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Problem: people are hungry Solution: eat animals Problem: people like eating animals and want more Solution: selectively breed animals in a way that makes th
by igetspam 6y ago
Problem: people are hungry
Solution: eat animals
Problem: people like eating animals and want more
Solution: selectively breed animals in a way that makes them reproduce rapidly
Problem: poor containment has caused selectively bred animals to breed with wild animals and created explosive population growth
Solution: kill all the animals?
"[Scientists] are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something." - Jurassic Park
Perhaps we should stop trying to screw with nature. We end up with things like explosive population growth and I don't know... SARS, COVID, etc.
- leetcrew 6y agoI think this is more or less correct, but I'm not aware of any conclusive evidence tying COVID to "meddling with nature". I guess you could consider dense, highly-connected human settlements to be an example of this, increasing susceptibility to pandemics, but I don't think that's a very useful criticism.
- simonh 6y agoAgriculture eh, what a mistake.
- shuntress 6y agoWe should go back to spending 100% of our non-sleeping time wandering around trying to eat whatever we find on the ground. The good old days.
- chillwaves 6y agoSounds like a myth to me. Humans were at the top of the food chain even before farming. Relying on what can be foraged/hunted would keep the human population in check instead of being propped up by agriculture -- and all the problems that brings.
- int_19h 6y agoIt would also keep the human population dying young because of easily preventable (by an industrial civilization) diseases, or just plain starvation.
- samatman 6y agoCan't forget raiding, slavery, and cannibalism!
- chillwaves 6y agoAny proof that cannibalism was prevalent in preagricultural era, or are you just dropping in some more mythology? Also there are more slaves in absolute terms today than at any other time. Not sure what agriculture and messing with ecosystems has to do with the human urge to enslave and kill each other.
- simonh 6y agoWe have copious evidence of prehistoric cannibalism in the form of human body proteins in preserved coprolites, and human bones with butchering marks and human teeth marks. https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/assemblage/html/9/cole.html https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/assemblag...
- samatman 6y agoYeah it's not even vaguely controversial, just something people don't want to hear, because they confuse their food taboos and morality for some kind of human universal, or moral absolute, and think I'm saying "evil" when I say "cannibal". How dare I call them evil, I never even met them! Nah. Cannibalism is basal human behavior. Strong taboos against it are a good idea, but also a relatively recent one, viewed across all of human history.
- chillwaves 6y agoAverage is not median. Historians say the number is skewed due to the higher infant mortality rate. And I would need to do more research on the prevalence of starvation. Seems like there was plenty of that after agriculture was discovered and we had high populations during a season of crop failure. None of this addresses the reality that humans' playing with the larger ecosystems is incredibly destructive. In a hundred years, people may have a very different view of "progress".
- IvyMike 6y agoYou joke, but... Jared Diamond wrote a famous article about this: "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race". Spoilers: agriculture. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mist...
- nkrisc 6y agoWell unless you've got a time machine, it's too late to go back and stop it from happening. It's happened, and now it's a problem.
- chillwaves 6y agoYou don't need a time machine to stop a pattern of destruction that we only seem to be accelerating.
- kjs3 6y agoPerhaps we should stop trying to apply highly reductionist lenses to very complicated problems.