... even educated fleas do it..."
- ComplexSpidey 6y agoWhen drastic situations occur, we should fall back to our basics to solve them. Just like animals it's time to adapt strategic social distancing now.
- garraeth 6y agoTotal tangent, apologies in advance: A genius university Dean recently re-labeled "Social Distancing" to "Physical Distancing". Lets not be "socially distanced", but rather simply "physically distanced". Just putting this out there in hopes that it catches on.
- bcraven 6y agoThat was the WHO advice in April: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/world/social-distancing-language-change-trnd/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/world/social-distancing-l...
- cik 6y agoWe've been saying this in Canada since at least mid-March. https://globalnews.ca/news/6717166/what-is-physical-distancing/ https://globalnews.ca/news/6717166/what-is-physical-distanci...
- flyGuyOnTheSly 6y agoNo we haven't. There were a few news articles about changing the name, heard it on the radio for a few weeks, etc... but literally everybody in my bubble refers to it as social distancing. Social Distancing has the first mover advantage on Physical Distancing.
- diffrinse 6y agoNothing more beautifully concise than the robustness of wild life
- 29athrowaway 6y agoI have heard that dogs go into hiding when they sense they're going to die.