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Loss of animals’ shared knowledge threatens their survival
- machinelearning 5y agoThis is the most interesting headline I’ve read in a while
- TrumpRapedWomen 5y agoI agree.
- elzbardico 5y agoWhat I like in The Guardian is that we are always fucked. Everyday a new tragedy
- loopz 5y agoOr we can learn to get unfucked.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Alan_Dillman 5y agoBut that'll put The Guardian out of business!
- machinelearning 5y agoThe Guardian is just a distribution channel. Academics and the conservation groups that back them stand to benefit by sounding an alarm since that helps them raise funds and get grants. Not a judgement on the legitimacy of the concern but that's just the incentive behind these articles.
- lashloch 5y agothanks. i was about to send a conservation group money but then i learned they might have the ulterior motive of making the world better
- throwaway8689 5y agoI read the parent comment as neutral or good. Conservationists need publicity to raise funds to do their work.
- machinelearning 5y agoYea meant to be a neutral comment. Sometimes raising the alarm is justified.
- machinelearning 5y agoI don't get the snarky comment, looks like you didn't read what I wrote carefully enough
- akdav 5y agoFacepalm
- mellavora 5y agook, I'll try a serious answer instead of a snarky one. You point out the incentive behind these articles, and call out the Guardian as a distribution channel for academics and conservation groups. Without a distribution channel, how should academics and conservation groups get their message out? Which message is better for our society, one driven by the academics who have been warning us of the danger of radical climate change, of mass poisoning of our homes and environment, of total ecosystem collapse (birds- down 29% https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6461/120 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6461/120, fish, down over 70% https://www.geographyrealm.com/study-finds-staggering-decline-in-marine-fishery-biomass/ https://www.geographyrealm.com/study-finds-staggering-declin..., amphibians, 40% of species on the edge of extinction in 2012 and things have only gotten worse since https://journals.openedition.org/sapiens/1406 https://journals.openedition.org/sapiens/1406, insect populations, down 80% https://www.pnas.org/content/118/2/e2023989118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/2/e2023989118, ... shall I continue? Do you know what total ecosystem collapse looks like? or perhaps the message of Netflix or Disney? Or the message/distribution channel of fake news bent on destroying Western democracy? Or the message/distribution channel used to keep us calm while we commit mass suicide? Sorry, I'm ranting. Yes, your charge is correct. The Guardian is an important distribution channel for the sources which are trying to get us to stop killing our planet, our home, our selves. And perhaps it is good to have such a channel. -- hey, sorry, just saw that you intended your comment to be neutral. Forgive me for letting my grief carry me away.
- wombatmobile 5y ago“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anaïs Nin
- 2dvisio 5y agoThank you for the interesting rabbit hole :) https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/09/as-we-are/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/09/as-we-are/
- galaxyLogic 5y agoThis is an interesting finding. Animals have culture. And it can disappear. So can human culture. That's good to know. It's part of the human culture that we know that culture can disappear unless we try to preserve it.
- acjohnson55 5y agoHas it occurred to you that this might be because the status quo is actually a really bad situation, the more you look at it? Many civilizations have fallen, with the resulting societal complexity permanently reduced. Usually, this process is not sudden. I suspect each probably had their version of people speaking inconvenient truths, and being written off as pessimists.
- nullc 5y agoWe didn't start the fire
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago> conservation efforts should consider how culture affects reproduction, dispersal and survivorship. Yes indeed. > Understanding who holds cultural knowledge in a population can be key Revolutionaries and conquerors understand this too. > The [matriarch] female’s experience of [...] which other social units are friendly has a demonstrable knock-on effect Certainly it's been important in my family. > However, when a population has lost its cultural knowledge, there may be circumstances where it can be reignited. We can only hope.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoMigration paths were disturbed too. We need connected green corridors for animals to travel through that span the continent.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vector_spaces 5y agoThis article reminds me of another from 2006 about PTSD in elephants. In various parts of the world, culling events and poaching have killed elder elephants in elephant clans, and traumatized the mostly young survivors, who grow up without guidance in parenting among other crucial activities. This has resulted in a breakdown of the elephant family structure, so that these traumatized and directionless young and mostly male elephants roam the grasslands engaging in senseless acts of violence against other animals and humans (the latter being probably more justified). One of the Ugandan researchers profiled draws parallels between what is happening to elephants and what has happened in the recent history of her country, with the civil war killing parents and grandparents, creating a generation of young traumatized and directionless men who similarly engage in senseless violence and bloodshed. It's a really beautiful and really sad article https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html
- randycupertino 5y agoI don't think I can handle the article seeing as merely your above comment was so strikingly beautiful and sad! And business-as-usual will just keep churning along, everything is fine, everything is peachy. Profits profits profits. Exploitation, single use plastics, dead oceans, destruction.
- javajosh 5y agoThe shocking truth is that, even if you exclude empathy (which is sadly quite common), this represents a total abrogation of humanities collective responsibility to protect ourselves. Earth and her biosphere is our space-ship and our life-support system, respectively, and we cannot seem to come to grips with this simple fact. It doesn't anger me when people act in ignorance. What angers me are those who know better, and keep others in ignorance with their cynically spent PR money, and those who know better and repeat the lies to pander to ignorance and garner votes. It is not a message that can be addressed with reason, since it appeals to the basest instincts of men: don't worry, everything is fine, keep doing what you want, you're justified. The ability to doubt (let alone challenge) authority when authority is telling you what you want to hear is vanishingly rare.
- js8 5y agoI have a theory that belief in authority (and conservative/authoritarian political ideologies that build on it) evolved because of this pressure, as a way to protect the culture and shared knowledge. In this view, hierarchies are a side effect of the belief in authority in large-scale societies. (I don't buy into the social and sexual dominance theories of hierarchies.)
- SonicTheSith 5y agounless a profit can be made...
- machinelearning 5y agoAuthority can also be used to corrupt culture and shared knowledge instead of protecting it. In fact, I argue that over a long enough span of time, it inherently will simply because selection mechanisms will be gamed by people who put their own needs over that of the society. By decoupling power with culture and shared knowledge, you can more effectively transmit these things to a broader audience while maintaining its integrity. In this setup, a critical mass of people in the community act as the immune system that helps to refine and develop the shared knowledge over time. I think artists, public intellectuals and thinkers of all kinds play this role in our society without the corrupting influence of a hierarchy.
- whereistimbo 5y agoIn Siege of Baghdad (1258) [0], "...Mongol soldiers looted and then destroyed mosques, palaces, libraries, and hospitals. Priceless books from Baghdad's thirty-six public libraries were torn apart, the looters using their leather covers as sandals. Grand buildings that had been the work of generations were burned to the ground. The House of Wisdom (the Grand Library of Baghdad), containing countless precious historical documents and books on subjects ranging from medicine to astronomy, was destroyed." [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y agoReminds me on this as well: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/150901-isis-destruction-looting-ancient-sites-iraq-syria-archaeology https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/150901-is... Also I am not sure from newer history was it Khmer Rouge who order genocide of their own population over 40 years old, ideology was that they wanted to erase collective knowledge of elders. "Pol Pot then began using intimidation efforts against the Chams that included the assassination of village elders but he ultimately ordered the full-scale mass killing of the Cham people."
- dopkew 5y agoIt is a reminder that a civilization not only needs to flourish from within, but be able to protect itself from without.
- andrepd 5y agoThe destruction of Bagdhad by the Mongols was one of the most destructive events in human history. It's hard to believe it today but Bagdhad was the cultural and learning centre of the world at the time. There's no telling what priceless works were lost, plus how many thousands of scholars were killed. Knowledge in medicine, astronomy, the classics (which were preserved by Muslim scholars), and god knows what else.
- nudpiedo 5y agoAlmost as terrible as the senseless destruction of Alexandria’s Library in the hands of barbaric Muslims. Supposedly in that single event we lost 1/3 of all mankind books and many original works like Calculus invented by Archimedes had to be reinvented thousands of years later.
- ovi256 5y ago> At the peak of the whaling industry, in the late 1800s Yeah, if you start your article with a falsehood that you could have easily fixed with a cursory read of any history of whaling, I can't trust you enough to know what you're talking about. Peak whaling was 1965-1970, have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_whaling#/media/File:Whaling_by_country.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_whaling#/media/File...
- MichaelZuo 5y agoYeah, that makes me immediately doubt the article.
- aquadrop 5y agoTo be fair that chart only starts in 1900, so you can't see 18th century here. And in the wikipedia page of this chart it says "By 1900, bowhead, gray, northern humpback and right whales were nearly extinct, and whaling had declined". But also in the original phrase "peak of the whaling industry" speaks not just about number of whales killed, but size of the industry as a whole, amount of people involved. Because with new tech I suppose those massive killings in 1960's required much fewer people.