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Animals changed by proximity to humans
- whalesalad 5y agoWhy so many headlines of really common-sense "duh" science? Who would have possibly imagined that creatures on this earth would evolve to endure their surroundings?
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- chrisseaton 5y agoYou need to test ‘duh’ things because sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong. Doing this is good science. Flat Earth was ‘duh’ science at one point. Good thing we tested it.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago> Flat Earth was ‘duh’ science at one point. This is probably a myth; anywhere you can see water, you can see things going over the horizon. We knew the Earth was round (and its size) well before circumnavigation.
- chrisseaton 5y agoPeople didn’t understand the horizon. What do you think went over the horizon until we had ships? Many people would have never seen the sea or other large bodies of water as they didn’t travel far.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoFishers? Also, a flat stretch of land will do nicely, too. It doesn't take long to notice the discrepancy of hills… and we have the actual calculations of the ancients to prove that they knew; they're fairly accurate, too.
- chrisseaton 5y agoYou’re arguing against widely accepted facts. I don’t know why. > Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat Earth cosmography, including Greece until the classical period (323 BC), the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period (31 BC), and China until the 17th century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
- wizzwizz4 5y agoI thought the classical period was earlier than that! Thanks for the correction.
- Retric 5y agoThat’s over stating the case, the Shield of Achilles doesn’t demonstrate a flat earth cosmology, and shields of that time period where generally curved not flat to provide better protection to the arm. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/3196_-_Athens_-_Stoà_of_Attalus_Museum_-_Spartan_shield_(425_BC)_-_Photo_by_Giovanni_Dall'Orto%2C_Nov_9_2009.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/3196_-_A... Indian philosophy uses a spherical earth in 6th century BC as well as many thinkers in Ancient Greece like Pythagoras.
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- chrisseaton 5y agoI don’t know what to say - that article includes countless examples of societies that thought the Earth was flat until they learned otherwise. If you’ve got other theories then great for you but I’m guessing they’re not mainstream.
- Retric 5y agoI am not disagreeing so much as saying there was more nuance. For a direct quote from that link: “early Muslims tended to also view the Earth as flat” In other words it was a common belief, but not universally accepted fact. So saying that culture believed in a flat earth isn’t true anymore than saying they believed the earth was round.
- Retric 5y agoMost people lived near water for most of human history. As to seeing stuff across the horizon even static objects along shorelines show the same effect. You can’t see the base of trees across a large lake.
- kbenson 5y agoNear water does not necessarily mean near an Ocean or Sea, or lake large enough to have similar properties with regard to the horizon. There are in fact many benefits to living next to a river or lake instead of the coast. A large one is that the water is mostly potable, instead of largely not. I would hazard a guess that most ancient coastal communities were actually ancient coastal river communities, and that rivers are actually the thing humans lived next to (there's some indication in the abstract here[1] that this is the case). If that's the case, proximity to water is a poor indication of how many people would have seen ships sailing over the horizon. As to how obvious bases of trees would be over large lakes, or how likely large lakes would be compared to the norm, I don't know. 1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08366-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08366-z
- Retric 5y agoThis is largely about water as a home to food sources. Rising sea levels are believed to have covered the majority of Mesolithic cites. For populations constantly on the move it’s likely a majority of adults saw the ocean or a sufficiently large lake to show this effect. Realizing it was evidence of a round earth is of course a different story. My guess is most people simply never considered it.
- chrisseaton 5y agoWell lol go and tell them all this! I’m not responsible for their beliefs or why they believed it. Telling me that these people were unobservant for thinking the Earth was flat doesn’t change the fact that they did.
- Retric 5y agoTo be clear I am not saying nobody believed it, in many areas the majority of people likely believed in a flat earth if they thought of it at all. I am rather saying, belief that earth was round was also quite common in that time period and people had evidence for such beliefs.
- yunohn 5y agoMaybe you misread the headline? It specifically talks about which animals and what behaviors they observed that were changed by human<->animal interactions.
- gotsa 5y agoproving "duh" stuff is generally good as it makes us understand much more about the foundations of any field. Take for example the mathematical journey of laying our fundamental axioms starting at Peano all the way through ZFC.
- truculent 5y agoIt is nonetheless useful to rigorously understand exactly how and why common-sense patterns occur. Also, I would guess that the speed and type of change being experienced as a result of human activity (that animals are responding to) is relatively rare and thus valuable to understand.
- animanoir 5y agoOf course, tho I would like to stop making ourselves superior from them, and fix the headline with something like "Animals change by proximity with other animals". I think this "human exceptionalism" is changing nature for the wrong.
- exoque 5y agoHumans changed by proximity to animals ;)
- eplanit 5y agoWhen some other animal species starts building libraries and exploring space, I'll consider them exceptional, too. Humans, a kind of animal, are quite distinct from other animal species. We can't fly by nature, but we can build machines where not only we can fly, but we can fly to space. Most all other animals live today in the same ways, and with the same capabilities, as their ancestors have for centuries; but, humans have adapted and advanced in ways that hardly a generation lives the same as the one before it -- all from human-driven, intentional advancement. We're a quite distinct species (judgements aside). I don't see the harm in recognizing our superior differences; in fact, it's as important as recognizing our similarities and common bonds.
- thatguy0900 5y agoOur hands could be the drivers for a lot of this. Dolphins have no practical way to use or create tools, that is a pretty fundamental limitation on how you can advance, irrespective of intelligence. Who knows what kind of cool tools something like an octopus could have created and used with more intelligence though.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoOctopuses are probably intelligent enough; it's lifespan and teamwork that are the issues. An octopus works out how to use tools, and then… that knowledge goes away. No future octopuses will ever build upon that.
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- VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago> Successful escapes by smarter fruit flies may have left scientists breeding from a less intelligent pool of lab subjects. This line of reasoning has really got a lot of geneticists concerned their findings may not be generalizable.
- dalbasal 5y agoThis comment feels like a Douglas Adams joke going slightly over my head.
- jerf 5y agoNo, it's just the biological analog of those stories you hear about AIs exploiting the rules of the simulation to crash it and score infinite points or whatever. Evolution/natural selection is at work all over the place, it can't be stopped, and it's even less able to be controlled and corralled than in the AI case. When you breed a long line of lab animals, you can't help but start imposing new selection pressures that didn't exist in the wild specimen, while having also removed other selection pressures, and the result will be that fairly quickly you don't quite have fully natural specimens. How much that matters depends on the nature of your experiments. Many cases it won't matter at all. Some experiments may entirely wrecked.
- dalbasal 5y agoOK... I have to. jerf, are you a mouse?
- in3d 5y agoDogs might be so friendly because they have their version of Williams syndrome: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/science/dogs-genes-sociability.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/science/dogs-genes-sociab...
- vmception 5y ago> They are also bigger, lay larger eggs and have smaller brains than their wild cousins - differences that are also seen in chickens. I wonder if something similar is also happening in amongst some humans in some selection process. Breeders with less cognitive material than others, the others being seen as less sexually attractive (like as seen in Idiocracy, and I posit: real life) I wonder how long it will remain controversial to consider that
- wincy 5y agoPeople who believe in evolution have fewer kids. Is a belief in natural selection a negative selection pressure? If you bring this up people who are rational seem to get upset.
- vmception 5y agoI would take it a step further to say that we - as a society - sexually select for behaviors we don't like in society. As well as sexual dimorphism to the point of physical features being debilitating.
- philwelch 5y agoNatural selection also applies to cultural beliefs and behaviors, albeit in a "selfish gene" sort of way that propagates the beliefs and behaviors rather than the practitioners thereof. For instance, universalist religions like Christianity and Islam have supplanted traditional ethnic religions. Anyway, there's definitely something about the culture of contemporary developed countries that's not adaptive, but I'm not sure it's belief in evolution itself.
- elzbardico 5y agoI think it is complicated because a lot of our long term fitness depends on the society. So, in the short term, you have some pressure for high promiscuity/low intelligence, but over time you'd have a very fragile society, and the slower reproducing more intelligent society would be more successful in the long run either because it obliterated the less intelligent ones in war, or just because it was able to overcome things like natural disaster, child mortality, hunger, cold, heat and disease
- autokad 5y ago> "They are also bigger, lay larger eggs and have smaller brains than their wild cousins - differences that are also seen in chickens. ...Pets tend to have floppier ears and curlier tails than their wild ancestors. They also have smaller jaws and teeth, white patches on their fur and breed more frequently. This phenomenon is known as 'domestication syndrome'." I am not being glib, but I wonder if this is what happened to humans. allow me to explain. As short as 5,000 years ago, our brains were 10% bigger, our jaws were bigger, and our size was smaller. The former 2 have been associated with diet, but the shrinking brain is still debated. Maybe its simple though. Maybe humans domesticated humans.
- nindwen 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-domestication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-domestication
- kibwen 5y agoLet's also keep in mind that brain size is not a proxy for cognitive ability. Ravens appear to be broadly as smart as chimpanzees despite their brains being 1/20th the size. Likewise neanderthals had larger brains than homo sapiens, which didn't stop them from being outcompeted.
- autokad 5y agothose are just issues in how intelligence is measured. As far as Neanderthals, its my opinion they were smarter than us. we just came from down south (not effected by sudden surge in ice age) and higher birth rates. The intelligence of neanderthals keeps getting revised up every time we learn something about them.
- rowanG077 5y agoDo you base your opinion on anything?
- makoConstruct 5y agoI've heard that there's archeological evidence that ancient sapiens engaged in long-distance trade, objects brought to places they shouldn't have been. Nothing like that was found with neanderthals. Not sure if this is due to having fewer samples of neanderthals, nor whether this reflects intelligence or something else (I think Harari or someone may have argued that it might be about eusocial myths enabling coordinating larger armies) but that's one contraindication.
- magwa101 5y agoAbsolutely the same effect is seen in humans when working in large organizations vs startups.
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